Friendships are a central part of the lives of both men and women. But from personal observation, you’ve probably noticed that the dynamics of male and female friendships aren’t always the same. You may not, however, have been able to articulate what those differences are or have known what’s behind them.

While there’s still a lot of facets of friendship that haven’t yet been researched, Dr. Jaimie Krems, who runs UCLA’s Social Minds Lab, has a lot of interesting insights about what we do know about how and why men and women approach friendship differently. Today on the show, she explains why men and women form friendships and the differences in the size and nature of their social circles, how long their friendships last, and what they look for in friends. We also discuss why men have a greater tolerance for their friends’ flaws than women do, why men and women would want to be friends with each other, and how each sex experiences friendship jealousy.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• The Banker’s Paradox
• Joyce Benenson’s research on “Males’ Greater Tolerance of Same-Sex Peers”
• Jaimie’s research on women’s interpretation of disgust faces
• Jaimie’s study: “Friendship Jealousy: One Tool for Maintaining Friendships in the Face of Third-Party Threats?”
• AoM Podcast #229: How Men and Women Socialize Differently
• AoM Podcast #360: Understanding Male Friendships
• AoM Podcast #726: What’s Causing the Male Friendship Recession?
• AoM Podcast #772: How Long Does It Take to Make Friends (And How Does That Process Work, Anyway)?
• AoM Article: How Not to Be Disappointed With Your Friends

Connect With Jaimie Krems

• The Social Minds Lab at UCLA
• Jaimie’s faculty page
• Jaimie on X

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Brett Mckay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. Friendships are a essential part of the lives of both men and women, but from personal observation, you probably noticed that the dynamics of male and female friendships aren’t always the same. You may not, however, have been able to articulate what those differences are or have known what’s behind them. While there’s still a lot of facets of friendship that haven’t yet been researched, Dr. Jaimie Krems, who runs UCLA’s Social Minds Lab, has a lot of interesting insights about what we do know about how and why men and women approach friendship differently. Today in the show she explains why men and women form friendships and the differences in the size and nature of their social circles, how long their friendships last, and what they look for in friends. We also discuss why men have a greater tolerance for their friends flaws than women do. Why men and women would want to be friends with each other, and how each sex experiences friendship jealousy. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/Krems. All right, Jaimie Krems, welcome to the show.

Jaimie Krems: Thank you for having me.

Brett Mckay: So You are a social psychologist who researches friendship, but you do it through an evolutionary lens. How’d you end up doing what you do?

Jaimie Krems: Well, I studied classical archeology and, translated Latin. It was like solving a puzzle. Thought that was cool. Booked bands, played poker, living in Philly. And then I let myself get bored and found books by Steven Pinker. And I thought, oh my God, I’m not alone. Other people think about the world and the mind like this. And I came to evolutionary psychology. Worked in Rob Kurzban’s lab at Penn, Robin Dunbar’s lab at Oxford, and Neuberg and Kenricks at ASU. And I thought, this is the way to make the world make sense. As for what I study, it’s in part because two of my best friends had a 26-page, two-hour G-chat just about how much they hated me. And I found it, ’cause one of them was a moron and did it on my computer. So I wanted to understand friendship dynamics for quite some time.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, friendship dynamics amongst women, particularly. A lot of your studies are on what friendship dynamics look like with women, but you also in the process look at how it differs from men and That whole thing about finding the G-chat about how your friends hated you. If you have a sister, you probably encountered this as well. I remember growing up, my sister, there was, something like that happened. She found out that this girl that she thought was her friend was just dogging her. It was terrible. It was devastating. It was not nice.

Jaimie Krems: Yeah, I cried so hard. My friend that I was on the phone with, I was crying to her. She couldn’t understand a damn word I was saying. Now I completely understand. Oh, like their parents never loved them. They were jealous. That’s fine. They’re still unhappy today. I sometimes go on Facebook and check. And so, yeah, thanks to them, I get to work at UCLA.

Brett Mckay: There you go. Okay, so I wanna talk about your research on how men and women socialize and form and manage friendships. So let’s start with this question. From an evolutionary perspective, why do men form friendships?

Jaimie Krems: So I don’t think that we can really pull apart why men and women do these as to two totally separate things. So the function of friendship seems to be about social insurance, and that’s for both men and women. So John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have a really great idea that friendship solve the problem of accessing resources and other support when people are most in need. So if I asked you, Brett, you’re a bank, you have some money to invest in, one person, would you rather invest that money in sort of a Ryan Gosling in the beginning of in the beginning of the notebook or a slick suited rich Ryan Gosling and crazy stupid, love.

Brett Mckay: The rich guy, the slick. That’s what I’d probably invest in.

Jaimie Krems: Absolutely. And that’s what banks do. And so the paradox is that people in need often don’t get what they need. Banks invest in the rich folks and people invest in those likely to repay it or reciprocate. But we need help when we’re in need and friendships might be the way that we solve this problem. These relationships where another person has a stake in my continued welfare means that when I am in need, they’ll invest in me. And so I survive helping them when they eventually face their own times of hardship because I have a stake in their continued welfare.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, Tooby calls this the banker’s paradox. So it’s when you’re most in need of help, people are least inclined to want to invest in you because people want a relationship that’s more benefit than cost. But if you already proved yourself to be a valuable friend, then people they’ll stick with you because they see value in continuing the relationship. So it’s worth incurring that cost. All right, so friendship builds our credit for hard times. Why isn’t family enough support? Like, why not just rely on grandma and grandpa and aunts and uncles and cousins?

Jaimie Krems: That’s a great question. Some people do think that friends act like family. A related explanation, the alliance hypothesis of friendship, suggests that it’s more about having support in conflict. So on this view, friendship is in part the output of cognitive mechanisms designed to assemble support for future agonistic conflicts and fights. And so in a conflict between two of my friends, I should preferentially support the friend who’s more likely to support me in the future, helping that person win their conflict and survive to support me another day. Whereas our siblings might be around to do that, our parents and our grandparents will eventually die and likely die before we do. So we might need to generate more kin, generate more other folks who have a stake in our welfare, who are going to maybe be at the same life stage as us and live longer than our elderly kin.

Brett Mckay: Okay. So friends are insurance. It’s just social insurance for us.

Jaimie Krems: That is the general idea. There’s some idea that women’s friends act as sort of kin replacement given a long history of patcher locality. So men stayed in the same place, women left their community and married someone else and went to that community. And so being without family, women really needed to replace those kin. And that might be why their friendships are so close. By contrast, men may have been sort of co-fighters in intergroup warfare and group defense. And so they benefit more from the numbers. And that’s really where it differs. But even then, friends can act and probably do act as social insurance. Among hunter-foragers in South America, for example, illness, injury, it’s inevitable. And it would have been in our evolutionary history. And so you can imagine that looking at these folks, when they do get ill and injured, they might often die. They’re less likely to die if they have good friends.

Brett Mckay: Okay. So generally what social psychology has found is that women’s relationships or friendships, they’re more intense in their didactic. Usually it’s just like one-on-one. Men’s friendship networks tend to be, they’re larger and they’re looser?

Jaimie Krems: Exactly.

Brett Mckay: They’re not as close. So yeah, kind of flesh that out. Why the difference between how those friendships manifest themselves?

Jaimie Krems: Yeah. So you’ll hear me say this a lot, but we don’t have a good answer to this. We don’t have an agreed upon this is why. It could have to do with the function of what men’s friends do versus what women’s friends do. So men’s friends are co-fighters. They help one another in intergroup warfare and group defense. They can help one another gain status. Women’s friends tend to be more along the lines of alloparents. They might help raise one another’s children. So part of it could have to do with function. Part of it could just have to do with function and the time constraints of group structure. So because women spend so much time, or maybe have to spend so much time, creating any one friend and investing in those really close and like you said dyadic intense relationships, they don’t necessarily have time to spend on a lot of other friends. So it could be that the way that women’s friendships work, being close and dyadic like that, force the fact that they can only have so many friends, whereas men are allowed to put more eggs in more different baskets.

Brett Mckay: Okay, so just to recap there, men have that looser larger, they want a lot of friends who are just kind of buddies, chums, it’s the intensity of the relationship is not going to be as much as women who prefer the close dyadic relationship ’cause women are looking for an alloparent. And I think it makes sense if you argue, okay, well, the reason why men form these clubs or gangs or coalitions, if it’s to fight in war, if one buddy dies or gets eaten by saber toothed tiger, it’s like, well, I guess replace him with another guy who can do the job. If a female friend, like an alloparent, you’re trying to replace your kin, if that person goes away, that’s a problem ’cause you can’t, it’s hard to replace.

Jaimie Krems: Not only is that person hard to replace because you must have built up a lot of trust to put this tiny packet of your genes that we call our offspring in their hands, they can also be dangerous to replace if you lose them not through death. So because women’s friendships are so intense and emotionally open and so on, we talk a lot of shit. Much more than men do, we talk about people we don’t like, what we don’t like, how much we don’t like them. And that information can be ammo for the friend that we told. And that could be very dangerous if the friendship ends as well.

Brett Mckay: Okay, so it’s kind of like you’re afraid that they’re going to blackmail you. Like you got information on them and they got information on you and you wanna keep the relationship together because you don’t want them talking about you if it goes south.

Jaimie Krems: Yeah, and honestly, that’s kind of a difficult situation to be in because for women, this kind of self-disclosure is almost required to ratchet up the closeness of the relationship. And then if the relationship dies, that same self-disclosure can come back to bite them.

Brett Mckay: It’s interesting. So on average, I mean, okay, it sounds like that’s a big cost. That’s like a reputation cost. For women, is there a greater benefit than cost in female friendships? Like is it worth it to have female friends?

Jaimie Krems: So I mean, you had Joyce Benenson on, she’d marshal the evidence and say, nah, I don’t think so. She’d say that female friendships are probably on average costlier than beneficial and costlier than beneficial than in comparison to males. I don’t know if I agree with that. I think that there can be a lot of benefits from female-female friendships, protection against predators, protection against male coercion advice and guidance, especially in friendships where two women are not necessarily at the same life stage and we don’t really study those friendships very much. So I do think that there are benefits, but I could just be blinded by the fact that my own best friendship is a lifeline.

Brett Mckay: Let’s talk about some of the other differences between men’s and women’s friendships. What about the length of friendships? Are there any differences between men and women and how long their friendships last?

Jaimie Krems: So the data right now suggests that women’s friendships, or really girls’ friendships, are shorter lived. So girl-girl versus boy-boy. We don’t know what this looks like across the lifespan. It could be that, your adult wife’s friendships are going to be just as long-lasting as yours are, but in girlhood, she would have experienced more best friends than you did. We also don’t know what this looks like across cultures, and we also don’t know the average time to unfriend. We don’t have sort of a survival analysis of male and female friendships, or cross-sex friendships. But what I can tell you is that if you ask a room of even awkward scientists, tell me about a time that you lost a friend, all of the women’s hands shoot up and they want to tell you about this acrimonious split they had and this horrible person that they’re no longer friends with. And the men sort of act like dogs hearing a high-pitched noise, like, lose a friend. Do you mean like, we don’t talk anymore or? So there does seem to be a difference even in how people, at least in my generation and those folks older than I am, have experienced friendship loss.

Brett Mckay: That tracks, ’cause I look at my own life, I can’t think of any friends that I’ve lost because of some kind of acrimonious dispute, something happened. They just kind of rusted out, like, we moved or we just, our lives went in different directions and this contact went away. It was nothing, no hard feelings. When I talk to women I know, they’ve all got stories of like, oh, I had this roommate and she did this and we were best friends, but we’re no longer best friends anymore. And like, that does not compare.

Jaimie Krems: Yeah, hard feelings. And we do move more than ever now. That is something that might affect both men’s and women’s friendships and the ability to stay friends. And so that’s interesting to hear that that’s really what did some of your friendships end.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, I would say that’s what did most of them end. Either I moved or someone else moved. What are the theories? Why do, with the research we’ve done, I guess it’s just been done on girls, maybe young women, why do their relationship tend to be shorter lived than men’s friendship? Like what are the theories?

Jaimie Krems: So there’s sort of these paradoxes in female friendship the way that I see it. One paradox is that female-female friendships are at once like the paradigm of friendships. Girls are so close and emotionally intense and open and affectionate with one another. This is how all friendships should be. Versus other folks say female-female friendships are actually an impossibility. There’s so much, they’re rife with actual envy and jealousy and hatred that they can’t ever really be friends. The second paradigm is that they are so emotionally intense and close and open, but we also know from the data that they’re fragile and shorter-lived. The third is that they seem to be strictly egalitarian. There are these rules in friendships among women that, or at least girls, that you really can’t strive for higher status than me. You can’t compete against me. So they’re strictly egalitarian and non-competitive, but in reality, there’s a lot of competition going on there.

I mean, the term relational aggression, which some people often use as indirect aggression or social aggression, was really coined to be able to characterize the kinds of aggression that takes place characteristically in female-female relationships. So it could be that they are unable to tolerate the sort of everyday issues in friendships, the turbulence that men are more likely to look at and either not be bothered by or reconcile from. And in fact, there’s some really cool evidence suggesting that male-male friendships are more likely to experience issues and get back together than female-female friendships. As to why that happens, again, the best idea that we have right now is that insofar as women’s friendships need great trust because of a long history of evolutionary functionality, of alloparenting, so we have to really trust this person to be able to take care of our offspring and our future offspring, we don’t brook any turbulence. Whereas among men, yeah, he might be a dick, yeah, he might have run over my bike, but in the end, more is better than fewer because we might have to come up against this other coalition.

Brett Mckay: Speaking to the tolerance that men have for their friends, for their foibles and the intolerance that women have, I think Joyce Benenson did a study on roommates and she found that men and men roommates, they just tolerate each other like, yeah, the guy ate my Cheerios and I was pissed for a little bit, but then I just got over it. Women, they’ve got a bigger problem with that.

Jaimie Krems: Yeah, the emotional reactions there kind of suggest that women often see other women, even their friends when things go awry, as the other woman’s mere existence is costly. And I think Joyce would trace this back to a sort of behavioral ecology idea in our primate ancestors that every extra female added to the group could, take my mate, could mean that I’m carrying this infant and now I have to walk further for food. They’re costly to me. Whereas every extra guy added to the group doesn’t cost other men in the same way and provides a benefit in group defense.

Brett Mckay: Okay. So that’s interesting. So women, I mean, tell me if I’m wrong on this, women, even their best friends, women might still see them as a potential competitor.

Jaimie Krems: Absolutely. At least in the women that we’ve studied. So that’s typically college students and then in developmental psychology. When we talk about men’s and women’s friendships, we can compare men and women. We can compare some women to other women and some men to other men. But all of this relies on having data. One of the problems in this area of research is that we have a lot of good data from girls and boys because people are interested in studying friendships in girls and boys. But as soon as girls and boys grow up, they hit puberty and they can have romantic relationships. It’s as if researchers flee for the romantic relationship hills and just want to study those relationships. So we don’t have great data beyond some young adults and certainly not in, say, mothers or in older adults. We’re starting to get them, but we don’t have great data on male-male, female-female friendships across the lifespan for me to actually tell you this is what’s going on.

Brett Mckay: Interesting. It would be interesting to get that data because I think you could theorize that maybe some of the conflict among college aged women, underlying that even unconsciously could be competition for mates. And then later in life, when each person is married they secured, each secured their mate. Maybe friendship tension goes down. So are there studies being done on that today? Like looking at friendships, how they change over the lifespan?

Jaimie Krems: So I mean, if you went to the big social psych conference of any talk about a relationship, seven out of 10, they’re gonna be about romantic relationships. Fewer than one out of 10 on average is gonna be about friendships. This is starting to change at UCLA. We’re starting to change this. We’ve developed the UCLA Center for Friendship research. There are multiple faculty that want to understand friendship and solve the problems of friendship, but it is not a well studied phenomenon. Not nearly as well studied as you’d imagine it would be. Certainly.

Brett Mckay: Do men and women today look for different things in potential friends? And what would evolutionary psychology tell us about that.

Jaimie Krems: Yeah, so a lot like the research on mating or romantic relationships, we often talk about the things that are different between the sexes. I should emphasize the fact that the biggies, the things that everybody wants in friends, they’re the same kindness, intelligence and so on. I’ll also note that in my lab we’ve actually figured out that that doesn’t hold the way that you might think it does. So we want our friends to be really kind. And we don’t want our friends to be mean. Except not really. We want our friends to be really kind to us, less kind to other people than they are to us. And sometimes we even want our friends to be more vicious than they are kind when they’re behaving toward people we don’t like. And that does hold for men and women. But at the same time, yeah, men and women also face some sex specific challenges.

