The Empathy Gym

In May 2007, an artist living in Chicago moved into a new place.

It was a small room with white walls. The interior design was minimalist.

“There was a bed, a desk, a computer, a lamp, and a paintball gun.”

A fix to the gun was a webcam. It lies streamed the room to the internet. Anyone could look in, and anyone could take control of the gun, aim and fire. At all hours of the day and night, the paintball gun was springed to life, and began shooting yellow pellets into the room.

Some hit the walls of the furniture. Some hit the artist.

I was shot at 70,000 times, and I received 80 million hits on the internet

from 128 countries. Wafa Bilal spent one whole month in the room. Targeted tens of thousands of times by random strangers around the world. Why would he choose to do this? Wafa was born and raised in Iraq.

He came to the US in the early 90s. I live this duality of living in two places. One is a comfort zone of the United States. And the other one is the conflict zone in Iraq where my family, friends, lived. In 2004, Wafa says one of his brothers was killed in an air strike.

One of my brother Hadji was killed in air to ground a missile, and I didn't know what to do. Wafa is a performance artist, and he wanted to engage others in the conversation that was running through his mind. Three years after his brother's death, he got an idea.

I said, "I want to lock myself in the gallery space for 30 days, and I can build a robot connected to the internet." And the robot shoots a pinball and viewers online could direct that gun and shoot at me. It's day 16. My body is just getting weak by the day. I thought I felt better.

As the days went by, Wafa started to feel crushed by the experience. It's late, um, night, feel extremely tired, but I'm afraid to go to bed. In some ways, Wafa was attempting to do what civil disobedience movements around the world have done. He was deliberately putting himself in harm's way in order to draw attention to a problem, and effect change.

I have United States, I have Denmark, I have Ireland, I have the UK, I have France, again, a Canada show. It's not one place. It is almost global shooting, and I don't know. Somebody said, "Mah, I don't need the orange and they will like this."

“Why did strangers who knew nothing about Wafa take it upon themselves to hurt him?”

Do technology and modern life and the anonymity they offer make us less caring as human beings? On today's show, building empathy in a connected and confrontational world. It makes a difference. Do you want to know what's in your community, but don't you know how? Then go to GoFandMe.com and start your own show.

Your next show doesn't have to go to school or the kids. You can only start in less minutes a goFandMe show. Some show for themselves, for friends, for me or for an organization.

The most important thing is that the people or projects at home,

GoFandMe is the four main platforms for playing games.

“The important thing is, without a friend or a friend,”

but with many helpers who are on their way to support you.

If creative, local, or life is important, there is no point. There is a reason why GoFandMe is of millions of support and value of playing games. GoFandMe makes a difference for many people. And help people to come together.

Start in a hurry to dine and goFandMe spend an off-roof. Jamil Zaki is a psychologist at Stanford University. He's the author of the book, The War for Kindness, Building Empathy in a Fractured World. Jamil, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thanks for having me.

You have a very powerful story about how you came to be interested in the subject

of empathy. Tell me about your parents, where they are from, how they met, what they went through, and what you learned from the experience. So it turns out that in the early 1970s, Washington State University in Pullman

had a program where they granted full scholarships for graduate studies to students from the world's poorest nations. My mother received the scholarship from Peru. And my father did not receive the scholarship, but nonetheless came to Washington State from Pakistan.

So they traveled from Lima and Lahore, these two massive cities to the sleepy town of Pullman, where they fell in love.

“When I think about my parents, I think the biggest thing that they had in common”

was the essence of foreignness in the US.

They sort of took comfort in each other in a place that neither of them understood. But as they grew more comfortable with the US and were acclimated to it, they grew less comfortable with each other. And they divorced. They started splitting up when I was eight. But didn't finish until I was 12.

And theirs was a long and acrimonious split. And I am their only child. And so a lot of my childhood was spent kind of bouncing around between their houses. And it really felt like I was bouncing between parallel universes because their priorities and values and fears

are really as far apart as their hometowns. So I would often feel confused, as a small child.

I would try to, when I was with my mom, figure out the rules that governed

her heart and mind and make them true for myself. But then when I would go to my dad's house, those same rules would stop working. And it was just very confusing.

“And it felt, I think, to all three of us, like, I would really have to choose”

one of my parents and give up on really knowing the other. But I knew that I had to try for all of our sake. So I did and I kind of kept working at it and eventually got better and learned to tune myself to my parents' different frequencies. And that kind of saved me as a kid.

I think empathy saved me. Not because it's easy, it was work. I was think of my parents' divorce as an empathy gym for me that forced me to work out my ability to care about and understand other people. And you, as you've said, describe this as an empathy gym

where they're times when you failed to show them empathy. I mean, I must imagine that as a small child, it must have been very difficult in many ways to comprehend what was happening and why these two adults were fighting over you. And each was demanding that you see things from their point of view.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, one of the big realizations for me as a kid was

“realizing that both of them were in pain. I think as a child,”

it's very easy to focus on your own perspective and what you're going through. And to blame others, especially adults, I think when I realized that my parents were both struggling, just like I was, it actually made me feel kinship towards them and made it easier to understand that I could connect with both of them.

In fact, because what we were going through wasn't that different. Talk a little bit about the benefits of empathy. There's been a lot of work that looks at what happens when people receive empathy from their partners, for example, or from their doctors. Oh, yeah. I mean, in many cases empathy benefits all parties involved.

So, for instance, patients of empathic doctors are more satisfied with their care, but are also more likely to follow doctors' recommendations, which is important for things like preventative care. And spouses of empathic partners are happier in their marriages. But one thing that I think people don't realize as much is that people who experience empathy for others also benefit.

It's not just receiving it, but giving it helps us too. Feeling empathy for others reduces our stress and adolescents who are able to pick out other people's emotions accurately are better adjusted during middle school.

We have courses and classes that try and teach children empathy.

I came by this clip on Sesame Street featuring the actor Mark Ruffalo, and the character Murray. Take a listen to the clip.

“Murray? What? Did I tell you about that time when I lost my favorite teddy bear?”

Oh, no. It was... This was very sad. Did you love that teddy bear? I love that teddy bear. Oh, I can imagine exactly how you feel. It's really sad feeling that it makes you want to cry like this. It was sad. It was so sad. But you know what? What?

You know what empathy is? I do. That was empathy.

What? You could understand how I was feeling exactly how I was feeling and understood it.

That's empathy. I can't now! Jimmy, you've used a similar kind of scenario to explain empathy. Someone's talking with a friend. The friend gets a phone call. Walk me through the rest of that scenario and the three components that you've identified that make up empathy.

Yeah, so again, imagine that you're sitting with the friend having lunch and they receive a phone call. And whatever the person on the other side of the line says makes them visibly upset. You don't know what's wrong, but your friend starts to cry and it's obvious that something is wrong. Well, as you see this, a bunch of things might happen inside you.

