Think Better with Mario Small

Nicholas Epley:

I'm delighted to have our guest with us tonight, Mario Small. As you know, if you've been to any of our talks before, this is a talk series that we run in the Roman Family Center for Decision Research, the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. The goal of this speaker series is to present behavioral science research that's attempting in some way to make a meaningful impact out there in the world and to show how this is done. I'm delighted that Mario is with us tonight because it's going to show us a little bit of a different picture of behavioral or social science than we've talked about before.

And the other thing that this seminar series sometimes does, in addition to showcasing behavioral scientists to you, is it also sometimes connects behavioral and social scientists to each other, which is wonderful. So I have been apparently stalking Mario for the last 30 years, roughly. We were in the same tiny small college town together from 1992 to 1996 in Northfield, Minnesota. I was at St. Olaf College and he was on the bad side of the river at Carleton College in Northfield. He then went out to the University of Chicago in Cambridge, that one, for a few years in its PhD program. And I went to Cornell. He then went to Princeton. I went to the University of Chicago on the East Coast. He came to Chicago. We've been circling each other for a while.

Mario was here at the University of Chicago on our faculty in the sociology department from 2006 until 2014. He was dean of the Social Sciences Division, which if you don't know, academic life is a very big, rough, difficult, sometimes horrible job. He was in that for two years before he left. I didn't ask him why he left. He went back to the University of Chicago in the East Coast in Cambridge for a bit. And now he is at Columbia University where he's a professor of sociology, the Quetelet Professor of Social Science at Columbia University.

What distinguishes the work that Mario does from so many other social scientists is that there's a depth of understanding that he seeks that is unique. Most of us as behavioral and social scientists, what we try to do is we try to come up with a model of the person. We try to come up with a model of you what you are like, why you do what you do. And the way we do that is by not really paying attention to you. And what I mean by that is we take a lot of people like you and we put them in some condition over here and we take a lot of other people like you and put them in some condition over there. And we average across all of our differences, and we try to get some sense of what the typical person would be like, the typical version of you would be in each of these two contexts. We make inferences about averages.

Now there's great value in using that experimental approach to reason about averages, but that approach misses a lot as well. What Mario does instead in his work, he's both a quantitative researcher and a qualitative researcher as well, is he goes very deep into what it's like to be you both in his quantitative data as well as his qualitative data. So just one example of a quantitative approach. He's for instance, studied how structural inequalities can affect access to things like the banking system. So one thing we know is that poor neighborhoods, more racially segregated neighborhoods, predominantly Black neighborhoods in the United States tend to have less access, just harder to get to a bank, fewer banks around.

But what Mario does in his research is something even deeper than that. He goes to the individual person and thinks not just about is there a bank in this town that they could get to, but how long does it take you to get to a bank if you tried? And that depth, that individualistic approach leads him to discover something powerful like, it turns out there's more inequality and access to the banking system by race than there is by class. There's a powerful result.

The other thing that Mario does is he's fundamentally at his core, I would say in many ways, is a qualitative researcher. He's an ethnographer, so he spends a lot of time with people interviewing them, trying to find out what they're actually like.

And tonight we're going to focus both on the methodological approach that you take and its uniqueness and why you think it's important for social science and for our lives in general. And then we're also going to talk about how you use that in your more, I'll think of it as your more bread and butter core research on sociality, sociality both in terms of inequality but also in horizontal connection, who we reach out and engage to and talk to.

So your most recent book is titled Qualitative Literacy, and it's a guide for researchers to understand both interviewing techniques and ethnography. And I wonder if we could start off by having you tell us a little bit about what qualitative literacy actually means. What is that?

Mario Small:

Yeah, so well first thanks for that very kind and lovely introduction. And you forgot to mention that in my new university, I continued the tradition of going to places where nothing is happening and when things are calm and peaceful. The idea of qualitative literacy came about as I was thinking actually shortly after the 2016 election about our ability to assess how other people think. So we've all heard of the term quantitative literacy or many of us, this is the idea that people should have the capacity to read and evaluate quantitative data. So you might notice for example, that the newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times over the last 20 to 30 years have actually increasing their quantitative literacy. They produce more data, they're more sophisticated about how they report experiments. They're careful to tell when correlation is not causation. Sometimes in those big studies, like in the upshot, they'll give you actual data that you can play around with. To me, all of that is a wonderful development.

But what's interesting to me, and what started getting me to think about this is that over that same period, I didn't see a parallel increase in qualitative literacy, meaning the ability to think about and evaluate qualitative evidence. And I know I can see from your faces that even when I say qualitative evidence, what do you mean by that? If it's qualitative, it's not evidence. The evidence is the quantitative stuff. The qualitative stuff is just, I don't know, anecdotes or stories. And the answer is no. Lots of social scientists for hundreds of years have been collecting data qualitatively and doing so either well or poorly.

