#5: Are you thinking what I'm thinking?
How life would be different if we knew what others were really thinking
Painting by Betsy Feuerstein
More than a year ago, I pitched a story to the Atlantic about people who make a friendship the central relationship in their lives—and what everyone else can learn from them about intimacy, care, and partnership. The response to the piece, which after pandemic-related delays came out last week, has been fascinating and moving. People have shared with me the alienation they’ve felt because other people didn’t approve of the way they organized their life around a close friendship. Readers have told me that they’ve long wanted a friendship of this sort but didn’t know others did, too.
There’s good reason to believe that other people aren’t interested in such a life-defining friendship: we have no name for this type of relationship; in the U.S., a romantic partner is supposed to double as your best friend and be the center of your universe. Yet, I’ve heard the same refrain from enough people to believe that the desire for an intense, intimate friendship isn’t all that unusual. It’s as if a bunch of partygoers all want to lower the volume of the music, but everyone thinks that everyone else wants the music that loud, so one suggests adjusting the speakers. They all leave the party with their ears ringing.
People decide on what kind of friendships to pursue (or not) based in part on “higher-order beliefs”—beliefs about what other people believe. The problem is, we often have a faulty idea of what’s going on in other people’s minds. In this case, lots of people are milling around believing that other people aren’t game for a friendship that requires serious devotion.
Such faulty beliefs can trouble nascent relationships. Take striking up a conversation with a stranger. As psychologists Gillian Sandstrom and Erica Boothby point out:
"Every friend starts as a stranger...And yet, people seem reluctant to talk to strangers, passing up a readily available source of well-being. Why?”
The researchers ran a (mini) meta-analysis—i.e. a study of studies—of several papers on people’s fears of talking to strangers and their actual experiences doing so. People are kind of freaked out about talking to strangers. Sandstrom and Boothby focus on a specific set of fears: that the participant will not enjoy the conversation, their partner won't enjoy the conversation, the participant won't like their partner, their partner won't like them, the participant isn’t capable of holding a conversation and their partner won't be capable of sustaining a conversation. It turns out that all six of these fears are overblown. The conversations tend to go well.
The researchers looked at whether a couple of simple interventions could allay these fears. Giving people tips on how to start a conversation didn’t seem to make a real difference. What did help people develop a sunnier prediction of future conversations was if they first had a positive experience in a conversation with a stranger. The positive experience gave the person evidence that shifted their forecast. The psychologists wrap up the paper by speculating that interventions worth pursuing may be those that focus on the beliefs of their partner rather than the participants’s beliefs about her own social competence, for instance, as a conversationalist. In other words, changing the person’s higher-order beliefs.
One of my favorite studies on attempting to change people’s higher-order beliefs takes place in very different setting and is trying to tackle a totally different problem: female labor force participation in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has one of the lowest female labor force participation rates in the world. The curious thing, which the economists Leonardo Bursztyn, Alessandra L. Gonzalez, and David Yanagizawa-Drott found, is that Saudi Arabian men are pretty tolerant of women working: 87 percent of participants reported that it’s okay for women to work outside of the home. But most of the men reported that they believed their neighbors weren't as open to women working. On average, they guessed that 63 percent think it’s okay for women to work outside the home—far lower than reality. The researchers randomly assigned the men to two groups. They told one group of Saudi men what their neighbors actually thought about women working—essentially correcting their misperception.
The remarkable thing is that there were meaningful real-world effects simply from telling men what their neighbors thought. Months after the experiment, wives of men who were given information about what other men thought were significantly more likely to have applied for a job outside of the home.
What this paper shows is that sometimes you don’t need to shift people’s own morals or instincts, but instead change what they think other people find acceptable—their higher-order beliefs. In the case of chatting up strangers (in the admittedly few opportunities we have these days to do so) or developing a ride-or-die friendship, we may just need to be convinced that other people want to be around us more than we instinctively believe.
As the Thomas Schelling has put it—he was a Nobel-prize winning economist and also the namesake for our hamster—“Each party is the prisoner or the beneficiary of their mutual expectations.”
I’m still thinking about
Words: This piece about the elderly people dying because of social isolation is astonishing.
“Social isolation was listed as a contributing cause of death for at least nine other Minnesotans — almost all long-term care residents — from June to September, according to state death records; no deaths in the previous two years cited social isolation as a cause.”
Sounds: The headline on this episode of Vox’s Future Perfect podcast captures the central puzzle of this episode: “Pigs are as smart as dogs. Why do we eat one and love the other?”
I made
…the article I mentioned above, “What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?” I’m hoping to write more on this topic, so if you know of people who have (or had) a friendship of the Oprah/Gayle variety, please ask them to reach out to me. I’m especially interested in hearing from POC, people 40+, straight men and disabled folks.
Now you know
In the 1970s, a Swiss physician, Hermann Brandt, invented the sport Tchoukball because he was concerned about the prevalence of injuries from sports. Two of the aims of the game are to “Be competitive without encouraging aggression” and “Avoid violent confrontations.” He said:
“The objective of human physical activities is not to make champions, but rather to help construct a harmonious society.”
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