First, you might become upset yourself, sort of vicariously catching their feeling.

“That's what psychologists often call emotional empathy.”

You might also try to figure out what's wrong, what they're feeling and why. That's what we call cognitive empathy. And if you're good friend at least, you probably will feel concerned for what they're going through and a desire for their well-being to improve. That's what psychologists call empathic concern or compassion.

And even though these pieces of empathy sometimes go together, they also split apart in interesting ways. So for instance, different brain systems support emotional and cognitive empathy and empathic concern. And different groups of people struggle with different flavors of empathy. That's fascinating. It's almost like these are different muscle groups and you need all

all the muscle groups to be functioning to in some ways actualize your full capacity for empathy. I love that analogy. Yeah, that's a perfect way of putting it. At the same time that parents and books and motivational speakers and fate traditions cite the value of empathy, many of us are living in ways that isolators from the people around us. Among people 18 to 34, for example, 10 times as many people live alone today as

did in 1950. I asked Jamil whether there's a link between going solo and the amount of empathy we feel for others. It's hard to say, you know, I do want to be clear that in looking at any demographic trends over time and trying to link them to empathy decline, we're necessarily speculating, right? There's no way to run an experiment where you have history occur multiple times and fiddle with different pieces of it to see what causes a decline in empathy. But certainly,

you know, you can point to big shifts in the way that people live and one of them is that we're becoming more urban and more solitary. And when we interact with people, it's often in more transactional ways, right? Sort of some of the regular rituals that used to bring us into contact with other people often are giving way to more solitary pursuits. So there's some evidence, for instance, that anonymous interactions do not favor empathy. So I don't know, there's not data specifically

on solitary living, but to the extent that living in, you know, a giant city, but by yourself we're most of the people who you see are total strangers. There's some evidence that suggests that perhaps that might have an effect on our empathy. And of course, one of the other places where anonymity rules is the internet. And when you look at some of the changes that have unfolded and the timetable of those changes, they do coincide, at least, correlationally with with the rise

of internet technologies. And I'm wondering, is there, is there reason to imagine that there's a connection between these two things that the connections we have with one another online and on Twitter or social media, where we often don't know whom we're communicating, where they're who's listening, or who's not listening, because this in some ways, be behind this decline in empathy.

“It certainly is possible. You know, I think that the internet and social media,”

I don't think of them as inherently anti-social. In a way, you can think of the internet as humanity's greatest empathic opportunity ever. We have the chance to connect with people around

go back and read Wired, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, people were waxing poetic about the way

“that the internet could bring us all together into a global community. I think I've been in some”

obvious ways that hasn't always occurred. And I think that has to do in part with some of the ways

that we tend to use the internet that might not be empathy-positive. So, for instance, oftentimes online, we don't have a chance to see each other's faces and voices in real-time interactions, the kind of richness that we have when we hang out offline. Instead, we see avatars and strings of text. And those might not be great triggers for empathy. There's a great study by Juliana Schroeder and her colleagues where they had people describe their political opinions sort of in an audio

recording. They then had a separate group of people, listened to those audio recordings or read a transcript of them. And what they found was that people were more likely to dehumanize the person

who's opinion was, they were reading about if they were only reading it, whereas if they were hearing

the person's voice, they were less likely to dehumanize that individual. It's almost as though we're leaving behind when we go online. Some of the cues that allow us to detect each other's real humanity. And there's a deep irony there, isn't that Jimmy? I mean, when we live in these big cities, we're living cheekby jowl with lots of other people, but in some ways we're not connecting with them and the same goes with the internet. We know we have the capacity to connect

with large numbers of other people, but we're connecting it often the superficial way instead of there's a deeper way. It is ironic, isn't it? I mean, in cities, for instance, we see more people

than we ever did in human history, but we know fewer of them. And it almost is as though our

interactions sort of favor a dehumanized perspective on each other. I mean, I know what of sort of stuck in traffic or trying to make my way down a crowded block in Manhattan. People become not

“people, but obstacles for me on my way. And I think that that's sort of the way that it can”

often feel in modern contexts. When we come back, more on the signs of empathy and why being empathetic can sometimes be bad for you. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Jamil Zaki is the author of the War for Kindness, building empathy in a fractured world. He conducts research on empathy at Stanford University. Jamil, people who have been through terrible suffering can respond in different ways,

some people turn inward to avoid future pain while others turn outward. They show empathy for the suffering of other people. I feel like I've seen research studies that show both these things. Can you talk about these studies and why people might go in one direction or another after the

“experience trauma? Yeah, you know, I think that we often think of trauma, you know, sort of things like”

being through a war or being assaulted or suffering a terrible injury as things that again, as you put it nicely sort of draws into each other or even that trauma might perpetuate itself. We often hear about cycles of violence or the idea that hurt people hurt people. And that's certainly true in some cases, but there is a lot of research that's actually much more hopeful on what psychologists call altruism born of suffering. This is the idea that sometimes

when we've gone through great pain, that actually sort of opens us up to caring more about other people and their suffering. So there are all sorts of examples of that as well. So for instance, people who have suffered from addiction often change their lives and become addiction counselors. People who have been assaulted often change their lives and become assault counselors, sort of because they resonate with the frequency of other people's suffering more acutely.

Psychologists don't really know that much about what causes people when they experience suffering to go in one direction or another, but one important factor that they have identified is the support that we receive from other people. So if after a trauma and individual is able to find a community of others who support them, well then they're more likely to recover from their own trauma and they might also be more likely to turn around and provide that support to others.

I'm thinking about research that Michael Wall and Naila Branscom and others have done, looking at how, when you remind people of past traumas, you remind Americans, for example,

techniques in the fight against terrorism. And in some ways at one level, it seems very intuitive that you feel like you've been through something bad and I remind you of the bad thing you've been through. And there's a part of you that says, I don't want that bad thing to happen again and that increases

my willingness to permit actions or behaviors that might, I might otherwise say, Hang on a second,

“this is going to cause harm to other people. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think that it cuts”

both ways. I mean, I think reminding people of collective trauma, for instance, can make them more weary of outsiders and sort of more, as you say, willing to even endorse violence or aggression towards outsiders. But thinking of a common threat is also one way to bring people within a group closer together. I remember after 9/11, the way that Americans really felt like we were all one, because we were facing this really deep trauma together. And likewise, there's all sorts of

evidence that when people feel that they have a common threat that they're facing, they ban together.

So it's really interesting what you're really pointing out is that empathy in some ways

has this double-edged sword quality to it, which is on the one hand, it's prompting us to to be outward looking, but it's also driven in some ways by factors about who's in our in group and who's not in our in group. The psychologist Paul Bloom who wrote the book against empathy, the case for rational compassion, he argues that empathy tends to be

“perocchio and it tends to be biased. And that's why when we ask people to be empathic,”

we're really inviting them to be prejudiced. Is that true? I think that Paul is right in certain ways. Absolutely empathy sort of begins perocially. Our instinctive empathy might be more driven towards

people in our tribe than outside of it. I often think of oxytocin, you know, this chemical that

that sort of causes us to bond to other people, right? We often think of oxytocin as the love drug or the cuddle hormone. But it turns out that if you give people oxytocin intra-nazily, for instance, they become more caring about people in their group, but less caring about people outside their group. In essence, sort of turning up people's empathy in that case means turning up their parochialism. I think a big place where Paul and I differ is on what we do with this information.