And to the extent that their same-sex friends help them solve those challenges, then men and women should look for different things. So what we’ve found is that women tend to look for friends who provide emotional support, intimacy and useful social information. They also tend to rate intrinsic traits like being supportive, trustworthy, and respectful more highly in friends than men do. Whereas men tend to prioritize male friends, physical formidability, high status and wealth, their sort of Wingmanship or ability to afford access to potential mates as really important compared to women. And they also rate instrumental traits more highly than women do. Traits, like being able to provide material benefits.

Brett Mckay: Okay, so dudes prefer competent dudes, dudes with skills with high status that can help them out. So hunter gatherers wanted male allies who were big and strong men today still respect strength in each other. But today guys wanna be friends with a guy who can help them fix their car. Or maybe they have a large professional network maybe they can help you find a job, start a business, meet women, et cetera.

Jaimie Krems: They do. And there’s some preliminary data that suggests that even the way that men and women use their friends kind of reflects this. So women will use their best friend as a study buddy, as a wingwoman, as a, you name the challenge. They’re gonna take their best friend with them. Men kind of use the right guy for the job. They have one guy for studying, one guy for wingman, one guy for the basketball game.

Brett Mckay: That’s interesting. That makes sense. I’ve seen that too in my own life. It’s like this. So completely anecdotal, but I’ve got, I don’t have a problem with having a friend. This is my weightlifting friend and this is my church friend and this is my, I don’t know my book friend. I have no problem. And I think when I look at the women in my life, they want a friend who can do everything.

Jaimie Krems: So this relationship scientist, Eli Finkel talks a lot about how in the modern US in particular, we put so much pressure on our romantic relationships to do everything for us and even take the place of our friendships. And it’s kind of the way that the data suggests women are thinking about their friendships. They want one best friend to be a Swiss army knife.

Brett Mckay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So men, large group of friends, looser, they look for friends that are competent who can do things for them. They help them out. Women typically tend to have close didactic, intense, emotionally intense relationships. I’m curious, is there any research on male best friends? So like, men tend to have like a large group of friends they go to, but men have best close didactic relationship with one of those friends every now and then. Is there any research on that?

Jaimie Krems: So we often include male best friendships in our studies, if only to look at the differences between male, male and female-female friends. And there’s some developmental work on boys friendships. But what I think you’re asking is more about research into sort of the potentially distinct qualitative nature of male and female best friendships. And there we really haven’t paid attention to men as much as we have to women. And in fact that attention is sort of doubly small so to speak, because we’re not looking at adults friendships. What I can tell you anecdotally is that, so again more than ever people are moving. And when couples move later in life, which happens a lot in academia, there are a lot of women who essentially try and find play dates for their husbands. They would just like him to have some friends. Put him on a kickball team, sign him up for a film thing, go make a friend. So I feel less bad about working and going to my friendships and tending to all my friends. We don’t know why it’s harder for men to maybe make friends in later life as it seems to be. We have no idea ’cause we haven’t paid attention yet.

Brett Mckay: Just listening. Why is it hard for men to make close friends? I know a lot of men might join a club or like a CrossFit gym and they’ll have maybe some superficial relationships and that can be fine. Some guys might be fine with that. But for the guys who want a closer friend, I think it’s just harder for guys because they might have less time than some women because they’re working and then they’ve got family responsibilities and then they’re doing kid stuff. We had Jeffrey Hall on the podcast. He’s at the University of Kansas.

Jaimie Krems: Oh He’s in Kansas. He’s a great dude.

Brett Mckay: He’s done this research on how long it takes to make a friend. And it just takes a long time. I forgot the number, but it was just a really long time.

Jaimie Krems: 200 hours.

Brett Mckay: 200 hours. When you think about that when you’re in high school, in college it was easy to acquire that 200 hours ’cause you’re with these people at school every day. And then you got to hang out with them after school doing your extracurricular activities, hanging out on a Friday night, to get 200 hours with somebody. That’s really hard when you’re a working adult.

Jaimie Krems: I mean, it could be, but let me say this. People, especially young folks, spend a ton of time on apps trying to find people to have sex with or date. We don’t spend the same amount of time trying to find our friends.

Brett Mckay: Yeah. That’s true. That’s a good point. Okay. So dudes can have best friends. We just don’t know a lot about it because there just hasn’t been a lot of research on it. So that’s, if you are a podcast listener and looking for a PhD project, there it is. Go for it.

Jaimie Krems: Come here to UCLA. We are the world leader in studying friendship. Me, Matt Lieberman, Carolyn Parkinson, Naomi Eisenberger. We want to understand what the heck is going on. So Come support our research, be our grad students. Figure this stuff out with us.

Brett Mckay: Yeah. So something else the research has shown about male and female friendship is that it tends to be homosocial that is, men are friends with men. Typically women are friends with women typically. Have you done or have you come across any research on heterosocial friendships? So like when men and women are friends with each other?

Jaimie Krems: So we’re doing some of that work in my lab. There is not a lot of great work on this. There’s some work by Hannah Bradshaw that’s really cool about guys girls. So what do people think of women who are primarily friends with men? Women don’t like them. There’s some cool work on the way that people pick their cross-sex friends. So for men in particular, it might be the case that when they’re looking for friendship, they’re sort of looking for backup mates. So they want the same thing in their prospective girlfriends as they would in their female friends. So there is some work there, but this is another place where we don’t do it. I’ll say part of the reason that we don’t is honestly that, and in, in much of my work I specify same sex friends because I don’t want there to be a presumption of romance or future romance.

Brett Mckay: Okay. That makes sense. So we gotta find out if is, is Harry right and Harry met Sally? Can men and women be friends?

Jaimie Krems: I mean I think that’s probably easier when men are already investing in their offspring and especially if they’re friends with a woman who’s investing in hers. There does seem to be a sort of fundamental trade-off that people face in investing their energy in mating and parenting. And so the more that you are investing your energy in things like parenting, maybe you are not going to be on the prowl or on the lookout. And it could be easier to be friends. But yeah, that will remain a question that people ask forever. I don’t think we’re even close to solving it. I just think people will automatically say Absolutely not. And absolutely. Of course. What kind of sexist are you that you don’t think women can be friends with Men?

Brett Mckay: Well, going back to this idea of why men and women would choose to be friends with each other. So men, they might be friends with a, a woman as a backup mate. So, well if I can’t get this one girl, then maybe I can go for her. But I think some other benefits of having a female friend, like a female friend could give you like advice on how to approach a potential mate. She could have an in with she’s like the friend of the girl that you like. And so you can figure out like, well what should I do to get, I don’t know, Jennifer to like me. That that could be useful.

Jaimie Krems: Absolutely. I mean they likely have knowledge that the other sex doesn’t have, including the very specific knowledge that you’re talking about. Does Jennifer like me? Some other folks have talked about that women can potentially be the people that men talk to about their emotional lives. That’s a possibility as well. But folks like Amanda Rose would question whether or not men even want to engage in that kind of emotional talk or benefit from it. Just because we know women want to and seem to benefit from it doesn’t mean that men want to and/or benefit from it. So it’s another place we need to be really careful about telling people what to do with their friendships. Not that you are, but a lot of people try to.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, that’s an interesting point. We’ve been alluding to this throughout the conversation. Sometimes when we approach friendship, even academically, we view the female idea of friendship as the ideal. So it’s like, well friends should disclose things and be really intimate with one another emotionally. So all even men should be like that. And it’s like, well maybe guys don’t want that. Like, what’s going on there? Why do we, why do you think we put female friendship as the ideal of friendship?

Jaimie Krems: I mean, that’s a really great question. I don’t think we always have. Certainly I should say so. Aristotle would talk about friendship and he’d just focused on men ’cause he didn’t really think women could be friends. And other researchers have put forward this idea that well women can’t really be friends with each other ’cause there’s always this underlying competition or envy or hatred. So now we more often see something different that women’s friendships are privileged. We see that in movies, we see that in books. And honestly, part of me wonders if that’s not just because that’s what sells. Women are the ones who are buying books. And so we write about female friendships. When men’s friendships are featured it’s Sam and Frodo or Jean and Finnis. This is a long-winded way of saying, yeah, I wish I had an idea. I really don’t know. And it would be kind of lovely to explore the media landscape of male-male and female-female friendships to show what are people even putting out there and consuming. Maybe that’ll help us figure out what it is that people are trying to say our friendships should be. I don’t think that’ll really answer the question of why do we tell people to be like women’s friendships.

Brett Mckay: Jean and Finnis? That’s from a separate piece.

Jaimie Krems: It is. Yeah.

Brett Mckay: That’s my wife’s favorite book she loves that book.

Jaimie Krems: Really? No Way. Yeah, that’s one of my favorite books as well.

Brett Mckay: Going back to male female friendships. So these are heterosocial friendships. Okay. So men might be friends with women because they’re a potential backup mate or a female friend might help him secure a mate. Why would women want to be friends with men?

Jaimie Krems: So there are a few reasons, and we even see this in some non-human primates. So folks like Franz Dal have written about this. One is for protection. So if I’m worried about the coercion or physical attacks from other men, or I’m a woman, I’m worried about that from men. Having another woman might not necessarily be as effective in protecting me from that male’s physical aggression as another male in my corner. So that’s one reason is that we get some of those benefits. But the same way that you said, well men might want to have women friends because women have access to information that men don’t. The flip side is true as well. Men might have some information about even simply their friend group that the women won’t have in that larger social network.

Brett Mckay: One thing I’ve heard anecdotally why some women like to be friends with dudes is they’re like, well there’s just not the drama. Is there any research about that?

Jaimie Krems: So I would say that there is, but it’s only tangential. So Joyce Benson’s work on that. So a a six month female-female friendship is gonna have more issues and fights and sort of more turbulence than a six month male-male friendship. And part of this is related to the research on how women aggress. So I can roll my eyes at you. I can say, oh, it’s so brave of you to wear that. I can say when I said we’re all going for ice cream, I didn’t mean you Brett [laughter] There are these somewhat more subtle ways of aggressing than punching one another in the face. And women tend to aggress like this aggress in ways that are more subtle and sometimes covert. So when a woman is talking to another woman, it’s almost like there’s a secret language behind the words that we can decode. In fact, I have some work on this with respect to disgust faces, women tend to make disgust faces at other women they don’t want around. Men don’t tend to do this. Women tend to notice, or at least infer that other women’s disgusted faces directed maybe at them, maybe not means that that woman is gonna try and avoid me. And the more worried I am about having friends, the more I think that that woman’s disgust face potentially at me. It makes me sad and unhappy.

Brett Mckay: I wanna talk more about female aggression. We talked about this idea that the female friendship is like the best, it’s the ideal. ’cause it’s close, it’s intimate, you’re being vulnerable and that somehow women are less aggressive. But like the research shows that women are just as aggressive as men. They just do it differently. Talk us more like what does female aggression look like with each other?

Jaimie Krems: So first I should say that we’ve been sadly loose with our language and research about this and given people the idea that women don’t punch, they only gossip, which is not entirely true. And given people the idea that when men aggress they punch, they don’t gossip, which I think we all know isn’t true. So what’s really going on here is that women are way more likely to use tactics of aggression that we’d call indirect aggression, social aggression or relational aggression than they are to use physical aggression. Those tactics of aggression are really characterized by hurting other women where it hurts, which is in their relationships. So yes, there’s the exclusion and the sort of asides that you say it just loud enough to make the other women overhear how much you hate her. But really what indirect aggression is often aimed at doing is harming other women’s relationships or even potentially precluding other women’s ability to form relationships because we say what a horrible friend she is, how selfish she is that she has an STD and you shouldn’t date her.

Brett Mckay: Okay. So the indirect stuff. So it’s basically like, I mean if you’ve seen mean girls, is it like that? Is that, is mean girls?

Jaimie Krems: It really is. Yeah, And it… Think, I haven’t seen that movie in a long time, but there are a lot of instances of aggression among women that many men might not even realize were acts of aggression. And it’s not to say that men don’t do that as well. They certainly do. They certainly gossip. They certainly derogate one another and try and harm one another’s reputations. Women seem to be attuned to avoiding the costs of engaging in competition and aggression toward other women. So they do it in ways that is more likely like implicature, deniable, kind of the same thing when you’re like, Hey, officer, is there a way we can take care of this ticket here? So no one can point out that was a bribe. That was aggression. You’re trying to hurt me. Let’s coordinate and hurt you.

Brett Mckay: What’s going on there? Like what are the theories? Why do men prefer the direct conflict and women prefer the indirect social conflict?

Jaimie Krems: Yeah, so I don’t know that I’d say women, men necessarily prefer direct conflict that they’d rather punch each other than gossip.

Some of our data suggests that if another person pisses a man off, the most likely thing he is to do is nothing. After that, then maybe he’ll avoid the guy or exclude the guy. Punching is pretty low on the list. Granted, that’s in modern America. So everybody’s more likely to do nothing than avoid, unlikely to punch. Women really are much more likely to use indirect aggression than direct aggression though. And the logic, and this is some work by Anne Campbell called Bjorkqvist, is that women are really attuned to avoiding the costs of aggression. So they don’t want to engage or start physical aggression, and they don’t want to engage in aggression that is overt and can end up in retaliation, that would, kind of physical retaliation. In fact, Anne Campbell studied girl gangs and found that, yeah, when there’s physical aggression its among women, it starts because somebody maligned somebody else’s reputation. So why don’t women, or why are women so attuned to avoiding the costs of physical aggression? Again, this is Anne Campbell’s work, but some of the ideas are that women are more expensive, so to speak.

We have these large, expensive gametes. We have a high possibility of having a child if we want to, versus men’s sort of small, cheap gametes, their sperm, and it’s harder for men to find a mate than it is for women to find a mate. So we really don’t wanna ruin our ability to pass on our genes. That’s one idea. And that seems to be the idea that is taken hold the most, is that women are trying to avoid aggression ’cause we’re potentially more fragile, but much more than that, we’re more expensive.

Brett Mckay: Does that change throughout the lifespan? I guess there probably hasn’t been research on that. Does that change when you’re 50, 60, 70 years old?

Jaimie Krems: I mean, it should. If it’s about protecting your reproductive potential, or if you’re a mother, I should have said part of what Anne Campbell also says is that women avoid aggression that could be physical or lead to physical aggression, because as mothers, we’re much more important to the survival of our offspring than fathers are. So if that is the case, and it’s really about protecting our future reproductive potential, or protecting our current young offspring, then we should see more physical aggression among women later in life. I don’t think there’s any evidence that we really ramp it up. So something else must be going on that sort of boosts men’s aggression. Mechanistically, that might even be testosterone. But we really don’t have a good handle on why women aggress the way that they aggress. I think we do now have a very good handle on the fact that women and men aggress differently.

Brett Mckay: Okay, whenever a new friend, like a new person comes into the friend group, and that other person could possibly become the new best friend of your best friend, that can cause a lot of bad feelings like, oh, my gosh, this is a threat. It can cause jealousy. There’s been a lot of research done on romantic jealousy. You’ve done some research on friendship jealousy. Tell us about that research there.

Jaimie Krems: Yeah, so friendships are really valuable. They do a lot of important things for us. Robin Dunbar would point out that having friends is the next best thing you could do for your health next to quitting smoking. And so we should be attuned to the concern that we’re gonna lose our friend to somebody else. Yeah, our friends only have so much time in the day. And we want them to spend that time helping us than somebody else. But it’s particularly we want that friend’s support for us over other people, their other friends, particularly for best friends. And so what we find is really simple stuff that people feel jealous when their friends might make new friendships, but not just when their friends sort of that friendship fizzles out or the friend moves away. People are more jealous when their closer friends might be usurped by other people versus their less close friends and acquaintances.

And people are really attuned to cues that their best friends are replacing them with a new friend. So for example, we ask people, how jealous would you be if your best friend started a new romantic relationship versus a new friendship? And if people are only concerned with spending time with their best friend, then they should be more concerned when they form a new romantic relationship ’cause our new romantic partners take up all of our time. But if it’s really about replacement and replacing the function that this person serves for you, and vice versa, they should be more jealous when their friends make new friends. And that’s, in fact, what we see people are more jealous when their friends form new friendships, particularly new same-sex friendships.

Brett Mckay: No, you actually, there’s a, in this study, you started off this paper with a quote from an author named Andrea Lavinthal. And she says this, most girls won’t admit this, but they’d rather you hit on their significant other than their best friend.

Jaimie Krems: Oh, yeah. So I think that’s from a New York Times article when I read that paper back in the day. And it was really hitting home the point that particularly for women, their best friendships might even be longer lasting than many of their romantic relationships, which again, it, I hate using the word problematize, but it problematizes or challenges this idea that female friendships are exclusively short-lived. There might just be a lot of them until we find the friend one. But that does seem to be the case. So when we do find sex differences, we find that females report greater jealousy at losing their best friends and close friends than men do. We also find, and this is a small effect, I don’t know if it’s real, but when men are asked to think about their friends as being on part of a team, and how they’d feel if their friend sort of left their team for another team, they tend to be more jealous there. That increases men’s jealousy, not compared to men, compared to women. Women are just more jealous at losing friends in general, not acquaintances, but friends.

