In a 2014 study, social psychologists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder recruited commuters on trains and buses in the Chicago area and asked some of them to start conversations with strangers. The recruits predicted that doing so would make them feel uncomfortable and that the recipients of their entreaties would suffer even greater awkwardness. They were mistaken on both fronts. Those who initiated conversations found it easier to do than they expected. They enjoyed their commute more than control group participants, who remained to themselves. And the strangers with whom they spoke were not put off. They enjoyed the conversations just as much.
“People misunderstand the consequences of social connection,” Epley and Schroeder wrote.[4] Commuters feared that reaching out would be uncomfortable for everyone, but their fears were misplaced. It wasn’t awkward at all.
In a 2020 study, Erica Boothby of the University of Pennsylvania and Vanessa Bohns of Cornell University examined a related phenomenon: our squeamishness about complimenting other people. The prospect of giving compliments, Boothby and Bohns found, can make people skittish. They worry “their awkwardness is on display and that people are noticing—and judging—them for their many flaws and faux pas.” But in the experiments, people’s predictions—about themselves and others—proved way off. They drastically overestimated how “bothered, uncomfortable, and annoyed” the person receiving their compliment would feel—and underestimated how positively that person would react.[5] It wasn’t awkward at all.
What’s going on in these situations is a phenomenon that social psychologists call “pluralistic ignorance.” We mistakenly assume that our beliefs differ vastly from everyone else’s—especially when those private thoughts seem at odds with broader public behavior. So, when we struggle to understand a lecture, we don’t ask questions because we erroneously believe that because other people aren’t asking questions, that means they understand—and we don’t want to look dumb. But we don’t consider that other people might be equally befuddled—and equally nervous about seeming stupid. We’re confused, but we stay confused because we falsely believe nobody but us is confused! Or surveys of college students reveal that most students don’t drink excessively. But those students think that they’re the exception, and that all their classmates are constantly getting hammered, which perversely reinforces a social norm that relatively few people truly endorse.[6]
Our concerns about the awkwardness of reconnecting with someone from whom we’ve drifted conform to this pattern. We too often presume that our own preferences are unique. During a conversation in which Cheryl maintained that Jen would have little interest in reconnecting—and that she would instead consider any communication from Cheryl a little creepy—I asked her to consider the reverse scenario.
How would she feel if Jen reached out to her?
“If I got a message from her today, oh my God, I would burst into tears,” she told me. “That would be a life-changing thing for me to hear from her and for her to still be thinking about our friendship after all those years.”
“HAPPINESS IS LOVE. FULL STOP.”
The longest-running examination of the lifetime well-being of a single group of people is the Study of Adult Development at Harvard Medical School, also known as the Grant Study, for one of its creators. You might have heard of it. In 1938, researchers at Harvard recruited 268 undergraduate men, and followed them for the next eighty years. The length of the study and its detail are astounding. Researchers measured the men’s IQ, analyzed their handwriting, and examined their brows and testicles. They drew blood, took electroencephalograms, and calculated their lifetime earnings. The audacious goal was to try to determine why some people flourished in work and life and others floundered.
Despite its obvious limitations—the subjects were all white American men—the Grant Study is one of the most important long-term projects in the history of psychological science. Researchers eventually included the offspring and spouses of these men in the study. And in the 1970s they added 456 working-class Bostonians to diversify the socioeconomic pool. The combined conclusions of these efforts are considered serious, instructive, and probably universal.
As the Harvard Gazette summarized in 2017:
Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives. . . . Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes. That finding proved true across the board among both the Harvard men and the inner-city participants.[7]