So Paul, I think, believes that, okay, empathy tends to be perocial and biased towards insiders versus outsiders. So we should give up on it all together. I think differently. I think that that's a problem without empathy tends to operate, but I try to focus us on the fact that we can control how we empathize and make choices about the way that we deploy our caring. And if we recognize that, hey, I'm empathizing in a perocial way in a tribal way,

we can try to make a different choice and broaden our empathy even towards people who are different from ourselves. You've done some very interesting work with police officers where you brought to bear this insight that you just talked about. Tell me about that work and tell me about how, sometimes the right recommendation might actually be to tell people, behave a little less empathetically. Yeah, so for the book I profiled, Washington State's criminal justice training

center. Although these officers were very empathic towards citizens, they were even more empathic towards fellow police officers. And that included fellow police officers who had engaged in potential police misconduct, right? So while I was there, there was a case of police officers who had shot an unarmed man named Antonio Zambrano Montez. And during my visit to CJTC, the officers involved in that shooting, they're not indicted at all. So that seemed like a travesty of

justice to many people in Washington State. But the people at CJTC were adamant that these were good guys who had just made a mistake. That level of empathy for people in their own group, I feel, and this is just my perspective, might have interfered with their ability to understand how the rest of the world saw what had happened. And in fact, this is consistent with at research by my friend Emil Bruno. He's studied sort of parochial empathy in a lot of different

“intergroup contexts. And what he finds is that sometimes if you want to predict when someone will”

be willing to be aggressive towards outsiders or unwilling to compromise with someone on the other

You have to also measure how empathic they are to their own group. And it turns out that people

“were extraordinarily empathic towards people in their group. Even if they're also empathic”

towards outsiders are unwilling to compromise unwilling to do anything that could threaten their own tribe. So what this suggests is that sometimes if we want to open ourselves up to other cultures, to people on the other side of a political or racial divide, maybe what we should start out doing is not just trying to get to know them and empathize more with them, but to recognize if we're empathizing so much with our group that will be unable to be flexible emotionally.

I want to talk about another paradox of empathy. You say that about 50% of oncologists report feeling intense heartbreak when they communicate bad news to patients. So even as empathy is

a very powerful driver of positive outcomes in medical settings, for example, it also seems to

come at some personal cost. Yeah, in fact, even having medical students simulate delivering bad news makes them anxious. Makes their palms start to sweat and their hearts start to race. Empathy is usually beneficial, including in medical contexts for the people who receive it. But it can be an occupational hazard for the people who give it. I understand that a friend of yours is a psychotherapist and she avoids scheduling depressed patients at the end of the day

for in some ways the same reason. Yeah, because she feels as though their negative mood will

“seep into her and sort of leave her unable to interact well with her family. And I think”

this is part of the double-edged sword of empathy for people in caring professions. On the one hand, many of these people are driven to their work by a predator natural care for others. But on the other hand, that same care can cause them to lose themselves. Especially if they're in really intense medical settings where they're surrounded by sort of chronically surrounded by other people's deep suffering. And as a result, oftentimes, I think

people in caring professions feel like they're stuck in a double bind between caring for other people adequately, but potentially grinding themselves down or turning themselves off. This is something that is called in the medical profession defensive dehumanization. The idea that that physicians and other health care professionals feel like they sometimes have to turn off their empathy and stop seeing their patients as people just so they can go on

being people. You you cite this interesting study that Mark Penseur conducted into the 1970s, which is another example of of this kind of defensive behavior where people avoid situations where they might be called upon to demonstrate empathy. What was the study and what did he find? Yeah, this was a fascinating study where Penseur placed a table sort of asking for charitable donations and the table had a request for donations to charity. Sometimes

the table had no one manning it and sometimes the table had a person there who was in a wheelchair. And what he found is that when he put those empathic triggers on the table, people actually walked further away. They sort of went out of their way to avoid the table, more. It was almost as though they were trying to keep physical distance between them and something that would make them feel empathy either because it would feel bad or because it would force them to do something

“like donate that maybe they didn't really want to do. I think a lot of us have this experience”

when we see, for instance, a homeless individual on the sidewalk ahead of us. I've heard of people who cross the street to avoid that encounter, maybe because they don't want to sort of see that person suffer and close up because it will make them feel sad or guilty or both. There's some irony there, isn't that? Which is the person who is likely to actually be more empathic is also the person who's likely to cross the street because they recognize that the empathy that

they have inside them is going to make them feel bad. Absolutely. Yeah, I've talked with lots of

people who identify as empaths and basically say that they're crippled by their over-abundance of

care for other people and that sometimes they avoid sort of busy cities overall just because they don't want to be inundated with other people's pain. So in other words empathy not only can produce pain, pain can not only produce disengagement but we can actually almost dehumanize other people because we're so in some ways reluctant to accept the pain that comes with actually empathizing with them. Yeah, absolutely. Especially if you or a group that you belong to is responsible for

a dramatic example of this that was studied about 10 years ago with death workers in the American

“South. These are executioners and what they found is that people who worked on death rows”

were likely to dehumanize inmates and say that they had given up the right to be treated like people and this was especially true if they were the ones physically involved in delivering lethal injections and the like. So again in lots of ways empathy can hurt us, right? It can be unpleasant or causes to view ourselves in ways that we don't like and that in turn can cause us to avoid it. When we come back how to manage the tricky balance and how we can train ourselves with deliberate

practice to be more empathetic. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vidantam.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vidantam. During his month-long performance art piece, tens of thousands of pain balls were fired at Wafa Belal in his studio. The white walls of his gallery turned fluorescent yellow. I say you could just keep repeating getting hits. On day 11, Ashudah from Estonia began bombarding

“his lamp until it fell apart. It was sad for me because the lamp represented just the only thing”

that stayed alive beside me in this space, especially at night. Viewers online could see Wafa's sadness. Later that day, one of those viewers came to visit him in person. The lamp was totally broken and I have a person here walked in with a brand new lamp. Hi, my name is Matt. I was watching the camera this morning. I saw the lamp went out. So I had some time. I thought I'd run the target. I got a new lamp and some light bulb.

Sometimes you need all the help you can get even in a situation like this. I'll bring that by and I'll just help you out a little bit. Jimmy will talk about this moment. Perfect strangers are attacking Wafa and then a perfect stranger shows up to help him. What do you think causes someone to take the step of saying, "This problem is my problem. This suffering is my suffering."