You can amplify men’s jealousy by saying, hey, he’s your teammate and friend, and he’s going to the other team.

Brett Mckay: Yeah, that makes sense. So okay, the idea of men prefer large, loose kind of club networks. Another guy coming in being a friend, even a best friend, that’d be, hey, it’s great, we got another pal we can go fishing with. But if that guy, if your best friend decided, I’m gonna go, I don’t know, join the other team or something, that’s more like you’ve betrayed us. What are you doing? You betrayed the club.

Jaimie Krems: Yeah, it’s exactly that way. And I should say, thinking about jealousy or friendship jealousy this way is totally different than how most people have thought about it so far in developmental psych or other more traditional areas of psychology or sociology. Some work suggests that feeling jealousy at all is a symptom of internalizing Western capitalistic ideals where you see people as things, and that’s moronic. Other work seems to suggest that, yeah, okay, young people feel jealous when their friends make new friends, but if they’re normally developing, they grow out of that because no one friend can fulfill all our needs.

So if you do feel jealousy in adulthood, when your friends make other friends, you’ve developed abnormally. And still other work seems to suggest you just don’t understand friendship, or there’s something wrong with you, personal deficits, you must have low self esteem if you’re jealous when your friends make new friends. Our functional and evolutionary look at it is just this emotion is beneficial. And on average, people that felt jealousy when their friends made new close friends, and acted accordingly in sort of positive ways to maintain their friendship, probably did better than people that didn’t feel that jealousy at all.

Brett Mckay: Okay, so if you started feeling friendship jealousy, you start doing, hey, I wanna invite you, let’s go out, let’s go do something like you try to be more proactive to nurture that friendship?

Jaimie Krems: Yeah, we created a list of sort of 44 items that we call friend guarding behavior. So everything from punching the interloper to being really vigilant, maybe you sort of stalk your existing friend on social media and see if they’re hanging out with this other person.

But in between, there are these behaviors that are probably more characteristic of adults, like saying, hey, I’m really close to you, let’s make sure we spend some time together and invest in this friendship. That can be a way that people guard their friendships and their friends against affection.

Brett Mckay: But then this could go like, malad… Not maladive, like maybe antisocial, not pro social, it’s like, well, you start telling your best friend, I’ve heard this about her gossiping and starting rumors and things like that, it could go that way, too.

Jaimie Krems: So I mean, in that sense, that kind of gossip or exclusion is antisocial or aggressive toward the person that you’re negatively gossiping about or excluding. It might still be an effective form of friend guarding, though.

Brett Mckay: Yeah. Okay. And to recap, women feel more friendship jealousy than men do, on average?

Jaimie Krems: They do. The one exception, and again, this is a small effect, is that men tended to be comparatively more jealous when their acquaintances made new acquaintances.

Brett Mckay: Wait, what’s going on there?

Jaimie Krems: So I mean, it could just be again, about the numbers. So men are using their networks to benefit them in ways that women aren’t necessarily. And so the loss of a network member for a man might be more costly than an acquaintance network member is to a woman.

Brett Mckay: Well, Jamie, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Jaimie Krems: So they can visit my lab website, the Social Minds Lab at UCLA. I’m Jaimie Krems on Twitter. And very soon, they will be able to hear about some of our research or maybe even see some public-facing talks at the UCLA Center for Friendship Research if they’re in the LA area.

Brett Mckay: Fantastic. Well, Jaimie Krems, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Jaimie Krems: Thank you so much. This was great.

Brett Mckay: My guest today was Dr. Jaimie Krems. You can find more information about our work at our website, kremslab.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/krems, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done this already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a read on the podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time, I’m Brett McKay reminding you to listen to the AoM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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Have you ever been in a hotel room with your spouse and kids, tucked away in this liminal space, enjoying the feeling that no one could find you (and kind of hoping that no one ever would), and thought to yourself: “This is all I need in the world”?

There has been some lament in recent decades over the dissolution of the extended family — the fact that most people no longer live in close proximity to grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, etc. This is indeed a loss. Yet in making this lament, it’s possible to lose sight of just how brilliant the nuclear or atomic family really is. Indeed, it is in part because of its stand-alone luminescence that we have not fought harder to preserve a wider familial network. While the extended family adds to it, the atomic family is not itself impoverished. 

Pairs of parents + their children form the smallest intergenerational units of society. What Edmund Burke called “little platoons.”

And how very serviceable these tiny troops truly are.

Agile and mobile, when the sh*t hits the fan (like, say, during a pandemic), the atomic family can contract into a self-sustaining unit, prepared to navigate through.

Independent and idiosyncratic, when society’s ways seem stale, dumb, and wrong-headed, the atomic family can cultivate its own distinctive, us-against-the-world culture. 

Safe and protective, when life in the trenches grows weary, the atomic family can become the hearth around which spirits are rallied.

Warm and close-knit, when the world feels cold and indifferent, the atomic family can be a refuge of counted-upon affections.

All hail, then, these merry bands of compatriots. 

All hail these rogue gangs of battle buddies. 

All hail these crews that hold together when everything falls apart.

All hail our little platoons. 

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As compared to mothers, fathers are sometimes thought of as a secondary, almost superfluous, parent.

But my guest says that fathers actually saved the human race, and continue to do so today.

Anna Machin is an evolutionary anthropologist, a pioneer of fatherhood science, and the author of The Life of Dad. Today on the show, we talk about the role of fathers in human history and how their main role continues to be teaching kids the skills they need to take risks, become independent, and navigate the world beyond their family. We also talk about the physiological changes that happen when a man becomes a father and how dads are just as biologically primed as mothers to parent. In the second half of our conversation, we talk about the experience of being a dad. Anna shares how long it typically takes a man to bond with a baby and transition into the role of fatherhood, how roughhousing is key in building that bond as well as developing your child’s resilience, and how your personality and background will affect your parenting. We end our conversation with the difference in how the relationship between Mom and Dad affects how they parent, and the implications of that for building a strong family.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: The Importance of Fathers (According to Science)
• AoM Article: A Man’s Guide to Pregnancy — Getting Ready for the Baby Bomb
• AoM Article: A Man’s Guide to Pregnancy — Your Progeny Enters the World
• AoM Article: New Dad Survival Guide — The Mindset
• AoM Article: New Dad Survival Guide — The Skillset
• AoM Podcast #119: Why Fathers Matter 
• AoM Article: You Don’t Have to Be Your Dad — How to Become Your Family’s Transitional Character

Connect With Anna Machin

• Anna’s website
• Anna on X
• Anna on IG

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript Coming Soon

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

Everyone has heard about the incredible benefits that come to mind, body, and spirit from having strong relationships. The quality of our social ties has a huge impact on our physical and mental health and our overall feeling of flourishing.

Yet many people still struggle to create these strong relationships in their lives, and often figure that things like weakening communities and digital technology are to blame.

But my guest says that the barriers to establishing bonds with others may actually be more psychological than physical, and he shares research-backed tips for breaking through them in his new book, The Laws of Connection: The Scientific Secrets of Building a Strong Social Network. Today on the show, David discusses how we can feel lonely even when we’re surrounded by people if we don’t have what he calls a “shared reality.” We then discuss ways to build that shared reality with others. We talk about why frenemies are so bad for you, how to overcome the “liking gap,” why you might want to interrupt someone to connect with them, the need to be aware of the novelty penalty in conversations, why you should stop telling white lies, and much more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• David’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #803 — How Your Expectations Can Change Your Life
• AoM Article: Why Ambivalent Relationships Are Terrible for You (And How to Deal With Them)
• AoM Podcast #949: Envy — Unpacking The Emotion No One Likes to Talk About

Connect With David Robson

• David’s website
• David on IG
• David on X
• David on LinkedIn

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Hey, this is Brett. I want to let you know that we’re having an enrollment for summer cohort of The Strenuous Life starting this Tuesday, June 11th. The Strenuous Life is an online-offline program that we created, it’ll be putting into action all the things we’ve been talking about and writing about on AoM for the past 16 years. And we’ve done that in a few ways.

First, we created 50 different badges based around 50 different skills. There’s hard skills like wilderness survival, outdoorsmanship, knot-tying, building fires, but also soft skills like how to be a better host, how to improve your social skills, how to be a better husband and better father. We also provide weekly challenges that are going to push you outside of your comfort zone mentally, physically and socially. We also provide day-to-day accountability for physical activity and doing a good deed.

And every new member of The Strenuous Life goes through what we call The Strenuous Life challenge. It’s a 12-week boot camp that’s going to help you develop a bias towards action that’s going to carry over to other areas of your life, and at the end of the 12-week boot camp, if you’ve completed all the requirements, we’ll send you a challenge coin that’ll commemorate your achievement.

If you want to learn more about The Strenuous Life, head over to thestrenuouslife.co. You can also sign up if you want to sign up. Deadline to sign up is Thursday, June 13th at 9 PM Central Time. And then the challenge, the bootcamp challenge starts on Saturday, June 15th. Thestrenuouslife.co, go check it out. I hope to see you on The Strenuous Life.

Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Everyone has heard about the incredible benefits that come to mind, body and spirit from having strong relationships. The quality of our social ties has a huge impact on our physical and mental health and our overall feeling of flourishing, yet many people still struggle to create these strong relationships in their lives, and often figure that things like weakening communities and digital technology are to blame. But my guest David Robson says that the barriers to establishing bonds with others may actually be more psychological than physical, and he shares research-backed tips for breaking through them in his new book, The Laws of Connection: The Scientific Secrets of Building a Strong Social Network.

Today on the show, David discusses how we can feel lonely, even when we’re surrounded by people. We don’t have what he calls a shared reality. We then discuss ways to build that shared reality with others. We talk about why frenemies are so bad for you, how to overcome the liking gap, why you might want to interrupt someone to connect with them, the need to be aware of the novelty penalty in conversations, why you should stop telling white lies, and much more. After show’s over, check out our shownotes at aom.is/connection.

Alright, David Robson, welcome back to the show.

David Robson: Thanks so much for having me.

Brett McKay: So we had you on two years ago to talk about your book, The Expectation Effect, which is about the placebo effect. You got a new book out, it’s about the science of social connection. You took a deep dive into what makes us feel connected to others, and then you offer these research-backed tips on how we can improve our connection with others. You start out the book talking about the loneliness crisis that people have been talking about that’s been happening in the United States and other Western countries. You have a fresh take on the source of this loneliness crisis, and you talk about it’s the lack of shared reality. So how is a lack of shared reality behind our feeling of loneliness?

David Robson: Right, I mean, there’s a lot of talk on how modern society and then new technologies are kind of driving people apart. And I’m sure there’s certainly an element of truth in that, but the fact is, if you look at historic data from what we know, it seems that loneliness has been a problem for humans for a very long time. And even if we think about the people who surround us, celebrities, like cultural references, you can really see that people can be surrounded by a lot of friends or a lot of people, but still feel pretty lonely.

So there’s more to feeling social connection than just having face-to-face contact with a lot of people. And what I propose and what the scientific research suggests is that even when we’re kind of in conversation with someone, we can often feel a sense of existential isolation because we lack a shared reality with that person. And put simply, a shared reality is the sense that the other person is on the same wavelength as you, so you feel that their thoughts, their emotions, their reactions to events are very similar to your own. That’s really the basis of our sense of social connection, and too often we have these psychological barriers that prevent us from forming that shared reality.

To give just a few examples, when we’re in conversation, our conversations can be so shallow and superficial because we’re too scared of disclosing the things that are most important to us that we just don’t give the opportunity for shared reality to develop. So it could perfectly well be that the other person is really thinking the same stuff that you’re thinking, but you just neither of you say it, so you feel that distance, even though there’s that potential for communication and for connection.

And that’s what The Laws of Connection is all about, it’s overcoming those psychological barriers so that we don’t miss all of these opportunities. And actually, what I really discovered from all of the research that I read was that there are so many opportunities for us to feel some meaningful connection with the people around us, and with just a few changes to our mindset, to our behavior, to the content of our conversations, we can make the most of those opportunities and achieve our social potential.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I love this idea because, as you said, a lot of times when people talk about how do we solve the loneliness crisis, it’s these really drastic engineering our environment, well, we need to get people more into face-to-face situation, we need to redesign our communities, or you tell people just get out there, sign up for a rec league, go to church, or something like that. And all those things are potentially good, but it might not be the solution, it’s not sufficient, ’cause you can be around people and you can still feel completely lonely, and you see this in relationships, people, they just… They’re in their family and they absolutely feel alienated from their family, and as you say, it’s because they just don’t feel like they’re on the same wavelength as their family.

David Robson: Right, exactly. And in today’s social environment, you could blame this on, say, things like political polarization, and certainly like sharing a similar world view is important for shared reality, but it can also be something very intimate, it could be that the two of you are sitting watching a film together, and one of you is laughing and finding it absolutely hilarious, and the other person is just totally turned off by that film, they just don’t get what’s funny. And that’s a very alienating experience, that creates this sense of existential isolation, because in that moment you have no shared reality. And conversely, actually, you can have a shared reality with someone who is thousands of miles away, like I have a friend who lives in DC, I’m based in England, but we grew up together and he can just send me like a gif on WhatsApp, and I know that he’s found it funny, he knows that I’ll find it funny, that creates a sense of shared reality in that moment, even though we’re not in the same room.

Brett McKay: And you highlight research when people have this shared reality, their brains actually start matching each other in different ways.

David Robson: Yeah, that’s what I love about this whole topic is that you can do these psychological questionnaires where you measure how much shared reality people experience with another person, and that can be like measured on do you have the sense that you’re kind of thinking the same thing, do you feel that you’ve got a shared stream of consciousness, do you finish each other’s sentences. And we know from those studies that the sense of shared reality really is important for our feelings of closeness, and it overrides often broader superficial similarities between people, for example, like if they both come from the same home town.

So we know that this intimate sense of sharing our inner world with someone is important, but then there’s a whole bunch of studies from neuroscience that show that there’s literal truth to the idea that we’re on the same wavelength with someone when we share a reality with them. Basically, one of my favorite studies looked at a bunch of students from this kind of graduate class at a university to watch a series of YouTube clips, so it could be a music video, a documentary, a comedy routine, and they measured their brain activity as each person watched the clips. And what they found was that the similarities in the brain activity to the same events could predict how close the friendships were between the classmates, whether they were kind of a direct connection or whether they were more of like a kind of an acquaintance who you might bump into at another friend’s party, but you’d never choose to spend time together.

This kind of interbrain synchrony is called, or interbrain coupling, and that’s really the neurological foundation of social connection.

Brett McKay: Okay, so in the course of your research, you developed 13 laws that can help you develop more shared reality with people around you. I want to talk about some of these laws today. The first one is be consistent in your treatment of others, avoid being a stressful frenemy. I want to talk about that frenemy part. What is a frenemy?

David Robson: So a frenemy is… Or the scientific term for a frenemy is an ambivalent relationship, and essentially, they’re the kind of people who blow hot and cold, they’re kind of Jekyll and Hyde figures. So you might go to them one day and they act like your best friend, like they have your best interests at heart, and then the next day, they’ll ignore you or lash out because they’re feeling jealous. They’re not reliable, they’re not consistent in their behavior.

Now, there’s been a bunch of longitudinal studies that have looked at the importance of social networks for our health, and one way of looking at this is just calculating how many connections you have, and it does seem that people with bigger social networks tend to be healthier. It can be as important the size of your social network as things like whether you smoke or drink, or whether you exercise regularly, how high your BMI is.

But then it’s not just the number, it’s the quality of the interactions with people that you have, and what was really surprising to me was that the ambivalent friendships, the frenemies who are kind of good and bad in equal measure, they’re not just worse than the people who are wholly supportive to you, they can actually be more stressful than the people who are purely aversive, those relatives, for example, or that colleague at work who’s just so consistently nasty that you just know to avoid them.

And I think the problem with the frenemies is that they have… You feel invested in the relationship and you kind of want their approval, and so when there’s this uncertainty on how they’re going to respond to you, it actually hurts a lot more. And so there are studies showing that just knowing that a frenemy, that an ambivalent relationship, is sitting in the room next to you and that you’re going to have to interact with them in a few minutes, that can make your stress levels soar, it can actually raise your blood pressure just knowing that they’re going to be there and you don’t know how they’re going to react.

