How to win friends and influence people? It is a perennial question, but science now has the answer, finds David Robson
IF YOU were to take one step to improve your health, what would it be: change what you eat, be more active or invest more time in your friendships?
Most people know that diet and exercise have huge impacts on well-being. Fewer realise that social connection is just as important. A slew of studies has shown that feeling supported and loved can help protect you from common conditions, including diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and heart attack. And the benefits don’t end there. In the workplace, good relationships are linked with greater creativity and job satisfaction – and a lower risk of burnout.
The obvious upshot is that we should put more effort into building strong and meaningful relationships. But many people find the idea of supercharging their social lives daunting. Up to now, science hasn’t been of much practical help because research was focused on environmental factors linked with loneliness, such as increasing urbanisation and reliance on technology. That might help explain why people seeking the secrets of better connection often turn to self-help gurus, whose advice is based on anecdote rather than data. But now there is a better way to think about this problem.
In recent years, researchers have made great strides in revealing the psychological barriers that undermine our attempts to build good relationships, and in discovering ways to overcome them. As I explain in my new book, The Laws of Connection: 13 social strategies that will change your life, most of us are needlessly pessimistic about our capacity to build bridges with those around us, and it is often surprisingly simple to cultivate better habits.
One early insight in this new field of research goes to the heart of how psychological biases can sabotage our social lives. Like many of the best scientific findings, it was inspired by a personal experience. One day, a few years ago, psychologist Erica
Boothby was talking to a new acquaintance while her partner and collaborator Gus Cooney stood nearby. She enjoyed the chat and warmed to the other person, but she worried that she had made a bad impression. To Cooney’s ears, however, the conversation had gone swimmingly. Discussing this afterwards, Boothby and Cooney, both at the University of Pennsylvania, wondered whether most of us tend to underestimate how well we have come across when we engage with someone new. So they decided to put the idea to the test.
To do that, they got pairs of people to chat for 5 minutes. Then, each person had to rate their agreement with a series of statements concerning their perceptions of their partner on a scale of 1 to 7. The statements were things like “I genera