Well, it's a beautiful story and there's so many like it. It really Wafa's story shows you the two sides of how empathy can work in our modern context. On the one hand, you've got people who are anonymous, sort of feeling as though, you know, they've had the break lines cut from their social lives and they can do whatever they want without having to worry about the consequences. So they're acting aggressively towards a total stranger. On the other hand, you have someone who

taps into that stranger's story, who's paying attention to Wafa. He's watching the video of him and realizing what he's going through, sort of able to tap into the story of this stranger and that instead of destroying his empathy, builds it, stretches it towards this person

“and drives him, inspires him to help him. I forgot to mention something is really important.”

Matt is a marine. Matt wasn't the only visitor. Hi, I'm Laura. I live here in Chicago so I came down to the gallery and I made some of my famous muffins. It's actually my sister's residence. Now, this is the other night when you went to sleep, they had one black stock on and one white stock, so I brought you some socks. There were lots of people online who had Wafa too. Sometimes they took control of the painball gun by repeatedly pressing down a key and pointing the gun away from Wafa.

He called them his virtual human shields. Something is really amazing. Right now I have about 36 or

so people pressing the button down on the left preventing people from paning into my direction. Here is Wafa on day 31, after stepping outside the gallery building for the first time in a month. The whole idea is we enforce my belief in humanity and the human kindness. So thank you very much for keeping the hope alive and please keep the conversation going.

about humanity, but he's not alone in that optimism. Jamil Zaki also thinks there are ways we

“might use technology to form connections with people who we previously did not see as being like”

ourselves. He's done work looking at how virtual reality might help people identify with others whose lives are very different from their own. What we wanted to do is use technology to bring people not just to sort of observe the experiences of a homeless individual but observe them from the inside. So we had a simulation where people went through a series of scenes. These are sort of virtual reality scenes of what it might be like to become homeless. So in one scene they've been

evicted from their apartment and they're trying to figure out what they can sell to make ends meet

and stay in their apartment just one more month. In the second scene they've failed to stay in their

apartment and are now sort of sleeping in their car which is then impounded and then in a third scene they're on a local bus line which in fact in the Bay Area there is a bus line that homeless individuals often take to for shelter during the night. So again this showed people in an interactive immersive way the process that an individual might go through when they become homeless. What we found was that this short simulation powerfully affected people's empathy for the homeless even a month

later people who had gone through that simulation as opposed to control condition were less likely to dehumanize homeless individuals and they were more supportive of policies that would produce affordable housing for people in the Bay Area which is a very sort of hot button issue around here. So again this suggests that by putting ourselves into the story of people who on the surface appear different from us we can recognize as you put it nicely our common humanity with them

and that can trigger empathy in a really natural way. There are also some less high tech ways to get people to walk in the shoes of other people and one of the things you mentioned in the book is the idea of the theater. How does being an actor

“in some ways prompt you to develop the muscle of empathy?”

Yeah I mean if you think about what acting is that you really immerse yourself so deeply in the character that you stop being yourself and start being them for a little while. I mean it's more than walking a mile in their shoes you're almost walking a mile in their skin. And as a result there's some evidence at least that acting in fact bolsters people's empathy. So in a great set of studies, Talia Goldstein looked at adolescents who were in performing arts high schools and

compared them at the beginning and end of the year to students who were being trained in visual arts. And what she found is that sort of acting, training and acting, improved kids empathy more than training in a different type of art which is not to say that training in the visual arts doesn't have advantages. I'm sure it does but sort of embodying another person in the way that actors do almost is like it's a performance enhancing drug for empathy if you will.

In some ways there's the same goal for narrative fiction. I mean I feel like when I'm reading a

great novel you know I as you say the second ago become transported I become you know a woman

who's living in the 19th century and in some ways deeply written beautifully written narrative fiction has this ability to pull us deep into the lives of other people. Absolutely yeah I mean this is why I love fiction as well because it really allows us to effortlessly voyage into the lives of other people and not just see them again from the outside but see them from the inside. There's a fair amount of evidence now that sort of the more fiction that people read the more

empathic that they become. So there's a number of correlational studies that show for instance that children who read lots of story books versus those who read less fiction become more empathic and that's holds for adults also. Unfortunately for me reading non-fiction like scientific articles not that helpful. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology doesn't do it. It's not really the empathy gym that some of us are looking for but but there's also some

experimental evidence now coming out that even small doses of fiction produce small but reliable

“improvements in people's empathy and I think this is especially important because fiction is one of”

the most powerful ways to connect with people who are different from us who maybe we might not

I don't know a Bolivian minor but you could probably go to a bookstore and find a novel about

their experiences and likewise there's some evidence for instance that when people read novelistic vivid accounts of the experiences of Arab Americans or people of different gender identities than themselves they form greater empathy for those other groups. We've talked in different ways about how redefining who's in the in-group can reshape our capacity for empathy. You mentioned a very interesting research study in the book involving fans of the Manchester United soccer team.

“Do you remember that study and if you do, can you tell me about it? Yeah I love this study from”

Mark Levine and his colleagues so they recruited rabid Manchester United fans and you know

fandom in UK soccer is very important and they asked them to write about why they loved Manchester United so much and then told them that they would go to a different building on campus to watch film of Manu playing while they were on their way across campus they came across a jogger who appeared to twist his ankle and fall to the ground writhing in pain. This person is in fact an actor and the trick here was that the psychologists made it such that sometimes that

actor was wearing a Manchester United jersey. Sometimes they were wearing a jersey of Liverpool which at the time was Manchester United's most hated rival and other times they were wearing a blank jersey and what they found was that manu fans were more than willing to help fellow manu fans

but also more than willing to basically step over a Liverpool fan as they sort of writhed on the ground

in pain. This is sort of classic tribalism in terms of our empathy and generosity but what I love about this study is that the psychologist ran a second version of it and here instead of asking manu fans to write about why they loved the team they asked them to write about why they loved soccer why it is such a beautiful game and and then they put them in the same scenario and what they found was that after writing about how much they loved soccer individuals were not just willing

to help fellow manu fans but also willing to help Liverpool fans. They still didn't help the person in the blank jersey which I guess suggested it's better to be part of any tribe than

“part of none but I think there's a deeper take away from this study which is that yes it's”

easier to empathize with people who are like us than unlike us but all of us have many different selves inside us at any given moment and each self carries with it a different group maybe of a different size so if I think of myself for instance as a Stanford person well then people that you see Berkeley are my mortal enemies especially during the big game but if I think of myself as a Californian then my in group the people who deserve my empathy and who it's easy to empathize with

that group grows and if I can think of myself as I don't know an American or a human being then that group will grow even further you know I'm thinking about the story you told me about your parents divorced when you were a small child you write in the book about your parents that two people's experiences could differ so drastically yet both be true and deep is maybe the