Now, the conclusion of this research is obviously that we should be more mindful of the people in our social networks, so maybe keep a distance from these people who are not good for our well-being. We probably don’t want to eliminate all of them altogether, because sometimes the good outweighs the bad, but an awareness of those people and their effects on our well-being can at least help us to manage our expectations and to make sure that if they stress us out that we do something to calm ourselves afterwards and put their behavior into perspective.

But equally important, we need to avoid being frenemies ourselves, and we could be doing this without realizing, like maybe it’s just that you’re the kind of person who is always late and that leaves your friend feeling devalued, or you never respond to their messages, you forget their birthday, all of these things. We want to be consistent. If people really matter to us, we really want to show that regularly and consistently.

Brett McKay: That takes some self-reflection. You might even have to ask your friend, Hey, am I doing anything that just really bothers you, and what can I do to improve?

David Robson: Right, exactly. It’s like asking, am I the arsehole in this relationship? You might not want to hear what they have to say, but ultimately it’s going to help you to be a better person if you do.

Brett McKay: Okay, so the second law is create a mutual understanding with the people you meet. What are some tips you’ve found in your research for how to create a shared reality with someone by fostering mutual understanding?

David Robson: Just actually making the effort to verbalize your feelings to the other person is hugely important. So if they’re telling you something that really mattered to them in their life, it could be like a tragic event, it could be something that they’re super proud of, but just verbalizing how you feel for them, that is something that we sometimes forget to do. We might just assume that they can read it from our facial expression, our body language, but just saying it out loud can be really important.

And if you’re having joint activity together, just to actually say how much you’re enjoying it, so that they know that they’re not the only person who’s experiencing that kind of exhilaration, that’s one way that we can do this. Another way that was super surprising to me was that you can often achieve that neural synchronization that is kind of behind this shared reality by changing your physiological experience. So rhythmic activities, when you’re moving or singing in time with other people, so going to karaoke, dancing, these are very effective bonding activities, because they’re synchronizing your brain waves, and so fundamentally, you know that that other person is living in the kind of physical world in the present moment, experiencing exactly the same sensations that you are, that’s been proven to be really good for establishing a bond between strangers and between people who know each other.

All of these experiments showed that when people kind of dance together, they become more altruistic to one another, they feel closer, they’re more likely to share their secrets with each other. It’s very, very powerful, and it doesn’t have… If dancing’s not your thing, if singing’s not your thing, something like going to a chili eating contest together, if that’s what you and your friend enjoy, experiencing that kind of pleasurable pain together, that is also a good way of establishing this kind of momentary shared reality that can then just ease your interaction and maybe you can develop that into some more meaningful relationship, a more lasting relationship.

Brett McKay: Yeah, the sociologist Émile Durkheim called that collective effervescence, when you’ve felt you’re connected with everyone and you’re dancing. Okay, so do things together that require synchronized movement, so dance, play music together, you can even do comedy or improv with each other. And I like that other idea, it’s very simple, just validate the thoughts of other people. If they say something and you agree with it, say so, and don’t just assume that they know that you agree.

And we talked about what it feels like when you’ve created that mutual understanding. It can actually feel… It feels like you’re on the same wavelength, but then you also highlight research, and I think people might experience this as well, there’s a sense of self-expansion, like you feel like you’re getting bigger whenever you have created this shared reality with someone. Talk to us about that idea of self-expansion.

David Robson: Yeah, self-expansion is super important, so even after you’ve clicked with someone, even if you’ve spent a lot of time with them, you shared the same interests, the most successful relationships are the ones that also allow each party to grow. And you know, that’s as true with platonic relationships as it is with romantic relationships, it’s not restricted to the particular kind of connection you have with someone. We just want to surround ourselves with people who are encouraging us to kind of exit our comfort zone in some way.

Now, they could do that purely by being themselves, perhaps they’re just bringing a whole new range of knowledge and perspectives that you never had yourself, so maybe your backgrounds are just so different that actually they always help you to see the world in a slightly different way, that they always have a new insight to bring. That’s one form of self-expansion. It could be that they encourage you to do activities that you wouldn’t have tried before, maybe it’s they practice a difference sport and they help you to do the same, or they’re a real foodie and they’re kind of taking you, encouraging you to go to new restaurants, to try different gastronomic experiences. It could be that you both do star-gazing together, like there are so many ways that you can create self-expansion within a friendship or a romantic relationship, but it’s really fundamental to making sure that your shared reality doesn’t grow stale.

Brett McKay: Another law that you have, you talk about in the book, is trust that others on average will like you as much as you like them, and this law seeks to resolve a problem of socializing called the liking gap. What is the liking gap?

David Robson: So the liking gap is a very common phenomenon that I think we’ve all experienced, some of us experience it more than others, and it’s the fact that when you meet a new acquaintance for the first time, you can have a great conversation, you can really hit it off, like you’re laughing at the same stuff, you have the same interests, you really find that other person fascinating. But when you go away from that conversation, you start to experience these doubts, you start to think that maybe I said a faux pas, maybe I was a bit boring at this point of the conversation. You come away despite your good experience assuming that the other person didn’t like you as much as you liked the other person. You just underestimate how appealing you are.

The research shows that the liking gap is probably happening to both parties, so each person within that conversation is going away thinking the same thing that the other person just didn’t like them as much as they liked the other person. And you can see how this can drive people apart, because if you have that kind of anxiety, you’re less likely to capitalize on that interaction afterwards, you’re less likely to arrange to meet up a second time to go out for a drink, to get a coffee, to maybe engage in some kind of creative collaboration if it’s at work. And the sad thing about the liking gap is that it lingers for quite a while.

So one study looked at university suite mates who were living together, should have got to know each other pretty well, but they found that even after seven or eight months, these suite mates still had this liking gap, they still weren’t confident that the other person liked them as much as they liked the other person. And if we want to build better relationships more quickly, we want to overcome that liking gap after the first few meetings.

Brett McKay: So it sounds like the liking gap is maybe you established a shared reality with someone, but then after the fact you start questioning it.

David Robson: Yeah, you start… You kind of allowed that shared reality to crumble because you start to think that what you perceived was not what the other person perceived, you don’t trust that actually those feelings of closeness were real and true for each party.

Brett McKay: And this liking gap is more common for introverts than extroverts. Another thing about introverts is that they think or they predict that they will enjoy a social interaction less than they actually do.

David Robson: So I’m not doubting that there are like meaningful fundamental differences between introverts and extroverts and the kind of situations that they might find most recharging or restorative, but in general introverts tend to have more pessimistic assumptions about social events. They’re more likely than extroverts to assume that they’re just not going to enjoy an interaction with a stranger, that it’s going to be exhausting and awkward and embarrassing, and that they’ll come away feeling a lot worse than they did before the interaction. But what the research shows is that when you compare introverts and extroverts after an interaction, they both actually find these social engagements really meaningful and enjoyable, so those expectations just aren’t as well-calibrated as they are for the extroverts.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve experienced that. I’m an introvert. I write for a living, I do my podcast, my podcast, I use my closet, so I’m just at my house all the time. And so when there’s an opportunity to socialize, I always have like, Oh, I’m not… I’m going to be really exhausted, I’m not going to be very good, and then I do it and I feel great. That was awesome. Have you had that same experience as a writer?

David Robson: Yeah, all the time, but especially, I think after the covid pandemic lockdowns that we had in England. It was like I’d forgotten how to… Only temporarily, only for like the first few meetings, but I really felt like I was worried that I’d forgotten my social skills and how to interact with people. And then once I had those conversations, it was great, but it took maybe a few weeks for me to fully feel engaged again to the same degree that I had before the pandemic.

This actually comes out in the research quite nicely, that to overcome phenomena like the liking gap and those kind of official nerves about meeting strangers, anyone can do it no matter what our personality, but you do need to put in practice. So you have to make it a kind of intention every day to try to speak to someone that you don’t know, and then after just one week, you’ll find that your expectations are much better calibrated, that you feel more confident about enjoying those interactions, and more confident in your ability to conduct those interactions with fluency.

You just need the experience, but if you let it go by for a few weeks or months without pushing yourself in that way, the nerves and the fear, they’re going to kind of creep back and you’re just going to have to kind of warm up again before you feel that same confidence.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and you say that Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice can teach us this principle of needing to take an intentional approach to developing our social skills.

David Robson: Right. There’s a great scene between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, who is kind of his love interest, even though they don’t realize it at the time, and she is basically pointing out the fact that he just doesn’t speak to people at parties, and he’s like very standoffish, and it seems to her very rude, the fact that he’ll just going to keep to his group and he just makes no effort. And he says something like, Well, I just don’t have the ability that you have to make small talk and to connect with people. And she’s playing the piano at the time, and she says, Well, I’m not a great pianist, but I don’t pretend that… That’s just like inherent within me, I’m not a great pianist because I just don’t put in as much practice as all of the other girls who can play much better than me. And maybe your social awkwardness is just part of the fact that you just have never tried to practice.

And that’s really what the science demonstrates for us, is that you put in the practice and you reap rewards in just the same way that you would with learning a musical instrument, that these skills don’t necessarily come naturally to anyone, but we’re all much better than we think if only we try hard to put ourselves in the kinds of situations where we need to use those skills.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I love that scene. That was a very incisive insight from Jane Austen. I really like that a lot. We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. So in the book, you also talk about how conversation can help us create and nurture shared realities with others. How can we better use conversations to create that shared reality?

David Robson: Right. I mean, again, there are like these psychological barriers where we might be trying our hardest to connect, and often we are successful, but we’re maybe not doing it as well as we could be. One of the problems that a lot of people have is that they just don’t ask enough of the right questions in a conversation. So I think it’s quite well known that you should ask questions to achieve a shared reality. But the problem is that when people take that advice, they can often do it quite kind of algorithmically, robotically, and they’re just kind of… It’s almost like an interview. They’ve got a list of things, like what profession you do, like where did you go to school, where do you live, what family do you have, all of these things.

But each question isn’t really building on the other ones, it’s just like a stream of new questions. Now, that’s fine. It’s certainly better than just those kind of ice breakers of like, Hey, how are you doing? And it’s better than this habit that some people have, which is like, Hey, how’s work going? Anyway, I got a great promotion and I was given this huge bonus, but you just used the question as an excuse to turn the conversation back to yourself.

So those are bad questions, but the best questions are the ones that ask the other person to open up and then build on what they’ve just said, so kind of follow-up questions that really make an effort to dig deep into this experience that they’ve shared with you.

Brett McKay: Any examples of questions that are really good for digging deep and establishing that shared reality with somebody?

David Robson: Yeah, I mean, say you are just getting to know someone, it’s reasonable to say, like, what’s your profession? What do you do with your day job? Then if they tell you they’re like a lawyer or a scientist, or whatever, just asking them like, well, why did you choose that profession, or what does it involve? Like, what’s your favorite part of that profession? What’s the worst part of it? Just showing that you have a genuine curiosity in what they’re saying is hugely flattering, and it’s just building that shared reality by constructing all these details that allow you to understand their life better. And from your reactions, you’re allowing them to understand where you’re coming from and how you feel about these different topics.

Brett McKay: You also talk about, there’s some research saying that in order to establish a shared reality with someone during a conversation, you may need to interrupt them, which goes against the advice you hear about don’t interrupt people, just listen, maybe you do some nodding and uh-huh while you’re listening, but you don’t interrupt. Tell us about this research, ’cause I thought it was really counter-intuitive.

David Robson: So the way we show attention to someone else is really important for establishing a shared reality. Now, a lot of us rely too much on what’s known as paralinguistic cues, so that’s things like murmuring assent, like mmh-hmm, uh-huh, yeah, or nodding along, that kind of body language. We think because we know that we’re listening, that the other person is going to read those cues as they were intended, but the fact is, it’s really easy to fake those cues. If you’re not concentrating, you can just like murmur assent every few minutes, and it’s really difficult to tell whether you are listening or not.

So what’s much better is to demonstrate actively that you’re engaged with what they’re saying, so it could be paraphrasing what they’ve just told you, asking one of those follow-up questions. But then the super surprising thing is that interruptions are actually a really useful way of demonstrating your interest and curiosity. If you’re finishing their sentences, or when they pause ’cause they don’t quite know what to say, and you interrupt to ask them to continue or to kind of guess what they were going to say, that shows that you’re really engaged, and that’s actually very flattering.

Now, obviously, not all interruptions are equal, so if you’re interrupting someone to completely change the topic, that’s super insulting. That’s never going to work. But yeah, if you’re interrupting because it’s a sign of your genuine curiosity and passion for what they’re saying, you know, we don’t have to listen to the etiquette guides, that is going to be a way of forging this connection.

Brett McKay: You also talk about the novelty penalty in conversation. What’s that?

David Robson: Yeah, that’s super counter-intuitive to me, and it’s the fact that when we’re listening to other people or they are listening to us, we all have a preference for hearing about something that we already know, a topic that’s already familiar. And so if you talk about something that isn’t in the other person’s life, so it’s totally novel, that’s when you have the novelty penalty, they just don’t feel the same level of connection to you through that. I think it’s very common when we’re talking about our kind of holidays, if the other person hasn’t been to the location that we’re talking about, they can feel very alienated and bored by the conversation very quickly because it’s just difficult for them to grab hold of.

Now, one of the reasons this happens is partly that our story-telling abilities just maybe aren’t as well-developed as they could be, so you’re leaving too many gaps in the conversation, in your descriptions that make it very hard for them to really get a handle on what was so exciting or fun or interesting about your experience and why it mattered to you. And so actually to overcome the novelty penalty it’s often better to embellish our stories a little bit more than we would naturally do, and I don’t mean embellish with like false details, but I just mean like fill in those gaps, be a bit more emotional in what you’re saying. Like if something like completely changed your life by having an experience, make that clear, actually explicitly say what it was that was so transformative about the experience. That just allows the other person to see inside your mind, and that’s really what is a shared reality is when people can see inside each other’s minds and really get to know what’s actually making you tick and what’s actually motivating you.

Brett McKay: And I guess if you’re listening to someone tell a story and the novelty penalty is kicking in for you, you’re just like bored. I think the solution to that would be to ask questions to flesh out those emotional details.

David Robson: Right, that’s it. I think we should be really humble about this, and rather than just assuming that the other person is really boring, not all getting irritated, we should think that maybe this is a reflection on us and that actually maybe we’re not asking the right questions or leading the conversation in the way that will allow them to tell us why that experience was so important to them and why they think it’s worth sharing with us.

Brett McKay: So oftentimes in a relationship to maintain it, we might tell white lies, we basically tell something untruthful to not hurt the other person’s feelings. So a typical one, hey, what did you think of this food I made? And you’re like, oh, it was so good. And you’re thinking, well, actually, I thought it was gross. What does the research say about how that affects relationships?

David Robson: I mean, there are very few situations where dishonesty pays off in relationships, it’s pretty much limited, actually, like a white lie can be beneficial, and it’s kind of acceptable if the other person has no opportunity to respond to that feedback constructively. So the obvious example is, if you have a bride or groom on their wedding day, and they’re just about to walk down the aisle and they look pretty awful for some reason, and there’s nothing they can do about it, they can’t manage to get a new suit, a new dress, they can’t manage to redo their hair, hearing that news is only going to make them feel a lot worse and be less confident, then it’s fine to tell a white lie, but in almost every other situation, people really respond well to the negative feedback much, much more than we would expect.

And that’s because people value honesty so much, because honesty is so essential for that shared reality. If you start to question whether the other person is really telling you the truth, all of the shared reality that you’ve constructed together starts to feel like this kind of illusion, this mirage that might disappear. So even if you have negative feedback, don’t be afraid to share it, just make sure that you are, firstly, you’re being honest, secondly, that you’re being nuanced, so don’t make sweeping statements, but try to be very specific in what you liked, what you didn’t like on their project, for example, and try to offer your own support and resources to help them to make the changes that they need.

So if you’re talking about a work project, offering to go out for coffee with the person to talk it through and to impart your expertise, that’s going to mean that the negative feedback is much better received and it’s going to help them to feel less stressed about the whole thing. But there have been studies where researchers got students to either go out into the world for a few days and to be as kind as possible to all the people that they met, kindness was their number one objective, or they asked them to be honest. So totally honest, even when it was uncomfortable, even when they might have naturally told those white lies.

And what they found was that actually both groups performed equally well, they found similar benefits to their well-being compared to a control group who just carried on as normal. And actually, those who had the honest conversations, they often reported feeling greater meaning in their interactions, even when there was the discomfort, they felt that they got to know the other person better and the other person got to know them better because they had been brave enough to tell them the truth.

