Another day at home. Another day wondering if and when you’ll ever again see people the old-fashioned way, meaning in the flesh and within hugging range.
Another day when a thought crosses your mind: Maybe I should call that old friend. But no. That would be weird. And you’re not really phone friends anyway. Maybe you should text. Or email. Or just not bother at all.
Let Nick Epley tell you why you should make that call.
Epley is a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He studies social cognition, which, by his description, includes trying to understand “why smart people so routinely misunderstand each other.” He teaches about ethics and happiness and is best known for his research on the psychological rewards of talking to strangers. During this pandemic, he has been thinking about social connections in a time of enforced isolation.
“In daily life, when we’re not on lockdown,” Epley said by phone on Friday, “we connect with people often accidentally. We pass somebody in the hallway, say hi. They say hi back. Or I get on the train and there’s my friend Harold and I sit down and chat with Harold. You’ve got meetings with people. These connections just happen. You don’t have to make a decision.”
But now?
“Now social connection is something you have to decide to do. Any barriers in the choice are magnified.”
Epley’s not talking about required Zoom work meetings. He means our optional social interactions and our inclination to opt out. Or, if we do decide to connect, our decision to keep a certain emotional distance by emailing or texting. Our choices, he says, are often based on mistakes.
One common mistake?
“People underestimate how social others are. That leads to a general tendency to underestimate how positively people respond when you reach out to them in a prosocial way.”
Another mistake?
“People think it’s going to be more awkward to call up an old friend on the phone than it actually is.”
A phone call, Epley says, may feel too intimate, but an exchange of voices in real time provides benefits a written exchange can’t.
As he puts it: “You understand others more accurately, and feel more connected to them, when you actually hear what another person has to say than when you read the same content.”
Epley’s ideas are based on years of research. From his work he has deduced that we also underestimate the power of a compliment, an offer of help, an expression of support — useful behavior any time, especially helpful now.
But what about all of us who are feeling — paradoxically — socially isolated and socially overextended in this strange time? I’ve talked on the phone more in the past few weeks than I have in years. I know many people who say the same. And there’s a reason that “Zoom fatigue” has entered the common vocabulary.
“As with anything,” Epley said, “you can overdo it. Same with exercise. Don’t exercise eight hours a day. The idea is not to open up the valve on your faucet and let it run all the time — but when the plant seems to need watering.”
In other words: Not too much, not too little. Sometimes, not all the time.
“The data on happiness makes it very clear that happiness — positive mood, at least — is an emotion that is fleeting,” Epley said. “One nice thing happens and you feel good and then it levels off. A life that has a lot of positive mood in it isn’t determined by extreme moments, but by the frequency of positive moments.”
He refers to it as “sprinkling.” An example of sprinkling: After he hosted a recent webinar on social connections during the pandemic, Epley heard from someone saying they’d created a list of old friends to connect with. They planned to get in touch with one every day.
After I talked to Epley on Friday, I went out for a walk and was moved to call my best high school friend. We’ve exchanged texts in the past couple of weeks but I hadn’t talked to her in at least three years. The usual benign reasons: our time zones are different, not everyone likes to be cold-called, it’s easy to lose the rhythm of phone conversations.
But on a warm spring morning in the midst of a pandemic I called, without warning. She answered. We cried out each other’s names then talked for nearly an hour the way we had at 16.
As we were about to hang up, she told me a story. The other day she was sitting at her computer, feeling a little down, when she heard the sound of a violin. She stepped outside. There at the end of her driveway was a boy from the neighborhood playing just for her.
In my mind I saw her listening to the boy and I heard the music, which made me almost as happy as it had made her. It reinforced something Epley had said: “When you feel the inclination to reach out, do it, because it’s likelier to go better than you think.”
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