“most important lesson I've ever learned. I think you know I often attribute that period of my life”

to really making me who I am at the deepest level I mean I think not for nothing they say that research is me search right at least in psychology people tend to gravitate towards ideas that have made an impact on their life and I think for me empathizing with my parents was a survival skill that I needed just to sort of keep my family together at some level but it also taught me at a much broader level that people can be fundamentally different from each other for fundamentally

similar reasons right my parents had totally different values not because one of them was wrong or because one of them was a bad person but because of the lives that they had lived and the experiences that they had had and the things that had hurt them and helped them along the way I think that this is a lesson that I try to impart to all of my students as well is that you know oftentimes when we encounter someone who's different from ourselves and has an

opinion or viewpoint maybe that we even have horror it's easy to just view them as being

naive realism the idea that your version of the world is the world and I think that empathy

“at a deep level is the understanding that someone else's world is just as real as yours”

developing that understanding of another person's world requires real vulnerability we can only begin to see things through another person's eyes if they are willing to tell us who they really are being that open with another person can be daunting and terrifying recently we talk with psychologists Leslie John about the secrets we keep and when how and why we choose to reveal them to others those episodes were titled keeping secrets and coming clean

shortly after those episodes came out we received a voice memo from a listener named Mung

on right around the time I listened to the episode keeping secrets I suffered a sudden hearing

“loss where I woke up one day and one of my years I just couldn't hear much and just didn't know what”

happened Mung freaked out she didn't know what to do one day her child had a play date with another child the mother of the other child and Mung spent some time together so when we were hanging out she asked me how are you doing you don't normally you just say I'm doing well and keep carrying the conversation but instead I just listened to her episode so I told her I actually I just lost my hearing on one set of my year I don't know what's causing it I saw my primary care physician she couldn't

see anything wrong she sent a referral to a specialist but I need a way for insurance clearing but he has been going on for over almost two weeks now and my friend got really concerned she said her partner had the same issue and he didn't go see a doctor until a month and a half later

after he lost his hearing and he never was able to go his hearing back because he lost the

“crucial window to see the doctor so my friend urged me to go see a doctor right away”

Mung listened to the advice she drove to the emergency room where she quickly got a referral to a specialist who figured out what was wrong and what to do moving quickly Mung says is the reason she got her hearing back so I really appreciate all my friends were there to support me to get the trim and right away if I didn't share my secret like I wouldn't probably not be able to hear on my life year anymore so that was a really great experience and I learned when you have people you

trust you can feel you're able to be vulnerable you actually can have shared life experiences and benefit everyone so that's just something I want to share with you we all wonder how much of ourselves to share with others often in social situations like the one Mung was in we make small talk other weather is awful right now did you see the game last night but Mung discovered that sharing how worry helped get her the help she needed she also made a

deep connection with a friend when we come back hidden brain listeners share their stories and questions about revealing their inner selves you're listening to hidden brain I'm Shankar Vedanta this is hidden brain I'm Shankar Vedanta in last week segment of your questions answered we talk with psychologists Leslie John about the costs of keeping secrets and the pain we feel when others keep secrets from us Leslie is the author of revealing the underrated power

of oversharing today she joins us for listeners questions and stories about what happens when we let another person in and unburden ourselves of our secrets Leslie John welcome back to hidden brain thanks so much for having me Leslie we talked before about how our impulse in many interactions is to stay at a surface level even when we want to go deeper what is the research say are the benefits of opening ourselves to others oh there's so many benefits the core benefit is trust

when we open up to others when we share something a bit sensitive and personal we are actually

you did not make a fool out of me and so that in turn is so powerful it makes them trust us and

“the trust is really the kernel of all social relationships right which are so important for human”

flourishing there are mental and physical well-being benefits to revealing revealing wisely and opening up a little bit more in makes us feel closer to our spouses to our friends it makes us feel known for who we really are the research I've done in the workplace has really surprised need because we've also found that leaders when they're a little vulnerable when they share some of their weaknesses for example that makes their their teammates and their employees trust them more and

be more motivated to work for them hmm we often hear the term too much information or TMI when we over share you have a term called TMI what is TMI yeah it's too little information I mean we're culturally obsessed with TMI with oversharing and yes TMI is a thing but oh we've paid so

“little attention to TMI to little information and the more I study and experience it the more I think”

TMI is probably a bigger problem than TMI one of the benefits of sharing a secret is what you call reciprocity we received a note about that from a listener named Win I discovered after my mother

died that I have a half brother that she never told anybody about and when I tell people that I usually

get a disclosure of a similarly significant family secret from the person I'm talking to and in fact I was a dinner party once when I made the disclosure and everyone else at the party at the table had some similar family secret like that so there is a lot of reciprocity associated with the disclosure of secrets talk about this idea Leslie why is it that when we reveal our secrets to others it becomes easier for them to reveal their secrets to us yeah reciprocity comes so naturally

“to us I mean I I might even say it's an instinct so when we make ourselves vulnerable by sharing”

something sensitive we're showing that we trust the person we're communicating that we're safe because we just put ourselves out on the line and that prompts people to reciprocate that it's also a gesture a gesture of it's a kind gesture right to say you trust someone in that way and it prompts them to engage back because also fundamentally opening up is something that does feel good to the right people in the right place hmm in one study Leslie you found a holding effect in

revealing secrets describe the study and what you found yeah so what we did in this study was we asked people a bunch of questions that varied in how sensitive they were like have you ever eaten meat poultry or fish that's like a softball question that went all the way up to like have you ever had sex with a friend's spouse so like way the whole range and what we found was that this hurting effect whereby if you know that other people have admitted to something or revealed

something it makes you more comfortable revealing back and the interesting thing about this study is that it wasn't a face-to-face conversation where you may feel kind of socially compelled rather it was this bare bones online survey where we just asked people questions and we told them

how other people had ostensibly answered the questions and basically when we told them that many

people had admitted to calling in sick when they weren't sick for example people were more likely themselves to admit that relative to another version where we you know we said almost nobody is ever calling in sick when not sick so so it's easier to reveal when you know that you're not alone the need for reciprocity in sharing with others can sometimes backfire on us we've all been in situations where we revealed something vulnerable about ourselves and expect the other person

to reciprocate but for whatever reason they don't here's a story along those lines from listener Abigail I was thinking while I listened to the episode about the cost of not reciprocating when someone is open with you what that can do to a relationship my son recently upset another mom's son at school by accident and they were planning to talk about it the next day with the teacher but he was really upset about the idea that his friend was mad at him and I said why don't

we send him a message so I gave my son my phone and he sent a message to his friend to the mom's phone number saying I'm sorry and it was an accident and just expressing a bit of vulnerability

and I know they're gonna talk about it in school tomorrow anyway and I felt really bad from that

response and I didn't really understand why until I was listening to the podcast and I realized that