Brett McKay: It reminded me of a scene. So we just got done in our family, we just got done watching Little Women. Have you seen the most recent one from 2019 with… It’s Greta Gerwig’s…

David Robson: Yeah, yeah, Greta Gerwig’s…

Brett McKay: Yeah, yeah, she directed it. So it’s that scene where Jo, the heroine of the story, writes this novel and she presents it to this guy, Friedrich, who she kinda likes, and he likes her. And he reads it, and he’s like, this is awful. And she’s like, what are you talking about? It’s like, no, it’s just not good. I don’t think it’s good. And then she got really defensive, like you think I’m a bad writer? He’s like, no, I don’t think you’re a bad writer, I think what you wrote was not good. And in the short term, it kinda hurt the relationship, she got all in a huff and she left, but in the end, it seemed like it was the right thing to do, ’cause they ended up creating that shared reality.

David Robson: Yeah, exactly. And so that’s it, sometimes like you might get a negative reaction initially, ’cause the other person needs to calm down and to process what you’ve said, but according to these studies, ultimately it does bring you closer together, to be honest. I don’t think this means that we… It gives us like an excuse to just be rude or tactless, I think there’s always going to be a much kinder way of telling the brutal truth, than just saying it in the kind of nastiest way possible, like there’s always a way that you can make your words… Like really emphasize how much you care about the other person and your honest intentions for doing so, the purity of your intentions to help the other person.

But yeah, mostly, like just having that bravery, it’s going to pay off for you and the other person, it’s going to help them to achieve their goals better. And it’s going to help you, as a kind of dyad, like as friends or in a relationship, it’s going to help you to grow as well.

Brett McKay: So another thing that can get in the way of relationships is the emotion of envy. I think this is a really fascinating topic. We did a podcast last year about the philosophy of envy with Sarah Protasi, and she described envy as this aversive feeling when somebody, could be even a friend, has something that you don’t have but you want and you feel bad. How do people typically manage envy in a relationship?

David Robson: So I don’t think we manage it very well. So often our fear of provoking envy in the other person just leads us to not share the things that we’re really proud of, like the stuff that’s given us joy. That’s been shown in multiple surveys that people will just keep it quiet if they’ve got promotion or if they’ve received a bonus, if they’re super proud even of like a personal best at the gym or by the number of Twitter followers that they’ve just received, it’s part of their personal reality, they want to be able to share that with the people that are closest to them, but they avoid doing it because they don’t want to seem like some kind of blow-hard, like some kind of braggart.

And those motives are so misdirected, because actually, what the research shows is that the very act of hiding your success can be incredibly insulting to the other people, because your motives seem pretty paternalistic. So when you finally found out that your best friend has got a promotion or that he’s won this amazing like prize for his novel, when you find that out and you realize that he was hiding that from you, that makes you feel like he kind of… He expects you act like this spoilt child who has to win at every competition, and that you’re going to act like this kind of brat who has a tantrum.

It kind of shows disrespect as if you’re not strong enough to deal with that good news and to actually feel joy for the other person. So there have just been so many studies showing this, so many multiple experiments showing that false modesty really doesn’t pay off, and that includes humble brags where you try to veil your boast in this kind of complaint or self-deprecating joke. All that tells the other person is that you’re trying to manipulate them, and that you’re trying to make them respect you without risking envy.

And that doesn’t go down well either, because when there’s the perception of insincerity in someone, that shakes the foundations of shared reality, so pretty much we should be more willing to celebrate our achievements, we don’t need to be ashamed of them. We just have to make sure that what we’re saying is honest and what we’re saying doesn’t involve any social comparison, so that’s really crucial. So it’s fine to talk about your promotion, talk about your prize, talk about your achievements at the gym, just don’t say something like, oh, yeah, I was running like faster than everyone I could see at the gym, or oh, yeah, like I’m now earning more money than like 90% of the people I know, because this social comparison, it triggers all of these kind of hard wire devolved responses where we’re really suspicious of people who are trying to climb the ranks of our society’s hierarchy.

We just don’t want to think of people overtly comparing themselves to others, because we might also be included in their negative judgment. That really puts people’s defenses up, but provided that you’re honest and you avoid social comparison, people respond really well to hearing about your successes, and often they experience this emotion called confelicity or mitfreude, a German word like schadenfreude, which means joying with someone, like experiencing that vicarious happiness in seeing another person’s joy and contentment.

Brett McKay: Okay, so the antidote to envy is confelicity. And the way you can do that, just share the good news, don’t do the social comparison, and then when someone shares good news with you, what can we do to have better mitfreude?

David Robson: Basically like when someone shares their good news with us, like even if we are feeling a little bit of envy, we just have to let the kind of mitfreude shine. We have to try to kind of put our envy to one side. I mean, the chances are you’re… We have complex emotions, so you might feel a little bit of jealousy, but you probably are genuinely happy for the other person, and just expressing that, showing the other person how glad you are for them, that is a really good bonding experience.

Scientists called that process where you experience mitfreude with another person, they call that capitalization, because it actually ends up increasing the well-being of both parties, the person who’s had the good news and the person who is vicariously experiencing the good news.

Brett McKay: So you got a law about helping others who are going through a hard time, and it’s offer emotional support to those in need, but do not force it upon them. And I think there’s another thing that keeps people from connecting with others, when they see someone going through a hard time they don’t reach out because they don’t know what to say, right, so if they have a friend who lost a loved one to death or someone lost a job, they don’t say or reach out, ’cause they’re like, I’m going to say the wrong thing, and it’s just better that I don’t say anything. But the research actually says that that fear is unfounded. What does the research say, and then what can we do to overcome that fear of reaching out?

David Robson: Yeah, so I mean, what I found so surprising about this research was the fact that actually the nature of the relationship didn’t seem to really change how grateful someone was to receive that emotional support. So whether they were close friends or whether they were vague acquaintances, like walking up to someone and saying, I’m really sorry to hear that your dad died or that you’ve been ill, or you’re going to be kicked off your course, I’m really sorry, and I want to be here to support. No matter what the nature of that relationship, people really appreciate your effort to reach out. So we don’t need to be as scared of offering our support as we would be, because most people do assume that it’s going to be kind of awkward, that they’ll say something clumsy, that they’ll end up making the over-person feel worse rather than better. But the research suggests that those fears are unfounded, we’re actually much better at providing the support that they need than we think we are, and what we really need is just a bit more bravery to do so.

Brett McKay: When we do reach out to someone and say something, anything that the research says is or isn’t helpful?

David Robson: Yeah, definitely. So one thing is that it’s one thing to express your support to another person, but you shouldn’t be overbearing in the way that you go about that. So sometimes a few short words, a few short sentences is enough. Trying to force someone to speak about something when they’re still in the middle of a painful experience, that’s not really going to help them to feel closer to you. So just making it clear that you’re there for them whenever they want you, but you’re going to kind of be willing to step back and allow them to approach you, that can be really important.

Secondly, there’s a lot of research looking at the downsides of venting, and essentially when we have supportive conversations with people, sometimes we can just egg them on to relive the painful experience in as much detail as possible. And in some ways that can be very validating, because people want to be heard, they want their feelings to be known, you’re engaging in their shared reality by kind of telling them how painful that must have been and how much you sympathize with them, but after a certain point, it can become quite toxic, because when you’re re-living a painful event again and again and again, it’s not really helping them to move on, it’s not really helping their mental health. And so that’s why we need to combine validation with some kind of attempts at helping them to see a new perspective on the situation.

Now, we have to be sensitive and delicate in the way that we do that, so kind of blundering into the conversation and being like, oh, well, what you need to do is this, and giving really misguided advice because you don’t actually really know precisely what they’re feeling, that’s not going to help too much. But it could be you tentatively suggest another way of looking at the problem, but do it humbly, and kind of ask for their opinion, like do you think that would be helpful, that’s a sensitive way of helping them to re-appraise what they’re going through.

Sometimes it’s just kind of asking the right questions and allowing them to come to a different perspective by themselves, so just asking them, what do you think you might learn from this experience, or how do you think you might move on from this? What’s your plan now? Just making sure that that is part of the conversation, so that it’s not solely focused on the pain that they’re feeling, that has been proven to be really fundamental to not just reaffirming your relationship but actually helping that other person to recover from whatever they’re going through.

Brett McKay: A related law to that is a law on forgiving and asking for forgiveness. And you talk about the research about what happens to us when we hold on to a grudge. What does that research say?

David Robson: There’s been a lot of philosophical and religious teaching around this. I think it is probably pretty well established in so many traditions that holding a grudge is bad for us, and the scientific research just kind of proves that point. Like if you lash out and retaliate, that can help you in the moment, but it doesn’t necessarily help you to recover emotionally afterwards. In fact, when we act spitefully to someone, even if we feel that we’re justified, it causes us to lose our sense of humanity.

There’s lots of scientific questionnaires that psychologists can use to measure that aspect of how human do you feel, and what you find is that people’s answers subtly change, so that it looks like they are now considering themselves to be a bit more kind of animal-like than they would have been if they had expressed forgiveness instead. So choosing forgiveness, taking that moral high ground, that can be really beneficial to how we feel.

And then there’s a bunch of research showing that people who forgive over those who hold lasting grudges, they tend to be much healthier with their psychological well-being, but also their physical well-being. When you hold a grudge, you really feel disconnected from other people, so it kind of poisons you inside and you face the consequences of that for things like your risk of chronic pain, even your risk of things like heart disease can be liked to whether you hold grudges or not.

Brett McKay: What about asking for forgiveness? Is there research that tells that the best way to approach offering an apology and how we typically mess it up?

David Robson: Yeah. I think the biggest problem that most of us face is that we just don’t apologize even when we know that we’ve acted rudely. That’s not just stubbornness. I think there’s research showing, actually, that people often really want to express their apology, but they just assume that the other person isn’t going to forgive them, so they don’t say those words. They think, again, that they’re going to be rejected, and they might even make the situation worse by apologizing, so they almost just… They’re too fatalistic about losing the relationship rather than recognizing that they might be able to heal this rift, and that often relationships are much more robust than we expect, even when they have suffered some serious damage through some wrong behavior.

So the first thing to learn, I think, is just to, if you genuinely feel sorry, it’s to actually to say those words. When you’re apologizing, you need to tick multiple boxes, so you’ve got to accept your full responsibility for what you’ve done, you have to listen to the other person to hear about what the consequences were of what you did, and take responsibility for that too. You really should then try to show how you’re going to act differently in the future, like you have to make it clear what you’ve learned from your mistake and why you’re going to avoid hurting the other person again.

A lot of the time, we just try to rush our apologies. If we are brave enough to apologize, we might be like, oh, yeah, I’m sorry, anyway, now you have to get over it, because we need to go back to normal. That is not going to help the other person, like they need to feel that they’ve been heard and that you are going to change as a result of what’s happened.

Brett McKay: Well, David, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

David Robson: My website is davidrobson.me, you can find links to buy my book there. It should be available in all of the usual retailers, your local bookshops, big stores like Barnes & Noble, Amazon, obviously, wherever you get your books. You can also follow me on Twitter, that’s d_a_robson, and on Instagram where I’m just starting to kind of build a following, it’s davidarobson.

Brett McKay: Fantastic, well, David Robson, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

David Robson: And a pleasure for me too. Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest there was David Robson, and he’s the author of the book The Laws of Connection. It’s available on amazon.com, and book stores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, davidrobson.me. Also check out our shownotes at aom.is/connection, where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support, and until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AoM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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Over a decade ago, I remember reading a story that stuck with me. I think it was connected to the famous Harvard Study on Adult Development that studied a group of men across their lifetimes, but I can no longer find the reference. A much-beloved doctor, upon his retirement, was given a notebook filled with letters of praise and appreciation from his patients. After he received it, he put it up in his attic, and never opened it or read the letters.

I’ve often thought of this story since I first heard it, wondering about what motivated the doctor’s behavior, and the larger question of why praise is typically welcomed and makes us feel good, but can also make people feel uncomfortable or embarrassed.

In today’s episode, I take a stab at answering this question with Christopher Littlefield, a speaker and consultant who specializes in employee appreciation. But first, we talk about the power of recognition, why we can be so stingy in giving compliments, how compliments can go wrong, and how we can offer them more effectively. We then turn to why getting compliments can make you cringe, how people deflect them and how this deflection affects relationships, and how to get better at receiving compliments graciously.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: Why and How to Offer More Compliments
• AoM Article: How to Accept a Compliment With Class
• AoM Article: How to Avoid Giving a Backhanded Compliment
• Sunday Firesides: Compliment Deflection Is Gift Denial
• Sunday Firesides: Give Them the Cream
• HBR Article: Do Compliments Make You Cringe? Here’s Why by Christopher Littlefield

Connect With Christopher Littlefield

• Beyond Thank You website
• Chris on YouTube
• Chris on LinkedIn

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript Coming Soon

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

Started in 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development represents the longest longitudinal study on happiness ever conducted. It set out to follow a group of men through every stage of their lives, from youth to old age, and continues to study their descendants.

The Harvard Study aimed to discover what makes human beings flourish, and its overarching conclusion was this: it’s all about good relationships. The Harvard Study has found that the quality of a person’s relationships has the biggest influence on their health and happiness. 

Robert Waldinger, the current director of the Harvard Study, uses a great phrase to refer to this relational factor: social fitness. However, in the book he co-authored, The Good Life, he never directly explains and unpacks what the concept of social fitness involves.

Below, we’ll take a stab at doing so.  

What Is “Social Fitness”?

We typically talk about fitness in terms of physical fitness, but it’s a very apt way to describe our social lives as well. We’ll get into the parallels between the two concepts in a moment, but let’s first explain what social fitness is.

“Fitness” can refer to a couple of things. 

One is a person’s current state and condition. (“He is fit.”)

The other is a person’s capacity to perform a certain role, task, or function. (“He is fit enough to ____.”)

Physical and social fitness each encompass both of these qualities. 

When you’re physically fit, you’re in good shape. Your cardiovascular system is healthy, your weight is normal, your muscles are toned. You are also sufficiently fit to perform certain athletic activities, like running a certain distance or lifting a certain amount of weight.

Likewise, when you’re socially fit, your relationships are in good shape. You have a sufficient number of ties and a sufficient amount of contact with them. Your relationships are marked more by intimacy and warmth than stress and strain. 

To assess the state of your social fitness, ask yourself how much you agree with statements like:

• I don’t often feel lonely.
• I’m happy with my number of friends.
• If I had an emergency, there’s someone I could call for help.
• If I had a bad day, there’s someone I could talk to about it.
• I feel like I can be honest in most of my relationships.
• I feel generally supported and loved.
• If I need advice on a practical matter, there’s someone I could talk to.
• There is at least one person in my life who challenges me and encourages me to grow.
• There is at least one person in my life who makes me laugh and helps me have fun.
• I’m happy and fulfilled in my romantic relationship.
• There is at least one person in my life who knows nearly everything about me. 

Social fitness not only encompasses the state of having healthy relationships, but also the capacity to show up well in these relationships. 

To assess the “fit for” element of your social fitness, ask yourself how much you agree with statements like:

• I would feel comfortable walking into a room where I don’t know anyone.
• I feel comfortable making small talk with a stranger.
• I can listen intently to someone without getting distracted.
• I am able to cultivate genuine curiosity about anyone.
• I’m adept at reading social signals and adapting my behavior accordingly. 
• I know how to ask questions that facilitate conversation and deepen relationships.
• I am able to offer feedback and advice in an appropriate way.
• I am able to empathize with others in a helpful and comforting manner.

Of course, both of the elements of fitness are inextricably connected. In both the social and physical realms, you become fit by exercising your capacities, and the more fit you are, the more capacities you can exercise.  

The Parallels Between Physical and Social Fitness

To better understand the concept of social fitness, and how it’s developed and maintained, it’s helpful to think through its parallels with something we’re more familiar with: physical fitness.

Physical and social fitness were once defaults, but now require intention to maintain. 

In our primitive past, people had to move their bodies by way of necessity. Physical activity was built into the tasks of daily life. 

In the modern world, it’s possible to perform most of life’s necessary tasks from a seated position. Exercising takes intentional decisions and will.

In the same way, social fitness used to be an automatic part of life. Primitive peoples lived in small communities, which were filled, morning to night, with face-to face interactions. Today, with the rise of technology and work-from-home jobs, it’s possible to go very long stretches without talking to someone in the flesh. 

Just like the physical movements that arise naturally during the day (like walking to and from your car in a parking lot), are not enough to maintain your physical fitness, the amount of spontaneous social interactions that crop up in your routine are typically not enough to maintain your social fitness.

Social health does not happen by default; it requires dedicated effort.

Ignoring your physical and social fitness results in serious health consequences. 

You know the potential health consequences of a sedentary lifestyle: cancer, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, depression, anxiety. You’ve probably also heard that many of those same maladies are linked to loneliness.

The Harvard Study found that “The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest (mentally and physically) at age 80.”

Thousands of years of human history has designed us to move, and to socialize. If we ignore these hardwired needs, both our physical and our mental health deteriorates.