So all of you know the discipline of anthropology, anthropologists go to a field site. They spend one year, two years and on often exotic location, they take field notes, they literally write down what they observe in notes. What they write down is their data. And those field notes are their qualitative data. And when they come back and they produce a book, they produce a book that is either a well-executed book or a poor book, meaning either the qualitative data are effectively collected and analyzed or not so. And that's also the case with interview projects where somebody goes out, talks to a whole bunch of people about their lives, as many researchers have done about life of the rural people in Appalachia, low-income African-Americans on the South Side of Chicago, elite members of boards of directors, literally just talk to them about their choices and their motivations, and just like with any kind of data, either that you can do it well or you can do it poorly.

I think it is important not just for science but for society as a whole, that we collectively improve our qualitative literacy just like it's been important that we've improved our quantitative literacy because it affects our ability to think critically about what we're hearing and reading, particularly in the political realm. And I think it makes us better citizens.

Nicholas Epley:

So it feels like there's a bit of a conflict here that is a lot of data in the social and behavioral science is getting very big, very big, right? And very distant from the individuals within those data sets. The qualitative approach is to go very small and to go to the individual person, at least the interview approach, and to go deep within that person and to find out what their experience is in this moment. So I guess there are two questions. One is how do you think about navigating that intention? How would you take a qualitative approach to really big data? How would we do that?

Mario Small:

Oh, I can give you many examples. And here's two. So one of them has to do with the kinds of questions we ask. So that study you just mentioned about access to banks in low-income neighborhoods, I can tell you how we used to do studies like this 20 years ago because I did one study like this 20 years ago using this terrible method that I'm going to describe to you right now.

So basically what we did is the following. You take data at the zip code level because the Department of Commerce collects data on the number of banks in every zip code. And you say, okay, here's the number of banks in every zip code in the country, and then the characteristics of the zip code, which zip codes are poor, and which zip codes are rich and what their average income is and what their racial composition is. And so if you want to answer this question, it's really simple. You take the data that you got, the big data, all zip codes in the whole country, and you see whether the number of banks per capita is lower or higher in rich neighborhoods or poor neighborhoods or Black neighborhoods or white neighborhoods or whatever. It's a really simple exercise. And the idea is by doing this, you can finally understand access to banks.

It's a terrible idea. Number one, put yourself instead of from the perspective of the data that you happen to get, in the perspective of the individual trying to get a bank. If I plop you anywhere, if I plop you in a city right now, would you say, huh, I wonder which are the banks in the zip code? No, you wouldn't get on your phone and Google, what's my zip code and what are the banks in the zip code? No, you would say, how fast can I get to a bank? You would literally Google a bank and Google would probably tell you, here's the number of minutes it would take you to get to this bank and this bank in this bank, and you would just pick by the mode of transportation you have the one that's quickest, meaning our lived experience, which we can ignore because we have the convenient zip code data is actually the thing that we're trying to understand and the thing that we ought to be focused on.

So what I did was to say, okay, now forget about the fact that I can conveniently get zip code data. What happens if instead we took, let's begin with the largest cities in the country, and you just go to the middle of every block and then from the middle of that block you calculate how many minutes does it take to walk or drive, because some people drive. Or take public transit because cities differ in transit infrastructure, to the nearest bank. It's going to take a long time, and I will admit that, took a couple of years to get it. But that's the question we're trying to understand. We're not trying to understand what's in the zip code. We're trying to understand people's experiences.

And so the first thing I'll say is that when you change your... By the way, we got the answer. We did, and it turns out there's a ton of inequality. In fact, I'll just give you a simple preview. We looked at the number of minutes it would take to get to the nearest bank versus the nearest payday lender and check casher. Exactly, exactly. Because the question was, well actually, it's not just a question of how quickly you can get to the bank, but whether maybe you can get more quickly to something that's actually more expensive and less useful for you.

And so we just literally said, okay, simple question. How often is the probability that the bank is closer versus the payday lender closer higher as the neighborhood changes, for example, in racial composition? And we found something completely striking, even after you take into account how rich the neighborhood is, how many homeowners there are, what the unemployment rate is in the neighborhood, how many college-educated people there are in the neighborhood, the infrastructure of the neighborhood, just about everything we could think of, after we took all of that into account, all of the money, et cetera, the more African-American neighborhoods, the dramatically greater the probability that the payday lender is closer, closer meaning faster to get to regardless of mode of transportation.

Going back to your question, there's no way we would've arrived at that finding if rather than thinking in the world of, oh, well, I got the zip code data, these are the big data I had. We hadn't said, no, no, no, let's pause. Let's actually try to understand human behavior and what human needs are. And then reshift our focus, even if it means collecting a whole bunch of new data that took us two years. But that's the scientific question. The other thing is not the scientific question. So that's an example.