“both my son and I I think by participating in sending this message we're trying to”

reveal something vulnerable and reach out and say I'm sorry I hurt you and looking for something reassuring and return like I'm not angry with you or I am angry with you and here's how to make it better and with the mom giving this really non-committal response that didn't really say why whether she or her son were upset it kind of denied us the opportunity to have the conversation and it made me feel really distant from her so lastly you called the type of situation that

Abigail experienced a reciprocity fail what is that and how can we get better at avoiding a reciprocity fail yeah so exactly a reciprocity fail is when you feel you've put yourself out there and be vulnerable and you kind of get shocked down or you don't get um you don't get a welcoming response

“or a reveal back and and that's what Abigail is describing here so um one of a few things”

strike me about this example one is vulnerability over text messaging and email um non-face-to-face or non-phone I think that's really tough that's a tough setup because it's so hard to interpret emotions when you're in a it's communicating virtually like that so the number one thing is

first to set yourself up for success is to talk on the phone or in person because then you're

emotion translates um the second is I think that we this is a perfect example of how we often expect someone to react in a certain way or want them to react in a certain way and when then when they don't we get really disappointed well what might we we'd be able to do to change that we can actually say what we need we can we can actually be proactive and say I feel terrible about this this is a this is a hard hard thing for me to say and I'm hoping that you can tell me how you

feel after hearing this right you know it also struck me Leslie that we are aware of our own motivations when we say something but of course all that someone else can hear are the words coming out of our mouths they don't have access to all of our internal feelings and I guess it underlines the importance of really making sure that what you say reveals and reflects your inner concerns that you're you're not giving short shift to them yes completely and a key part of that is sharing your feelings

“I think we too often we think that feelings are they's la la la la for through through things”

but feelings are data feelings are informative and feelings when you share them they're actually very persuasive why because it's hard to fake feelings and you also can't really argue with feelings in the way you can with facts right feelings aren't really subject to logic and debate the way a fact is and and it's also disarming a little bit because if you they're not accusational if you share how you feel as opposed to comment on someone's behavior right so sharing our

feelings is something that I really think in most areas we would benefit by doing doing more of when we come back how our propensity to share with others depends on who we're sharing with you're listening to hidden brain I'm Shankar Vedanta this is hidden brain I'm Shankar Vedanta when we over share with the wrong person it can be embarrassing but at Harvard University

Leslie John says not sharing anything at all could be worse Leslie I often find that when I'm deciding what or how much to share of myself it can really depend on who I'm talking to we receive the voice mail along these lines from a listener named Jeremy he shared that he's recovering from an addiction to pornography as a teenager he grew up religious so Jeremy decided to confess his sins to his church leader why we're in there and I was so

terrified my hands were sweaty I remember just sitting in that room and just not wanting to say the thing and he could tell that there was something I wanted to say and he kept just gently asking

and finally I just I said the thing I said you know I've been looking at a lot of pornography and I

response it felt like I had taken so much courage and so much energy and strength to go in and

“say this thing and his response was just stop and I tried everything in my power to possibly stop”

and I just couldn't between hormones and and just you know being a teenage boy of course well all that did was drive me more underground and I became better at hiding it so Leslie talk a moment about the importance of recognizing someone's courage when they tell us a secret not just responding to the content of the secret yes yes we think way too much about the content and not enough about the gesture of disclosure and when we're on the receiving end

we it's hard for us to empathize with just how hard it is especially when there's power and balances as there was in in Jeremy's example and so I think like when someone says that think of it as a gift and say thank you for sharing that like truly even if it's something that you're dissatisfied with you you can recognize that this took courage and there's actually been some really interesting studies on what can when you're on the receiving end of someone's sensitive

“disclosure what is the best way to help them and again and again the best thing to do is validation”

so we often think that we should problem solve right like in this example like what are you going to do about it but actually less is more just like recognizing their disclosure and saying I hear you that must be so hard I would feel the same way too these are forms of validation and that is so comforting to people it really reduces their their momentary stress levels and helps them see things more clearly and be more clear headed I wonder bring you to the next part

of Jeremy's story Leslie as he grew into adulthood he continued to struggle with his addiction until a partner learned about it and finally the came a point at which I was discovered which is often the case for people like me and I had no choice but to come clean and she didn't want to hear my coming clean but I did find a program where I had some support and people who really understood what I'd gone through and how this thing works and when I did that to a person who really

really understood what I felt was freedom understanding comfort love to a level that I'd never felt

“before I think it gave me a real good step into not having the problem so Leslie I'm struck by”

the contrast between Jeremy's different experiences of sharing his secret and I'm also struck by the fact that he received the most support from other people who had been through what he went through have you studied the power that support groups have and helping people unburden themselves with their secrets it's so powerful knowing that you have a shared reality with someone that they have been going through the same things because when you think about it again this idea of like

feeling known for who you really are is so soothing and so if you've had unique experiences with addiction talking it's one thing to talk to an understanding spouse but it's it's also incredibly

curative to talk to other people who have been through similar things after the first hidden brain

we did together a bunch of my old friends from ballet reached out to me I trained professionally classical ballet when I was a lot younger and they reached out to me and this was third this was the last time I saw them was 30 years ago and we met last month the four of us met together we hadn't seen each other in 30 years and it was unbelievably bonding and wonderful and beautiful and and we talked about some of these things that at the time you know we lived together

in grade six and seven we were like sisters and we went through like it was it was a privilege a total privilege to get to do this to train at this level but it was also really hard and you know these things it may be realized that things that we that I hadn't really processed that were kind of lurking that you know I have dreams nightmares every month or two and I don't have them anymore so far because we were able to talk about these things that that were really messed up and make sense of them

like one of these things is when you when you do point work you standing on your toes your your

your feet bleed especially at the beginning and and we never told our teachers that our feet were

bleeding so we just reached as dance with these raw feet and and the thought of telling them did not even occur to us because the this the the norm this authoritarian competitive norm was so entrenched in us that if we revealed we would be weak and I just made that realization with

uniquely been through it's it's very very healing I'm also wondering if it's possible that when we

“share things with people who've essentially been through the same experience like like you had”

with your friends one of the advantages is that there is so much that can be left unsaid and unspoken because in fact you share all of this implicit understanding and knowledge oh yeah it's so efficient now I'm type A business goal profit's efficient but it is I mean you don't need to set the stage you already know the cast of characters you know the personalities and you just go right back it was it was beautiful hmm we received this message from a listen in Meryl that also has to do with the audience

for our self disclosures two years ago I was the victim of a bank fraud three well-trained

imposters from abroad contacted me by phone over a six-week period they hooked me in with kindness

and had me believing that it was in my best interest to follow their instructions as an elderly person I was easy prey for them when my checking account was depleted I didn't know who to turn to for support not wanting my intelligence to be judged I kept the secret intact imagining words like how could you didn't you see where this was going why did you listen to people you didn't know and why didn't you call me kept the secret even tighter the deputy attorney

general in the state I reside in contacted me by phone to speak at a symposium about fraud speaking with him for one hour gave release the conversation with safe and non-judgemental because I knew this higher up legislator was talking to other people in my state who were in similar