Physical and social fitness offer freedom from and freedom to.

Related to the idea of fitness as both a state and a capacity is the fact that in both its physical and social forms, fitness offers an individual freedom from and freedom to. It’s both a protective and proactive quality — something that prevents the bad and allows us to do more good.

Physical fitness gives you freedom from diseases, fatigue, poor sleep, and mental malaise, while also granting you freedom to navigate varied environments, play sports, climb mountains, play with your children, and so on. 

Social fitness likewise offers freedom from bodily and mental maladies and also keeps the burdening stresses and sadnesses of strained relationships at bay. At the same time, it provides the freedom to enjoy rich friendships, get ahead at work, feel confident at parties, find love, and experience joy in a happy and long-lasting marriage. 

If you don’t use your physical and social fitness, you lose it.

Have you ever been out to a social engagement after a long hiatus from face-to face interactions and noticed that all your behaviors came out cringe-inducingly creaky? You felt like a social Tin Man who’d gone too long without an oiling. 

Even if you lift weights for years and years, once you stop, your muscles will begin to atrophy. Likewise, if you fall out of the socializing habit, your interpersonal skills get rusty.

Some people are more inclined towards physical and social fitness than others, but everybody needs them all the same.

Some people are more physical. Some people are less. Some people truly enjoy working out. Others highly dislike it. Regardless of what category someone falls into, getting exercise is equally important for their health.

Some people are more social. Some people are less. Some people are naturally inclined towards extroversion; some people are more introverted. Regardless of what category someone falls into, socialization is equally important for their health. 

In the case of both social and physical fitness, a minimum amount of exercise is needed to maintain good health. But the amount someone needs beyond that minimum to be at their best will vary. 

Some people need to work out an hour every day to not go bonkers. Others only need to do 30 minutes of dedicated exercise several times a week to stay trim and feel copacetic. 

Some people need to be out socializing multiple times a week to feel happy; others are content with far more occasional gatherings. 

Dr. Waldinger says that one of the questions he’s asked most frequently is how many friends someone needs to have. He says there’s no set answer; it depends on the person. Some people are perfectly happy having just one good friend; others need a dozen. 

In a similar way, different people are drawn to different forms of social and physical exercise. Just as some people like playing tennis and others like yoga, some people enjoy small talk and others like deep, emotion-exploring conversations. But just as someone who likes running but dislikes weightlifting may need to lift weights in order to stay healthy for running, even people who dislike small talk must engage in it as an on-ramp to more intimate exchanges. 

While the natural desire for socializing, optimal social circle size, need for interactions, and inclination towards certain types of socializing will vary from person to person, everyone needs a quality stream of socialization in their life.

Cultivating physical and social fitness constitutes both a self-interested exercise and an act of service.

Working on your physical fitness offers personal advantages: you look and feel better and are capable of engaging in life’s most fun and adventurous pursuits. But it also confers a benefit on society: you’re prepared to assist others in an emergency, are less of a burden on the healthcare system, and have the vim and vigor to do as much good as possible in the world.

In the same way, working on your social fitness is both a self-interested and an altruistic act. Socially fit people enjoy a richer life themselves, while also benefiting others by providing a listening ear, supportive companionship, and nourishing recognition. 

As David Brooks argues, the moral fabric of a society frays when people stop feeling seen and heard; the resentment that results moves them to act out and act badly. Witnessing this bad behavior prompts people to interact with and trust others less, which only makes folks feel lonelier and less recognized, which leads to more behavioral ruptures, and the negative cycle continues. Being adept at socializing pushes this cycle in the other direction. It’s an act of service.

Maintaining physical and social fitness requires endless monotonous exercise, but when you need it, you’ll be glad you have it. 

You don’t typically see immediate benefits from working out, besides an elevated mood. Health benefits accrue slowly and subtly. You don’t need to typically put the strength and physical skills you’re building to use. You put in hours each week and don’t experience an obvious payoff.

But, when you need your physical fitness for something fun or in an emergency — a friend invites you on a backpacking trip; a family member needs help moving a couch; you have to walk a marathon all over Disney World; you need to run from a burning building — you’re surely glad you have it.

The same thing is true of social fitness. A lot of the conversations and exchanges you engage in may be fairly mundane. But, when you find yourself meeting an important client, going on a date with someone you’re nuts about, or getting to know a friend you can tell will turn out to be special, you count your lucky stars that you’re prepared. 

By consistently exercising your interpersonal fitness in mundane, day-to-day ways, you ensure that you’re socially agile, confident, and adept when the interaction really counts.

You’ve got to regularly exercise your physical and social fitness whether you feel like it or not.

People typically understand that even if you don’t feel like working out, you have to do so anyway, for your health.

Socializing, however, seems more optional — something you only do when you feel like it.  

We recognize we shouldn’t give much credence to our mood when it comes to deciding to exercise, but frequently let our mood dictate whether or not we’ll attend a party.

But the same consistent commitment should prevail in both areas. Sometimes social exercise is something you look forward to, and sometimes it’s akin to eating your spinach — something you do, even though you don’t feel like it, because it’s good for you.

Regularly getting in social “workouts” means saying yes to after-work drinks or a networking event, not because of an innate desire to go, but simply because you recognize you need the exercise to stay interpersonally limber. It means striking up a chat with a coffee shop barista simply to practice your chit-chat. It means asking a couple to go out to eat, even if you’re not terribly excited about their company, to keep your conversational muscles in tone. 

To maintain your social fitness, you’ve got to get in the reps, whether you feel like it or not.

Even when you don’t feel like exercising your physical and social fitness, you’re always glad you did.

When you don’t want to exercise, but get after it anyway, by the time you’re done and all red-faced and sweaty, riding that post-workout high, you’re invariably glad you decided to fight through the inertia.

When you don’t want to socialize, but you put in the effort anyway, you’re almost always glad you did and walk away feeling better and even a little buzzed — a little more human, a little more healthy, a little more fit.

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What does it mean to be cool? 

Philosophers have long pondered this burning question. 

There are different types of coolness, with some related to affect, style, or talent.

But one type is connected to how we show up in relationships. It’s the type that underlies the feeling expressed when you think to tell someone (or yourself), “Just be cool, man.”

When individuals embody this way of being cool, their relationships, instead of being marked by tension and drama, are filled with a paradoxical combination of easy warmth and abundant chill.

This kind of coolness requires the development of three qualities:

1) The ability to charitably tolerate the weaknesses of others. Everybody’s got their stuff. Everybody’s trying to get their needs met. Everybody’s just trying to make it in the world. The cool individual recognizes that everyone is imperfect, just as he is imperfect. In fact, he recognizes that the flaws in another are usually just the flip sides of their strengths, and he focuses on his gratitude for those strengths, rather than their cost.

2) The ability to diplomatically communicate how others’ weaknesses affect you. Rather than believing that other people should read his mind as to what’s bothering him, the cool individual openly talks about what’s on it. The majority of relationships end because people passively stew on their resentments until they air them at explosive, point-of-no-return levels, or because they walk away having never voiced them at all.

3) The ability to readily acknowledge your own weaknesses. The cool individual is entirely self-aware of his own shortcomings, so that when someone points them out, he’s able to say, “You’re absolutely right! I do do that! I’m sincerely sorry and will keep working on it.”

Tolerance. Openness. Self-awareness. Cultivate these qualities, and you, too, can reach certified cool dude status. Sunglasses recommended, but not required. 

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Your marriage is struggling. You’ve invited your wife to do couples therapy, to go out for date nights, to spend more time together in general. But she’s refused all these invitations. 

Your daughter has the potential to be a champion swimmer. But she isn’t into the sport, and getting her to go to practice is a source of constant conflict.

A guy at church has been down on his luck, and you’ve been helping him fill out job applications. But every time he lands an interview, he fails to show up.

Your son has been addicted to drugs for a decade. You’ve paid for lawyers for related trouble he’s gotten into. You’ve paid for two expensive stints in rehab. But he’s still using. 

In these kinds of situations, when should you continue to invest time, money, and emotion in someone and in the outcome you’d like to see brought about in their life? When should you let go?

Certainly, there are no easy answers to one of the most difficult dilemmas of the human experience. 

But there is one guideline that can be helpful to adopt:

You can’t want it more than they do. 

If someone already has the will, the commitment, the desire to make something happen, then your support will be a beneficial aid to their already existent efforts. If they don’t, even the most abundant pleading, cajoling, and assistance will come to naught. 

You will never be able to pull someone in a direction they aren’t already heading themselves. 

This doesn’t mean that you stop cheering for them (from a greater distance), hoping for them (with realistic expectations), or loving them (with undiminished sincerity).

But you should only keep trying to bring someone along if, at the same time that you’re reaching out, they’re extending their hand. 

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In resolving hundreds of kidnap-for-ransom cases involving gang leaders, pirates, and extortionists, Scott Walker, a former Scotland Yard detective, has learned a thing or two about how to negotiate and communicate in a crisis. He shares how to apply those lessons to the difficult conversations we all have in our everyday lives in his book Order Out of Chaos: Win Every Negotiation, Thrive in Adversity, and Become a World-Class Communicator, and we talk about his tips on today’s show.

Scott and I discuss what a “red center” means in a kidnap-for-ransom scenario and how to create one in your personal life, the “immediate action drill” that can help you stay in that red center, the importance of separating the decision-maker from the communicator in a negotiation and having a “battle rhythm,” why you don’t give hostage takers the money they ask for right away and how to structure a negotiation instead, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: The 7 Habits — Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
• AoM Podcast #648: Lessons in Building Rapport from Experts in Terrorist Interrogation
• AoM Podcast #234: Haggling and Deal Making Advice From a FBI Hostage Negotiator
• Box breathing
• Physiological sigh

Connect With Scott Walker

• Scott‘s website

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. In resolving hundreds of kidnapped for ransom cases involving gang leaders, pirates, and extortionists, Scott Walker, a former Scotland Yard detective, has learned a thing or two about how to negotiate and communicate in a crisis. He shares how to apply those lessons to difficult conversations we all have in our everyday lives in his book, ‘Order Out of Chaos’. Win every negotiation, thrive in adversity, and become a world-class communicator. And we talk about his tips on today’s show. Scott and I discuss what a red center means in a kidnap for ransom scenario, and how to create one in your personal life, the immediate action drill that can help you stay in that red center, the importance of separating the decision-maker from the communicator in a negotiation and having a battle rhythm, why you don’t give hostage takers the money they ask for right away, and how to structure a negotiation instead and more. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/walker. All right. Scott Walker, welcome to the show.

Scott Walker: Thank you for having me.

Brett McKay: So, you are a hostage negotiator. So, you negotiate with people who have taken other people hostage. You also help organizations who have had ransomware attacks. How’d you end up doing what you’re doing?

Scott Walker: Yes, a great question. I don’t actually recall the conversation at school where you sit down with a careers advisor and they say, so what is it you want to do? Do you want to be a train driver? A teacher? A doctor? Whatever? And at no point do I remember them saying, “Hey, Scott, do you want to negotiate ransoms for people?” Because it’s one of those jobs you kind of fall into, so to speak. I was a cop. I was a detective in London, Scotland Yard, for about 16 years. And towards the end of my career there, I got introduced to the world of kidnap for ransom negotiation and operations to help resolve those and get the hostages back. And I did that for a number of years. And when I left the police, I went to work for a consultancy firm that specialized in crisis response, you could call it, which ultimately was about flying off all over the world, working with families and organizations to get their loved ones and colleagues back who’d been taken hostage, had been kidnapped and a ransom was being demanded.

Brett McKay: Are you still working with that company or are you doing it on your own now as a consultant?

Scott Walker: Yeah. I’m doing it more by myself now. And over the last couple of years particularly, it’s taking all those lessons and themes and patterns and tools and techniques that I learned over hundreds of cases over many years into the business world, into the corporate world, and also into people’s personal lives as well. How can you have really difficult conversations? How can you succeed in those and just have better relationships and communicate better regardless of which area of your life really?

Brett McKay: Oh, so you’re taking the lessons you’ve learned as a hostage negotiator and helping people be better negotiators in everyday aspects of their lives?

Scott Walker: Yeah. It’s how to think, feel, and act differently in a better way, particularly in times of stress, uncertainty, overwhelm, conflict, crisis, a bit like the world we’re living in right now. And in a way, it doesn’t really matter what the circumstances, the principles apply, or at least the underlying principles apply. And then you can just adapt accordingly depending on what your needs and circumstances are.

Brett McKay: So, this is a world that is just new to me. I don’t know anything about it. How often does kidnap for ransom cases happen? Does it happen more often than we’re aware of that you see in the news?

Scott Walker: An accurate figure for how many kidnaps take place each year is not really known. Because if you think about it, the places in the world where these kidnappings take place, the government, the tourist department are not gonna say, “Hey, we’re the kidnapped capital of the world. Come and invest your business and your hard-earned money here or will come and visit us as a tourist.” There are probably 40,000 to 50,000 kidnappings a year worldwide. That’s what we estimate. Probably only about 10,000 of those are actually recorded. But when I was working in London in the police, we had about one a week.

Maybe you about 50-52 kidnappings a year there? And then when I worked in the private sector, we were dealing with over 100 a year, just us as a small team doing that. But the chances of the average Joe walking down the street somewhere becoming a victim of a kidnap is really slim. You have to be unfortunate to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Usually, they’re targeted ’cause they’re high net worth, or there’s some kind of, we used to call them bad on bad, where a criminal gang would kidnap another criminal or a family member of another criminal for retribution or to pay off some debt or for lack of respect or whatever it may be. But for the average person, you’ve got to be really unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Brett McKay: Okay. Let’s talk about how people can apply the lessons that you’ve learned as a hostage negotiator to their everyday negotiations or even just difficult conversations you have at work or with family members. You say and you argue that dealing with kidnappers is easy. And I think when most people hear that, they think, are you crazy? That’s the most… Like you’re dealing with irrational people. It’s one of the most stressful situations you could be in because the person who’s kidnapping is often threatening the life of the person they’ve taken hostage. Why do you think dealing with kidnappers is easy?

Scott Walker: At the end of the day, it’s a business transaction nine times out of 10. They have something we want, the hostages, and we have something they want, primarily money. And it’s coming to an agreement about how much that’s gonna be and when. How they’re going to get it and how we’re going to get the hostages back. I appreciate if you’re the family of the hostages, you’re not going to see it like that, but ultimately that’s what it comes down to. And there’s a bit of leverage we can apply there. And ultimately it’s pretty straightforward. Whereas what the challenge is, is on your own side and this applies to the big business world as well. It’s when the egos and the internal politics and the competing demands and the conflicting arguments and priorities all come into play. We call it the crisis within the crisis. And you can see that in a lot of, as I said, business negotiations where a lot of the time will be spent dealing with internal stakeholders who all want to have their say. They all want a piece of the action.

They all want to feel as if they’re in control or they’re dictating the narrative somehow. And I’d say probably 80% of my time on all of my kidnap and other crisis negotiations around the world, 80% of my time was spent managing the client, managing their expectations, their egos, their emotions, their needs, their wants, the challenges that they were going through. And so at times it’s quite a relief to be able to get onto the phone with the kidnappers and come up with a straight forward negotiation, so to speak. But that goes back to the point you made about irrational actors, irrational people, difficult conversations. And I think one of the most effective ways of dealing with those kinds of situations, realizing that actually it’s not about me, so to speak. I need to be able to understand where is the other person coming from? What’s their underlying needs, for example? And it’s that classic saying, first seek to understand before being understood. And by spending the time, bringing more curiosity than assumption to the table and working out, okay, what’s really going on for this person? Then that takes a pressure off you slightly. And it means you can then tailor your communication style, your part of the conversation to actually address that.

Brett McKay: Okay. So, a hostage negotiation is, it’s a business negotiation. And I imagine that’s the value you bring as a crisis negotiator, is you’re a third party. Of course, you care about this person who’s been taken hostage, but you’re detached, like you’re not as invested as the family members who have their loved one. And so they’re thinking, oh, my gosh, I got to do whatever I can to get this person back home safely. They’re going to get angry when the hostage takers don’t cooperate. They might say something irrational, but you as a third party, you’re able to kind of keep it cool and detached.

Scott Walker: Yes. And I think that’s a great way of highlighting that if you can regulate your own emotions, and identify the people’s emotions, you can go some way to bring in about far more calm and equanimity and balance and groundedness to the situation. And yes, by default, my position is coming in as a third party, so to speak, I bring that naturally, because it’s not my loved one that’s been taken. But even dealing with my own kids or in my own personal life, where there’s some that really triggers me or winds me up. Actually, initially, I’ve now over many, many years of getting it wrong, been able to regulate, understand, okay, what is showing up for me now in my body, my emotions, and then by being able to identify it and name it, that can somehow dissipate the impact it’s having on me, which means I can bring around more objective, rational thinking and decision making, rather than some knee jerk reaction.