Nicholas Epley:

What's interesting there is that you didn't take a qualitative approach to that, but you took a qualitative perspective on that. That is, you saw it through the eyes of the person, which is what qualitative research is ideally meant to do, to get the perspective from you. I mean, if you're analyzing big data, the data that you get, they're also trying to understand human behavior and why folks are doing what they're doing, but you're oriented in a very different way.

Mario Small:

Well, I'll tell you why, it wasn't an accident. So before that project, I've spent years doing field research in low-income neighborhoods in Boston, near Chicago of the east, in New York, in Houston, and in Philadelphia. And I've talked to a lot of people about their neighborhoods, neighborhoods of very different racial compositions, mostly low-income neighborhoods, but not only low-income neighborhoods. And you know what I never heard somebody say? "I wonder how many banks there are in my zip code." But I heard a lot of people say, "It just takes forever to get to a bank." I didn't magically, spontaneously combust the question. It was the question that resulted from being out in the field and talking to actual people about their experiences enough that it became clear that the other approach, even though it was convenient, was the wrong way to do it.

Nicholas Epley:

Yeah, yeah. So much of what you do as a researcher otherwise is you're doing top-down perspective-taking, I'm trying to guess what it's like to be you as opposed to just getting it from someone directly.

Mario Small:

Absolutely.

Nicholas Epley:

So that's the value of qualitative literacy for science, which I think is crystal clear. But when I read your work on this, I also think that we should all be trained in qualitative literacy, that it would seem to be... Essentially what you're doing, at least on the interviewing side, is you're training people to be good questioners and conversationalists and to learn. So how would you think about... You wrote a book encouraging qualitative literacy. What would the value of that be for society at large? Let's say we taught this in school to kids.

Mario Small:

Oh, I think it would be fantastic. I think we'd all be more sophisticated thinkers and more empathetic people. I first started thinking about this right after 2016. And you might remember that was an election year, and Donald Trump was elected. You might have heard. And at the time, all of the major newspapers had predicted a different outcome, and everybody was shocked and appalled... not everybody was appalled, which is important. But certainly all of the major media outlets were shocked. And considering the amount of coverage that election had, I thought it's embarrassing that they were shocked. If the reporters were going out there and talking to people... I'm not just talking about pollsters. Polls have their own problems and their own strengths. If you're talking to people, why are you shocked? You could be surprised that the results were not within a particular margin of error, but you shouldn't be shocked that a large number of people voted the way they did.

And what I realized shortly thereafter is a lot of the narrative was relying on stereotypes, the Trump voter or the rural whites or whatever it is. And just to be clear, there are people who are Caucasian who live in rural parts of the country, but that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is the trope. And I realized that a lot of the people commenting just hadn't had a conversation with somebody who had voted for Trump and said, well, hey, why'd you vote for Trump? It's a pretty straightforward question. I don't care how... I mean I care for democracy's sake, but as a scientist, as a human being, it doesn't matter to me how any particular individual votes, it should be important to me why they voted how they voted. And we weren't doing that, and we weren't doing that because we weren't trained or accustomed to the basic fact of interviewing people with the objective of understanding the world as they understand it.

So a good interviewer goes out, and it is not a question of trying to shift people's political opinions or any of that. It's, I may disagree, but I want to understand how you see the world as you see it. If I'm strongly pro-choice, do I really understand how somebody who's strongly pro-life believes? If I'm strongly pro-life, do I really understand what somebody means when they say, "Keep the government off my body?" If I strongly supported Bernie Sanders, do I really, really understand why somebody who voted for, whatever, Sanders has had many opponents, take Joe Biden on the one hand, or Donald Trump on the other, actually capture why that person as they see it, made that decision? I think for many of us, for the most important questions we have today, the answer is no.

And as a result, I think we are all poor in turn. And sometimes think of this example, who is... my father-in-law. So I can tell you two very different things, and they're all true. My father-in-law voted for Trump in 2016. He's also a now retired construction worker. He's white. He lives in rural New York state. All of that is true. And so I can already see the image of the Trump voter.

The following is also true. Every morning before going to work, when he was working, he would get up at four in the morning and he'd spend one hour just reading literature before going to work. His last name is Mathewson, or his given last name is Mathewson. His born last name is Mathewson. His wife was a dark-skinned Puerto Rican woman whose last name was Garcia, like a good feminist in the 1970s, he changed his name to Garcia Mathewson. So he's now Mr. Garcia Mathewson no longer just Mr. Mathewson. He also voted for Obama, the two elections before that. Now, for some people, this is like an exotic, insane individual that you can't even perceive and you must think I'm making it up. But the truth is just go talk to people about how they made their decisions outside of their trope and you understand it.