“circumstances so that's a powerful story lastly and I think many people can relate to”

moral experience you know you sit next to somebody on a bus or a train or a park bench and you tell them things that you haven't told your closest friends why do you think that is yeah it's freeing because you you know you're not going to see them again it's freeing because you don't need to worry about them judging you and in fact sometimes especially when we know the person it it feels very like it's very hard to to reveal things and and I really feel for

moral because that's a really hard thing you know it's it can really happen to anyone but it would be you'd feel so stupid and it would be very hard to to talk to and I'm really glad that she there was a professional who was really well trained and received those disclosures in a great way I'm wondering how much it matters whether the people we unburden ourselves to share the same values or world view as us we received an email from listener Allison she writes

before the 2016 election when Donald Trump's comments about women and sexual assault were coming to the surface I spoke up about how my own experience with sexual abuse had destroyed me in an attempt to show friends how serious I felt the statements were I did so selectively but I live in a very conservative community and I had a handful of friends tell me that I needed to get over my feelings about sexual assault in order to vote for the greater good I fell into a deep depression that I

haven't really pulled out of I used to be friendly and outgoing heavily engaged in my neighborhood church and PTA but even after years of therapy I still isolate myself I don't know my neighbors anymore I rarely see friends investing in relationships especially new ones just feels too risky so lastly how do we still share of ourselves our experiences our stories what we feel that the people we're sharing with are not on the same pages us yeah that's a really

“important question and I think this speaks to the importance of curating your audience now you can't”

predict people's reactions 100% so it's not like the revealers problem all the time but one thing that we can try to do in with these really sensitive things is instead of just kind of feeling like it's a one-shot thing we're going to just say the thing to a bunch of people we could try for example we

could try first saying the words out loud privately how does that feel right and then try saying

them to someone that is really close with you yeah I mean I'm also reflecting that one of the things that Alison was doing was she was trying to frame her disclosures in the context of a very tense political situation and I'm wondering whether Alison might have had more success if she was in a situation where even if she was with people who disagreed with her politically she's finding some kind of a common you know activity or an event that people are interested in and then sharing

lens yeah totally I mean the context massively shapes the interpretation of the self-disclosure for

“sure another thing that comes to mind is if she was here what I would love to ask her more about”

is her why like what's her purpose what's her motive for revealing because I'm a story of mine

it's not a terrible event like what Alison experienced but you know when I was first pregnant with

our first little guy I was overjoyed and in a spirit of warmth and transparency I kind of learning it out to our landlord well that sent a series of chain reactions that basically ended with us having to move out it was definitely a disclosure that came back to bite me everything worked out in the end but you know and in hindsight I'm like why did I do that well I wanted to get clues and love and was my landlord really the right person to do that absolutely not so it kind of thinking those

“things through your goal and whether this audience is the right the right person or context”

we all heard the phrase humble bragging we revealed something that looks like a flaw but it's really

designed to draw positive attention to ourselves when we come back how to reveal things that show us in a good light you're listening to hidden brain I'm shanker vedantham this is hidden brain I'm shanker vedantham. Leslie John is a psychologist at Harvard University she's the author of revealing the underrated power of oversharing. Leslie we've been talking today about self disclosure of secrets that are often painful or embarrassing but you also studied

how it can be difficult to share something that we are proud of how so yeah it can be hard because

you don't want to make your loved ones in friend ones feel badly you don't want to spark envy

right you don't want them to feel jealous and so oftentimes then what we end up doing is we end up just like not sharing the thing and that's also problematic. this reminds you of my colleague oval sazers workware on humble bragging where what we we try to do is we try to then often couch the take the edge off the brag by couching it with a display of humility like oh my gosh I can't believe my boss asked me to leave this meeting right or so hard when I get so many

text messages from all my friends it's really hard to respond all that and it's just like mega eye roll right and so so don't humble brag it's better to outright brag and by that I mean say the positive thing but there's there's ways of being like really thoughtful about it like you got to consider the timing you don't want to tell your bestie that you got a promotion when your bestie had a really bad day and is feeling down another thing you can do is reveal like the story of

how you got there like I that you worked really hard and you've been thinking about this a long time so it's not like oh hey I got promoted like I'm the best it's so easy so you can reveal kind of the struggle

“I think we need to be very careful about the timing the recipient and the context and you can see”

that context very dramatically in how much self praise or self promotion or saying positive things about myself is acceptable like if you're on LinkedIn it's weird not to self promote it's weird not this right so you really have to read the room a list of name Patricia called in with a story she's from Australia and had a new boss at one point and she shared a story with him about how she had challenged authority and gone outside the rules in a previous job and in many ways it turned

out really well Patricia was working in child protective services and she really did right by the children she was working with and she hoped the story would show her new boss what an exceptional employee she was going to be unfortunately her boss did not see the story in the same way she did he no longer talked to me after I told him the story no longer looked at me I was like someone that he wanted to get rid of and I couldn't understand why and it's because he realized that I wasn't

someone that would just easily follow anything that he told me and he wouldn't be able to control

realized the consequences of it I felt nothing but dread and regret and I thought oh God this is

“one situation where I probably shouldn't have disclosed because this guy was all about having”

power control over his employees so let's talk about the role that power plays in the self disclosure dilemmas because it seems to me that perhaps this is especially tricky terrain where we have to be careful about when and with whom we disclose completely yeah and the workplaces of very tricky situation because you know in any given day most of us a lot of us move up and down the status hierarchy right like when I'm talking to the dean I'm low status when I'm talking to my

my MBA student some higher status and so that really shapes disclosure too like your status

has a big impact on what's safe and generally as you move higher up the status poll it's more safe

to reveal sensitive things Patricia's example is a great example of how a well-intended disclosure can come back to bite us at least in the short run since we have the benefit of perspective and not being in this situation ourselves a couple things struck me one is I know this is hard but I wondered how much she had talked to her boss about you know why he reacted the way he did because sometimes if you can if you can have a meeting and ask the person about more about

the reactions you will learn things that the of the perspective that completely maybe explain

“their reaction and it is not what you were thinking so I think we kind of underask but I don't say”

that lightly because when there's big status differences it's hard to ask someone higher status a question like that the other thing again with the benefit of being way zoomed out here is so this person didn't appreciate the efforts that she had gone to and I think that should prompt a question is this the person I want to work for is this the organization where my values fit and if you do have the luxury of maybe looking elsewhere like that that's an interesting data

point to consider so I think like a big thing that I've learned is like when your self-disclosures don't go the way you want them to sometimes if you think of them as failures then that's really demotivating but try to think of them as what you learned a lot of times you learn even more from the times when you get surprising reactions in the negative way right? I'd like to switch gears for a moment and talk about disclosure in romantic relationships many people have found

that there's a topic that can be particularly difficult to discuss with their partners and that's the topic of past relationships. Listener Janet had been seeing a boyfriend for six years when she decided it was time to have the talk. I had not shared with him that I was in a very seriously damaging relationship about 20 years ago police were involved there was there was pretty bad and I just felt like I wanted to share it with him it was something that he should know about me so we were having

a conversation about vulnerability and I said there's something I'd like to share with you and it's not going to be easy for me to tell you and you may judge me but I feel like I need to tell you so I told him the story and he sat and listened and when it was all done there was just silence