And really, when you think about it, it’s a skill that we’re all capable of, and we get plenty of opportunities all day, every day. It could be the person who cuts you up in traffic, or is rude to you on the subway, or it could be an ego driven boss. There’s all these moments, all these pockets of time and situations where it gives you this great opportunity to practice this regulation. And if you can do that, it’s a real superpower in that actually less and less things phase you.

Brett McKay: So in your book, ‘Order Out of Chaos’, you walk readers through a process and practices that they can implement in their own lives so that they can be more like a hostage negotiator, that sort of objective, third party negotiator in their own personal negotiations. And one thing you talked about at the very beginning is this idea, as a negotiator, you want to develop what’s called a red center. What’s a red center in hostage negotiation? And then how can people develop their own red center in their own difficult conversations?

Scott Walker: A red center, particularly in law enforcement terms, is the physical location where the telephone calls are being received from the kidnappers. It’s where the family member, for example, is receiving the demands and the threats. So, it could be the family kitchen, it could be a hotel room, it could be an office somewhere. And that is the place where we have to bring order out of chaos, which is why I called the book this. It’s a place that’s high emotion, lots of irrational thinking, understandably, and it’s about bringing this calmness so we can actually come up with a proper negotiation strategy and communicate it in the most effective way possible.

And my job was actually to bring about that calm, was to instill that in what is a really challenging situation. And I realized over time in many, many, many cases in many years was, you know what? We’ve got our own red center within us, each and every one of us. And it’s this place that no matter how challenging, how many problems or issues that get thrown at us in life, personally, professionally, we’ve all got this inner ability, it’s like an inner resilience almost, that we have that ability to overcome whatever is put in front of us. And if we can master that mindset, and tap into those resources that we have, then actually nothing is really gonna knock us off our path again.

And just like anything, it’s like working a muscle, it’s muscle memory. It’s like going to the gym. You don’t just go once and expect to get the body of Adonis. You have to practice it and reinforce it daily, which is why I was saying a while ago that every day life presents you with opportunities to practice emotional regulation, getting your mindset to where it needs to be, and developing this inner resilience, this red center that actually you’re gonna find a way through this no matter how challenging or how stressful the conversation, the negotiation, the business presentation, that difficult phone call with a loved one you’ve been putting off, or whatever it may be.

Brett McKay: This idea of a personal red center. It reminds me of the inner citadel that Marcus Aurelius talked about.

Scott Walker: Yeah. Actually I never thought of it like that, but that’s exactly what it is. And do you know what? It’s the only thing really, now that you’ve mentioned it. It’s the only thing, I guess, that you have complete control over. You can’t control the weather. You can’t control the taxes. You can’t control traffic or what someone is gonna do or not do or say or not say. But what you can control is what goes on between that stimulus, that trigger, and your response. And as you described there, the stoic approach, I guess, of this citadel. I control what goes on within these walls here. And that’s what… You can become the master of that domain, so to speak. So, I like that analogy there. Thanks.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So in any difficult conversation and negotiation, you want to develop this red center, this inner citadel where you’re in control, you’re still gonna feel emotions, but you’re gonna…

Scott Walker: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Control them and manage them effectively.

Scott Walker: That’s it.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about how we can do that. What are some things that you do to maintain your cool in a hostage negotiation? Especially, in situations where there are threats about killing the hostage, do you have processes that you go through to keep yourself centered and in that personal red center?

Scott Walker: Yeah. And again these have been developed over time, and these are tools and techniques that I know work when the stakes can’t get any higher, when there’s a mock execution on the phone, the family is in bits, the threats are coming in. The negotiation is not really working that well for a whole host of reasons. The money is not becoming available. The hostages are in poor health. So, anything that can go wrong is going wrong. And as the negotiators, the… As the crisis response consultant, so to speak, all eyes are on me or people that are doing my job to resolve this. And so I can’t afford to let my emotions or mindset be anything other than really, really strong and agile in the moment.

And so the techniques I’ve developed and a sense of discovered that they’re grounded in neuroscience and what have you, I call it the immediate action drill. And this is something that I keep in my back pocket, even to this day. The kids know what button to press or, as I said, somebody on the train tube subway or in the traffic. And the first part of the immediate action drill is interrupting the pattern. It’s so important that, what I mean by that is something is said or something happens, or you get the trigger, there’s a danger, you can just stay so focused on, that you get that tunnel vision and then you just get lost in a negative, disempowering story that plays on loop over and over and over again.

And interrupting the pattern could be something as simple as standing up and going outside for a bit of fresh air, or going for a walk, or going to the gym, or having a glass of water, or putting some music, on. Something to… Or it could be some breathing techniques. It could be something to interrupt the pattern, the situation that you’ve just found yourself in. And from that moment, the second stage is about riding the wave. So, for any surfers, or skiers, or skateboarders, listening, is imagine you’ve interrupted the pattern and now we wanna ride the wave. And this is the wave that happens to us biologically, chemically is for about 90 seconds, two minutes maybe tops, we have this rush of cortisol and adrenaline and other chemicals pumping through our bodies when we face the whole fight, flight, and freeze response. And so that 90 seconds, that two minutes, we wanna ride the wave. We want to feel the feeling and drop the story. It doesn’t matter why we’re feeling this, we just need to tune in and allow that to dissipate. And if after about 90 seconds, two minutes, it’s still going, it just means we’re stuck in a story or some trauma pattern there.

But then, so we’ve interrupted the pattern, we’re really tuning into what’s showing up for us, riding the wave for 90 seconds, two minutes. And then the third step is to ask better questions. And you can only do that when you’ve regulated, when you’ve brought the nervous system into balance and better questions such as, okay, what am I missing here? What’s the opportunity? What’s the learning or insight? What else could this mean? What can I be grateful for? Whatever happens to be. And so it’s asking better questions because if you ask better questions, you’re gonna get better answers. But you can only do that from a regulated state. And if for some reason that’s still not quite working, I’ll just go back to do some breathing techniques such as box breathing, which is quite a popular and an effective one where you breathe in for four seconds, you hold it for four, you exhale for four, and then you breathe in again, you hold it, and then you breath in again for four. So you just repeat the cycle.

Or there’s the physiological sigh where you breathe in through your nose and then before you breathe out, you do an extra little in breath as well through the nose. And then there’s a longer exhale. And again, these are just proven ways of regulating a system. And I would do this every time before I walked into the room where the kidnappers were gonna phone, before I sat down with a family or the client, I would do that so I could regulate my emotions. And if we were using a communicator because of a language barrier who was gonna speak to the kidnappers, I would get them to do that as well. Either box breathing or the physiological sigh or whatever technique worked for them so they could regulate, they weren’t stuck in a pattern and that we were able to ask better questions if we need to. And the same applies to people’s personal lives as well. The techniques work.

Brett McKay: Yeah. If you are dealing with a kid who’s frustrating ’cause they’re not wanting to do their homework, you feel triggered, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I’m getting angry here.” You can just do this really quickly. Interrupt the pattern. That might just be, I’m gonna leave the room and say, “Hey, we’ll talk about this here in a bit.” And then you can do the process of ride the wave, ask better questions like, okay, what am I missing here about what my kid’s point of view is and how can I better understand them? And then maybe do some box breathing and then you can come back and begin the conversation again.

Scott Walker: Yeah, and absolutely. And dealing with your kids, for example, or a loved one, a partner, a friend, a colleague is, you can look at it for… You look at your hands, look at your both hands. You look at your left hand and you go, “Okay, this is the person, this is their true self, this is their identity, them as a person,” you know, they’re inherently a good person. And in the right hand you look at them and go, well actually this is the behavior that’s showing up. These are the unkind, unhelpful, disruptive, so-called bad behavior. And it’s about separating the two. So, then you can deal with the behavior that’s manifesting itself rather than what we generally do. It’s really both together and we attack the person as opposed to the behavior. And I think by separating that as part of that immediate action drill as well, can go some way to avoiding, you know, us jumping in or making the situation even worse by going into a spiral or a tit for tat, arguing back and forth, which isn’t really gonna resolve anything.

Brett McKay: I can see this happening in a business negotiation. Maybe in a business negotiation, there’s multiple issues being discussed. And let’s say there’s one issue where you can sense that there’s a trigger, like people are uncomfortable, there’s some tension there. You can interrupt that pattern there with that issue by saying, “Hey, I sense we’re reaching an impasse here, let’s table this for now and then we can discuss these other issues that are not as pertinent or not as heavy.” And then you can come back to that one issue once you’ve calmed yourself down.

Scott Walker: Absolutely. Which is why you get saying such as, well, okay, well let me sleep on it, or let’s have a coffee break. Let’s, you know, people can, if you have what I call a sensory acuity, if you can walk into a room or you’re sat in a room for a long period of time and sense, actually this is… We need a break and the tension is getting too much, something is not quite right, people are flagging, the air is getting quite irritable. We just need to interrupt what is going on here. So, we’ll go outside for a bit of fresh air. Let’s grab a coffee and we’ll come back in half an hour. And something as simple as that. You’re right, it may sound really, really super simple, but it works.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Scott Walker: And which is why I always recommend clients now in business negotiations, particularly if they’re face to face, is have somebody in the room on your side whose sole job is to observe. They’re not to actually take upon the negotiation itself. Their job is just to pick up on all the nuances and the context and the body language and what is not being said. And the mood. And the energy. Because so often we can get narrow focus, we get tunnel focused onto the specifics of a negotiation. We can sometimes miss the bigger picture. And those people who are the observers, they’re worth their waiting goal, because they’re the ones who can pick up stuff and go, well actually we’re not in alignment here. There’s a mismatch, there’s an incongruency between what’s being said and everything else I’m noticing we need to take 20 minutes out ’cause we need to have a conversation about this.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. That reminds me that idea of having an observer in a negotiation reminds me of another point you make as a hostage negotiator, one of the things you do is you have a team, there’s a big team going on in a hostage negotiation. One thing you do is you separate the people who are the decision makers in the hostage negotiation from the person who’s communicating. Why do you do that?

Scott Walker: Commanders command and negotiators negotiate. Absolutely, because if I’m the key decision maker and I’m jumping on the phone with, it could be anybody, it could be kidnappers, it could be in a business deal. I have nowhere left to go. I can’t put any buffer, any firewall. I can’t store for time ’cause I can’t go, well, let me check with the boss if I am the boss. And not only that, it allows… Even if it’s just you, even if you are buying a car for example, you could still separate the negotiating and the decision making yourself. Which again, it goes back to that point I made just now is, well, let me sleep on it. I wanna think about it. Let me come back to you on that. It’s really important to build that buffer so you don’t get caught up in the whole emotion of it. Because we do make decisions emotionally and then look to justify them rationally afterwards. Whereas, because we know that, well, let’s put a bit of time in so we can make sure they have the right emotions. And we are not making a decision in the moment out of fear, greed or whatever it may be. And so by separating that ideally with two or more people, but even if it’s just you, the same principles apply.

Brett McKay: And while what this does, it just helps you bring in that idea of you being a disinterested objective third party. You’re trying to get to that as close as possible by doing that.

Scott Walker: Yeah. It just brings a bit more space and control and enables you to make better decisions that are gonna be in your interest ultimately, rather than agreeing to something, and then you come off the phone or you walk out the room and going, “Oh, we could have asked for more money. Or do you know what? We’ve been ripped off here.” Which happens to all of us because we make those decisions too quickly because we’re caught up in the emotion and the high drama, the negotiation, rather than having some time to think about it.

Brett McKay: And so the idea is you need to have a plan whenever you reach one of those decision points where you could get caught up in the emotions as the communicator and negotiator, you know, doing it by yourself. Have a plan where, “Okay, I reached this point where I can see my emotions are getting the best of me. That’s when I need to separate the two.” The inner negotiator, the inner communicator, and then take a break and then let the decision maker do the decision making and then come back and let the communicator do the communicating.

Scott Walker: Yeah. And that could even be a five minute gap. It doesn’t have to be five weeks, you know what I mean? It’s just separating it. You bring an intentionality to it, I guess, of right, I’m deliberately, consciously putting a firewall in place now between this negotiation. Okay, well let me, I’m gonna go off for half an hour. I’m gonna come back and then I’ll make a decision.

Brett McKay: What do you do in the situation as a hostage negotiator? ‘Cause I’m sure this happens there, ’cause this happens in regular negotiations. Let’s say you do want to put some space, “Okay, I wanna interrupt the pattern here. I want some time to think about it.” But the other party is like, “No. You gotta make a decision now. It’s do or die.” How do you handle that?

Scott Walker: Okay. Well, we would’ve preempted this ahead of time and we can come onto that later about what we call that and how we do that. But in terms of, it’s just explaining, well, if you want me to get the money, we need time to do that. And all the time I’m on the phone to you, I’m not gonna be able to get the money. It’s a lot of money you’re asking for, we’re a poor company, we’re a poor family, whatever. Actually, I need to go and speak to people. I need to try and get the money from them. I need to raise the funds, whatever it is. So, you’re building in a narrative, you’re building in a story, a credible story as to why you need time. And then you can go, well, “Do you know what? Let’s speak again, same time tomorrow.” And that helps with what we call the battle rhythm of being able to manage this over a long period of time without getting burnt out. And so if we can buy time, if we can separate the negotiation from the decision making, and it just means it’s far more sustainable and everybody stays far more alert and in better shape, and they can make better decisions. And ultimately it’s about the safe and the timely release of the hostages.

Brett McKay: Tell us more about this battle rhythm idea in hostage negotiation.

Scott Walker: Yeah. What it is, is when you don’t have an effective battle rhythm, what that looks like is people on edge 24/7, every phone call notification ping on their phone or computer, they think it’s from the kidnappers. They don’t sleep, they can’t eat, they don’t get any rest. And that’s fine for a couple of days, but after week, two weeks, two months, three months, six months, it’s just not sustainable. And the longer that goes on without an effective battle rhythm, people get burnt out and make poor decisions, and ultimately people can die as a result of that. And so what a battle rhythm really is, it’s about a routine. It’s about a structure. Again, this applies to the business world as well. Is, “Okay, we’re gonna sit down and we’re gonna negotiate between 2:00 and 4:00 PM every day.” And outside of that, each side is gonna work on their side of the deal, you know, their offers and counter offers and dealing with all the demands and threats maybe that are showing up. But it also means people get a chance to sleep, to eat, to rest, to think through things, to work out 4, 5, 6 steps ahead, particularly kidnapping. “Okay. Well, we need to start thinking about how we’re gonna get the money together and who’s gonna transport it, who’s gonna carry it to the kidnappers, for example.” So, that’s really what we mean by a battle rhythm.

Brett McKay: It’s interesting, I didn’t know this about hostage negotiations. You’d think hostage negotiations, they’d be resolved really quick. But the way you describe it, it can be a very long drawn out affair.

Scott Walker: Well, it’s worth emphasizing the different terms here, the hostage taking that people think of when we use that term, they think it’s like a bank robbery gone wrong, or it’s in a domestic situation where usually a disgruntled husband is taking the wife hostage because she’s having an affair with somebody. Or the bank robbers are caught in the bank and they can’t escape. Those situations aren’t that common. So, really what we’re talking about is somebody is on the way to the factory in West Africa or Latin America or Southeast Asia somewhere, and a kidnapping gang want to take them. And then we’re gonna ransom the family or the company for money. And that is what we’re talking about really here. And I said that could take days, weeks, or months to resolve.

Brett McKay: So, the battle rhythm is just establishing structure to the conversation that you’re having?

Scott Walker: Yeah. So, you can have a sustainable negotiation, which ultimately is important because if you don’t have it, it can impact the efficacy of the negotiation, which ultimately can impact the chances of the hostages coming back alive.

Brett McKay: And you can do this in your own personal negotiations where you say, “Hey, we’ll discuss this for 30 minutes and then we’ll take a break if it hasn’t been resolved. And then we’ll come back to it 10 minutes later.”

Scott Walker: Yeah. And as I said, we’ll sit down, we’ll meet up here in the meeting room between 2:00 and 4:00 every day and look to work through this. And then in the time outside of that, each side will have their own challenges and issues as I mentioned at the beginning. They’ll have their own crisis within a crisis, so to speak, where they’ll have to brief upwards. They’ll have to come together and work out what they’re gonna do and all the challenges and all the issues and problems that can come from doing these big negotiations. And so it’s in everybody’s interest to do this.

Brett McKay: Well, another aspect of establishing parameters for the negotiation, not only establishing a rhythm, it’s actually establishing who will be doing the talking and who you will talk to. ‘Cause one thing you talk about in the book is a tactic that hostage takers will often use is they’ll go to multiple parties and try to negotiate with multiple parties. Why do they do that?

Scott Walker: To spread fear, distress, dissent, confusion. Which is why one of my key roles at the very beginning is to try and get some control over those communications. And so we say it’s, we want one number, one voice and one message. We want the kidnappers and us to be speaking on one number. We want one voice on either side, and there’s gonna be a clear message, certainly from our side to them, one clear message. We don’t want four, five, six different people all trying to get involved, all trying to have their say, all in these parallel negotiations because ultimately it confuses the situation. It can lengthen the negotiations and ultimately threaten the ultimate outcome, which is the release of the hostages or in a business context, the deal. But you often see that particularly in the business world is where, well actually in kidnapping where people come out of the woodwork, they all feel as if they should have a say or an involvement. And sometimes they’ll open up these parallel lines of dialogue without each, you know, the other… The partner of negotiation realizing this, and it rarely ends up well.

Brett McKay: You know, who does this tactic very well of causing discord and confusion? Kids do this when they go to their parents, they’re like, “Hey dad, can I go to the amusement park?” And then your dad gives an answer, and then they also go to the mom, “Mom, can I go to the amusement park?” And then, they give different answers, kids are… They know about that.

Scott Walker: Yeah. They’re the best, best negotiators going around. And I’ll tell you what, if anyone listening has got kids that realize actually we wanna watch and learn how they do it. ‘Cause kids are masters at it, it must be an inherent thing that as adults, we lose it over time, perhaps. I don’t know.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So, it’s something you can do when your kids do that and they ask you a question where it’s kind of like, “Oh, I’m not sure.” Just be like, “Well, let’s talk about it with your mom as well.”

Scott Walker: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah [laughter]

Brett McKay: Yeah. You just nip that in the bud. Another aspect of prepping for a hostage negotiation is this idea of bunch of fives. What is that?

Scott Walker: Yeah. This is something I was alluded to a short while ago around as part of the preparation for any form of negotiation, if you can come up with a bunch of fives, and again, just imagine your hand, the palm of your hand, if you can think of, okay, what are the top three, four, five objections, challenges, opticals questions, threats, demands, issues, whatever the other side is likely to levy against you, if you can understand and work out what they’re likely to be ahead of time, that’s a great position to be in because you can then preempt, and you can mitigate against them. You could even introduce them yourself, you know, they’re the elephant in the room, so to speak, and you could just introduce them into the negotiation, and it gets it out the way because if there’s a chance that the other side are gonna levy them against you, it means that it’s gonna be playing on their minds somewhere. Which is why if you can have, and we use this in a kidnapped negotiation. We want a conflict call. We call it the conflict call.

We want that as soon as possible. And this is the phone call with the kidnappers where they’ll ask for, say, I don’t know a million dollars. And the family has got about 20,000. So, there’s a huge, huge disparity between the two. And so that initial conflict call is when we’re looking to manage the kidnapper’s expectations. Our initial offer could I don’t know, $10,000-$15,000. And obviously the kidnappers are not gonna respond too well to that, but it’s far better to have that at the outset than wait till you’re two, three, four, five weeks into the negotiation. And so this bunch of fives allows you to get to that position and have that conversation from a place of strength, because it’s not gonna faze you when the other side suddenly come out with the threat, the demand, the question, the challenge, the obstacle, the objection. And so it’s time spent preparing for that is time well spent in my experience.

Brett McKay: Okay. So, all the things we’ve talked about so far, the immediate action drill where you interrupt the pattern, ride the wave, maybe do some breathing, the separating the decision maker from the negotiator, this bunch of fives, this is all about developing that red center, that mental fortitude that you’ll stay calm when you’re in the process of negotiation. Let’s talk about actually just the negotiation process specifically. You talk about how it’s important to establish empathy with the other party that you’re negotiating with. And I think people can understand that when you’re in a business negotiation, you wanna understand what people’s needs and wants are. Why would you wanna develop empathy with a hostage taker who is threatening the life of somebody?

Scott Walker: I think it’s worth emphasizing what empathy is not at the outset. Empathy is not agreeing with somebody. It’s not acquiescing, it’s not condoning, it’s not even necessarily being particularly pleasant or nice. [laughter] Empathy, it’s a verb, it’s a doing word. It’s what you do to demonstrate you understand where the other person is at or where they’re coming from or what’s going on in their mind or their position. And people have difficulty with that because they bring their own ego to bear in the driving seat. And they allow that to get in the way and they’ll then be judging the other person where again, it’s really worth emphasizing, it doesn’t matter if I disagree with the person. In fact, empathizing with the other side when we do disagree, when we have nothing in common is really, really powerful. But if I can do that, I’ll explain how we can do that in a moment, but if I do that, if I can demonstrate that empathy, it enables them to feel seen, heard, and understood. And this is not some kind of woo-woo, fluffy nonsense.

This is, it’s grounded in neuroscience and it works. I’ve seen it work time and time again, both in situations where high stakes, life or death situations, and in a more benign, let’s say, corporate environment. If people feel as if they’ve been listened to and that the other side gets them, they’re more likely to agree to your terms and suggestions. And actually by empathizing, you’re earning the right, you’re building the trust, you’re earning the right to then look about influencing and persuading the other person to do something that they may not initially wanna do. And the way we can demonstrate that empathy is first of all, remove our judgment and ego out of the way. And it could be something simple as just summarizing where you think that the person is at. It’s like, okay, well, before we go any further, is it okay if I just share with you where I think you’re at with this deal? You think actually this deal, it’s a lot of money. It’s probably more money than you wanna pay right now.

You feel that actually we’re in a stronger position here and you may even feel as if we’re looking to rip you off because we’ve inserted these terms and conditions or clauses in the deal that you probably feel as if they’re not really fair to you. And this isn’t the first time this has happened. This is the third time as two businesses we’ve been in this position. And they’ll go, “Yeah, actually, Scott, yeah, Scott gets me. He understands. Even if I disagree with him thinking, well, actually, this is all above and beyond. It’s a standard contract, standard terms and conditions. And actually you’ve signed this many times before without any problem.” It doesn’t matter about that. I just wander to the side to think, “Ah, they understand me. They get me.” And then you’re almost given an open goal in which you can then start to influence and persuade.

Brett McKay: So yeah, you can do this even when the guy is saying, “I need a million dollars now or I’m killing this person.”

Scott Walker: Yeah. And it’s like, okay, well, “Hey, it sounds like getting a deal here pretty quickly is important to you so you can get back to your family or whatever it is you’re doing. And actually you believe that we’ve got the money at hand to pay you so we can get our loved one back.” And they go, “Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. You’ve got the money we wanted. Otherwise we’re gonna kill them.” Okay. Well, then we can actually at that point go, “Well, please, the responsibility of the hostages is down to you. I know this is important. I know you want this resolved, but you must look after the hostages. And if you do that, we’re gonna do our best to get you as much money as possible.”

Brett McKay: Another thing you do in a hostage negotiation is this idea of decreasing increase. What is that? And how do you use that in a hostage negotiation?

Scott Walker: Decreasing increases how the offer, counter offer, demand, counter demand, et cetera, how that goes. So, say there’s an initial demand for a million dollars and we, the family or the company, they can maybe get quarter of a million. That’s the maximum amount of money they can get. And so we would make an initial offer of, I don’t know, let’s say 150,000. And then each time we make an offer, we would do slightly less than the previous one. So, each time we offer some money, it’s less than the previous offer, which signals to the kidnappers where this is gonna go. Actually, they’re not gonna get a huge jump, a huge increase anymore. And the longer this goes on, the less and less we offer. The challenge comes when sometimes the kidnappers will say, “Okay, okay, this has gone on long enough. We understand where you’re at. You can’t get this much money. But actually, you know what? We’ll settle first.”

Let’s say we’re at $200,000 so far. They’ve declined that offer. And they’ll go, “Okay, actually, if you can get 220,000 to us by tomorrow, we’ll release the hostages.” If our last couple of offers have been in increments of maybe a 10,000, a 5000, and a 3000, and then all of a sudden we’re gonna find an extra 20,000 overnight, the kidnappers are gonna go, “Well, hang on. You’ve been telling me you could only find 3000 for the last couple of days, and now you’ve suddenly found 20,000 overnight? Well, then they’re gonna hold on for more.” And so it’s a way of bringing some discipline, I guess, and some structure to the negotiations. And again, as I said, it manages expectations. It sets the trajectory of where this is gonna end.

Brett McKay: That seems counterintuitive that you wouldn’t to just give the money that you have available, because I’m sure their loved ones are like, “Geez, I want my son back alive. So, just give them the $250,000.” Why wouldn’t you just wanna give the hostage takers the money they asked for right up front?

Scott Walker: That question probably gets asked on every single case. And the reason we don’t do that, the reason we don’t wanna do that, well, you imagine if we paid what they asked for too quickly, what do you think is likely to happen as a result of that?

Brett McKay: I guess they’ll just ask for more.

Scott Walker: They’ll go, “Thank you for the down payment. Thank you for the deposit. Now we’re ready to negotiate. And not only are we gonna keep that money, the poor courier, the poor person who you’ve managed to persuade to bring us the ransom money, we’re gonna keep him as a hostage as well.” And so what we wanna do, and it’s counterintuitive, I get that. But by bringing about this discipline in the negotiation, it actually shortens the amount of time that the hostages are kept for. And so we want the kidnappers to feel as if there’s no more money left. Because in the business deal as well, if you think there’s more money left on the table, you’re not gonna agree to a deal. And the kidnappers are no different to that. And we call it squeezing the orange. We want them to feel as if they squeezed every last drop of juice out of us so they don’t come back for more, so they don’t release the hostage and then they kidnap them or a family member next week, for example.

Brett McKay: So to come back to the decreasing increases technique, this would be like you’re negotiating for a new car and you throw out a low number and then that’s rejected and with your subsequent offers, what happens?

Scott Walker: The money goes up. My offers to pay more money would increase, but the amount that they would increase would decrease each time.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. Well, Scott, this has been a great conversation. I think the big takeaway is from this conversation, in a negotiation or a difficult conversation, you got to keep that red center, that inner citadel. We talked about some tactics you can do to do that. Is there like one thing you think that if someone started implementing today with difficult conversations they’re having, whether it’s at work or at home, where they’d see immediate return on investment?

Scott Walker: I would say it’s the emotional regulation piece. It’s any conversation or every conversation you have now and you can feel yourself getting a bit riled, it’s just pause even if it’s for a split second and just notice, “Actually, do you know what? I can really feel that tension coming up in my body. Okay, well, let me just focus on that. Let me breathe through it and then I can reengage.” And the more you can practice that, this can be a split second or one or two seconds maximum by the time you’ve practiced this. And I would urge people to then seek out worthy opponents, I call them. Those are those people who always annoy you and frustrate you or the situations you know are likely to be testing because it’s just a great practice to work those emotional regulation muscles. And if you can do that, it means you’re never gonna get fazed again in a negotiation when it really counts.

Brett McKay: Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Scott Walker: Yeah. They can go to the website scottwalkerbooks.co.uk and there’s more details on there. Sign up for the newsletter and get a copy of the book and learn about my negotiation workshops and other good stuff.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Scott Walker, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Scott Walker: Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Scott Walker. He’s the author of the book ‘Order Out of Chaos’. It’s available on Amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, scottwalkerbooks.co.uk. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/walker, you’ll find links to our resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, make sure to sign up for our newsletter. We’ve got a weekly option and a daily option, they’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AOM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to review our podcast on Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time it is Brett McKay, reminding you to listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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A friend recently sent us a post from Cup of Jo, a women’s lifestyle site that was founded close to the time Art of Manliness was, and like AoM, is one of the few blogs from blogging’s heyday that’s still around and kicking. Cup of Jo is known for its engaged readership (its mantra is “come for the blog, stay for the comments”), and that dynamic was on full display in the post in question. In it, Cup of Jo’s founder, Joanna Goddard, asked readers for their “random turn-ons.” Readers responded with over 400 comments sharing the little things in men that make them swoon. 

I found reading through the comments pretty charming and interesting. I think most guys are fairly clueless about what women find attractive, so this was a fascinating inside view of things. Some of the qualities offered were expected, like kindness, a nice smile, and a pair of broad shoulders. Masculine competence and capability — as one reader put it, “Knowing a little about a lot of things (change a tire, fix a sink, how to cook, etc.)” — were highly rated. Other entries were more surprising, like how sexy women find it for men to back up the car with one arm (mentioned multiple times), and the sheer fact that the thing mentioned the most by far was . . . forearms. The ladies love forearms, guys. (Perhaps the backing-up-the-car thing makes sense, then; as one reader observed, it involves competence and forearms.)

It’s also sort of heartening that a lot of the entries are pretty attainable and don’t require hitting the genetic lottery. Highly-rated things like skills and intelligence can be readily developed, and traits some men might think are drawbacks, like salt-and-pepper hair and a big nose, plenty of women actually find very attractive.

Below you’ll find a selection of the turn-ons that were shared, along with a selection of some of the comments that accompanied them. 

1. Forearms (“forearms omg swoon!”; “every woman is a goddamn freak for forearms”; “Totally into forearms especially if they are muscled from some kind of physical activity!”)
2. Rolled-up sleeves (because forearms) 
3. Salt-and-pepper hair
4. Intelligence (“I like it when a guy rants about something he is passionate and knowledgeable about!”; “Seeing my boyfriend do math in his head”)
5. Biceps
6. Easy confidence
7. Good with kids (“a man who loves to play with kids and can get them to laugh”)
8. Cooking skills (“I love when he throws a dish towel over his shoulder and shakes around the cast-iron pan”; “love it when they have their mise en place out!”) 
9. Flannel shirts
10. Good dancer
11. Manual competence/skills (“My husband once picked a lock, and when it clicked open I spontaneously flushed with arousal!”; “building a fire in a wood burning fireplace”; “A man who can fix things and make things happen”)
12. Parallel parking (“When we were still newly dating my bf pulled off a really impressive parallel parking job – unexpected major turn on!”)
13. Backing up the car using one hand (“When a guy reverses a car and puts his hand on the passenger seat back and looks over his shoulder…why is it so hot??”; that thing when men back up the car using ONE hand on the steering wheel. It is so hot, I can barely breathe. Something about their casual confidence—’I got this’”)
14. Crinkles around the eyes when smiling
15. Natural scent (“the smell of his neck when we hug”; “There’s a scent, like a natural pheromone something, like he’s been working all day and didn’t shower and didn’t plan on seeing anyone today but here we are, and I catch it as he moves and it triggers something instinctual that catches me off guard.”)
16. Sweaters 
17. Strong hands
18. Deep voice
19. Wearing Old Spice
20. Good posture
21. Chivalry/courtesy (“hold the door for you, if it is dark/unfamiliar/possibly unsafe…make sure you see the step, walk you to your car or destination”; “I was recently on a work trip with a lot of people, but I really hit it off (in a friendly way, not a romantic way) with one of my colleagues, so we walked between meetings a lot together talking. In the third or fourth day of this trip, I realized he always walked on the outside of the sidewalk. I thought it was a coincidence but when it occurred to me that it always happened, I realized he was doing it on purpose in a chivalrous way without ever planning to mention it, and I was touched!”; “Unexpectedly jolted by an unassuming man a little my senior. I was standing back to let him ascend the narrow stairs and said ‘after you’ and the tone of his voice as he said ‘Thank you & good morning’ woke me up in a way that coffee never does.”)
22. Reads books 
23. Tailored woolen coats
24. Classy sunglasses (“especially brown ones”)
25. Ability to speak a foreign language
26. Quiet dependability
27. Dimples
28. Wearing a baseball cap backwards (“I live by this tenet — Backwards baseball hats make babies.”)
29. A neatly trimmed back of the neck
30. Skateboarding
31. Work boots
32. Defined deltoid muscles
33. White t-shirts
34. Good conversationalist (“Being able to go somewhere without knowing anyone but fit right in instantly”)
35. Chest hair
36. Chopping wood 
37. Button-down shirts with the top button undone
38. Stubble
39. Wearing a tool belt
40. Henley shirts (“and henleys WITH forearms, of course”)
41. Fitted sweatpants or joggers 
42. Sports jackets and jeans
43. Broad shoulders
44. Hoodies
45. Big nose
46. Sense of humor
47. Suits (“Wearing a well cut navy blue suit, white shirt that has been professionally laundered and still has that hot iron smell, a classic silk tie, big feet in cap toes dress shoes. Feeling that warm muscled bod when you go in for a hug putting your arms between the shirt and the jacket!”) 
48. Glasses
49. Good in a crisis
50. Uniforms (“I’m talking firefighters, military, UPS worker…If you’re in a fitted head-to-toe uniform (usually with a well-kempt haircut) sign me up.”)

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