I didn't know what to do so I just sat there and ultimately we ended the conversation and he

decided to get up and leave and go home and from that point forward our relationship changed pretty profoundly and we still see each other as friends occasionally but that's it so that's the story. So Leslie it looks like Janet was punished for being vulnerable in disclosing something that happened to her in the past how should we think of these moments when we put ourselves out there and the

“other person has a negative or awkward reaction to our disclosure. I think it's information right”

as hard as it is and I feel so badly for Janet I admire her courage and it just sucks so bad when someone doesn't even know what to do with it and leaves that said it is a very clear signal right like this person can't handle it I mean especially if I unless there's like a day or a few later he comes out he's like oh my gosh I'm so sorry like this was overwhelming right like but if it's not paired with some kind of hugely rectifying behavior like that I know this is going

to sound crazy but it's a bit of a gift because this person revealed himself to her now it happened after six years I think she said which is that's that's that's incredibly hard to take it's one

the long run hmm let's know Rachel had a psychologically complex question can we ever use

disclosure and vulnerability as weapons one thing I was just curious to hear her talk about was whether something like being vulnerable could be used sort of as a form of manipulation it's a

“behavior I think I witnessed sometimes for people sort of use their vulnerability to sort of get”

close enough to people to kind of manage the situation but I just wonder if that is a possibility you know both in the public sphere and in personal or work relationships where the idea of like putting yourself in a vulnerable position to sort of gain a little more power within like a relationship dynamic now Rachel didn't actually give us a specific context or an example lessly but what do you think and vulnerability and disclosure ever be used as weapons of manipulation absolutely I mean

this is a kind of interrogation 101 right is saying something about yourself that's sensitive and that builds rapport with the person you're trying to get to confess or whatever so that's like definitely in that trick book scammers they they say they're vulnerable they say oh no my my my father's dying right so we feel very we trust them because they're like revealing to us even though you know objectively we know we should not there's something about that gesture so absolutely vulnerability

can be used against us and it is and we need to be very careful and when we are in a vulnerable

“or weakened state we are more susceptible like even I remember when I was lonely and in my mid-30s”

and I found myself single and I was dating again like I caught them before I got looped in but there was a couple of people that were definitely scammers in hindsight they were and they was it was the situation of like too close too quickly and I did see through it but it's it's just when when you want something to be so true with connection if you're looking for love like that's one of these moments when we're very susceptible to a vulnerability being manipulated by that way hmm we got an

interesting question from listener Nora about using self disclosure as a way to reduce tension and conflict when I first started dating my husband I met a lot of his college friends and one of them

was this woman who always behaved kind of strangely toward me whenever I made an attempt to talk

“or joke with her I was met with this chilliness or sarcasm that they're really seemed unwarranted”

and when they asked my husband about it he kind of brushed it off and assured me it wasn't because of any jealousy or past that they had but as you can imagine every time I saw her it was a point of anxiety and really hampered my enjoyment of whatever the occasion was so this went on for years and one day I decided to invite her over we had never hung out one on one before and it took a few tries but she finally came and I told her how I felt like there was this resistance from her

that I couldn't figure out and how it perplexed and saddened me really and I swear it was like a pressure release valve just opened up for both of us she told me she felt the same way and we essentially figured out that we both tend to mirror other people's energy when we meet them and I guess we were picking up on each other's hesitance or weird vibes so things just went wonky from the very beginning but anyway we ended up bonding over that and a number of other things

we may have even cried together at some point but from that day on we've had this incredible

connection and fondness for each other that continues today so Leslie that story might be the poster child for the benefits of disclosure to talk about the risks and benefits of being vulnerable with someone that you are in conflict with I love this this is so beautiful there's two things that really stand out to me about this the first is the self-awareness right the oh I feel we are around this person there's something right identifying that instead of brushing it to the

side identifying it the second thing I love about it is the nature of the disclosure it's a it's a meta disclosure it's like what I'm feeling this thing what is it and it's kind of now you're engaging that person in a joint problem solving task right so it's not it's not like you're like this and I'm like this and how are we different the frame there is is making the whole thing collaborative which is very beautiful but you can think of like revealing sensitive things about

yourself like political affiliation and like I'm thinking of my in laws where we have different political affiliations and it's it can easily be conflictual these conversations but what I've learned

we still disagree but I I understand better and I empathize more and so if you can get to that point

“which takes practice I think I have found it takes practice and as we've been saying feeling”

understood for who you really are is the key part of connection I also wanted to say I thought of one anecdote as you were describing this what of my father's greatest moments so when we were kid my parents had tons of dinner parties and there was this one dinner party I just remember this because I was sitting in the other room watching TV and things got really heated they were like

arguing I don't even know what they were arguing about and what my dad did was he walked over to

the the record player and he puts on what is it multi-python's are we having an argument this is not how to buy an argument how to buy an argument how to buy an argument and he puts it on full blast and it just completely cut the ice and so it's one of these like meta comments right it's commenting on the situation just like oh this is feeling really conflictual and we don't hate each other what's going on and when he put that on it was just like everyone burst out and laughing

not all so had a practical suggestion on how we might go about having a conversation like this

and I wanted to play what she shared with us when I invited her over I had created a special space that I learned from doing talking circles where we sat across from each other on the floor

“and had a talking piece that we passed back and forth which I think really helped set an”

intention of really hearing each other and wanting to heal this thing between us like we had just met for coffee or sat at a kitchen table and I'm not sure the outcome would have been the same. So lastly what do you make of the technique that Nora used and are there other techniques like this that can help us be more open with others? Yes really important things are receiving the person's disclosure well listening making eye contact and less is more your job is not to fix

usually it's to listen and make them feel heard and to do that you validate right you say you repeat back with their say you say I hear you're feeling frustrated that makes sense it makes sense that you would feel that way like those things I know it sounds like therapy speak but these has been showed in many many studies that validation is the single best thing you can do when you receive people's disclosures but you also want to you know if you're like in a just like Nora's

situation this rule of reciprocity right you want to you want to share your feelings and you want to invite the other to share theirs and you want to kind of go back and forth like this and and so

“really the process really really matters. I mean it's a dance is that's what you're saying”

it's a dance yes exactly exactly yeah. Leslie John is a psychologist at Harvard University she's the author of revealing the underrated power of oversharing. Leslie thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thanks so much for having me. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Correll, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer.

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