Part of the reason I think qualitative literacy is important is because it should not be a shock that all of us have complex ideas about all of the things that we care about, complex motivations, complex perspectives. But it also should be very easy for us to talk to people routinely enough that you can paint two apparently contradictory pictures just like I did for a lot of the people in our lives. I think that it's an important feature of living in civilized society. And I think the absence of cultivating the skills of the interviewer, just like we've all... We don't have to be a mathematician to know that you better understand your taxes and that you better understand basic finance and you better understand compounding. We all get that intuitively. In a similar way, you don't have to be an interview researcher to understand that cultivating the ability to capture people's perspectives as they see them is important to living well in society today. So that's why.

Nicholas Epley:

I'm sometimes struck, if I think back to my education as a kid in rural Iowa at a public school, we took home economics classes, I learned how to sew a pillow and I could probably still do it today, but nobody ever taught us how to actually talk to somebody to actually understand them. How would you do this? Right?

Mario Small:

Exactly.

Nicholas Epley:

And it seems to be there are two things that would happen if you adopted this perspective more often. One is you get better at it. That is, I would learn what it's like to be you Mario a little better if I did this more often because I would just become a better interviewer. But the other is I would probably just do it more often. Right?

Mario Small:

Exactly.

Nicholas Epley:

I wouldn't be as nervous about asking somebody, how'd you vote and why?

Mario Small:

Both of those are true.

Nicholas Epley:

Both are true. Yeah, so this really lines up well with this, what I think of as the core of your research on which really is a social network kind of person, both the hierarchy part, which you already talked a little bit about, the social status part, but also the social connection part about reaching out to other people or avoiding others. And this forms the core of a book that I love very much that you published in 2018, Someone to Talk to, which takes on this really big question that you've been tackling over a number of different years now, focused on who do we go to in our social networks to engage with, to confide in, to talk with about one thing or another. And your answer to that is different from the way most researchers think about it.

So before we get to your answer to that though, what I want us to do is we're going to have all of you essentially participate in a little experiment with us here. So if you've got a piece of paper and a pen, you can get it out. If you have your phone, you can get it out too, I'm going to have you write some stuff down, okay? Have you write down a few names. So open your notes page, or if you need a piece of paper, Mario's going to start making paper airplanes and tossing them out. All right? I'm going to ask you three questions, okay? You can just number them if you want next to them.

Mario Small:

And just confirming, this is not a quiz and there's no wrong answers?

Nicholas Epley:

You're the professor here. I don't know. This is your research. You can decide to grade them if you're required by your contract. All right?

Mario Small:

No.

Nicholas Epley:

There will be no grading as far as-

Mario Small:

And nobody will see what you're write.

Nicholas Epley:

All right? First question. There are people with whom we talk about matters that are personally important, things that really matter to you. These are the people we confide in. Who are those people for you? You can type down names, you can type down initials. Who are the people you confide in about things that are really important to you?

All right. I see some of you looking at me who have fewer people to confide in and some of you're still writing things down.

All right, second question, second question. Now I want you to think about something else. What are the most personally important matters that currently concern you? The things in your life that are currently of concern to you? Jot down what those topics are.

And then the last question is, think about the last time you talked with someone about each of those topics or if you've got a long list, just think about the last one you wrote. Think about the last time you talked with someone about each of those topics. Who did you talk with about it? Jot their initials down next to it.

Mario Small:

I just did it.

Nicholas Epley:

You got the effect? All right, so let's take each of these questions in turn a little bit slowly. Let's start with this first one, and I want to hear a little bit from you about the history of how sociologists and psychologists, folks interested in social connection have thought about the people we confide in. So look at that first row, this question survey researchers have been asking for years, including starting here, how have sociologists and psychologists thought about the people we confide in over the years?

Mario Small:

Yeah, there's a couple of different ways, but here's a very simple one. So we all are embedded in a social network, meaning a set of people we're connected to and who have some set of connections among themselves. And one useful distinction is the distinction between the strong ties and the weak ties in the network. So the strong ties, unsurprisingly, are the people we're close to. For example, the people we confide in. The weak ties are acquaintances, people we don't know that well, et cetera.

And a very basic idea that's been examined in a whole bunch of different places is that weak ties and strong ties are both useful to you but in different ways. So weak ties are the people who you don't know that well, but you would go to when you want to find a job or you're trying to find something very specific. They're the the computer scientist I rarely see, but who has a solution to the problem I'm looking for? Or that guy I met in yoga class who's just really good at knee pain or whatever. But then the strong ties are of course, like in my case, my wife, et cetera, the people who I'm very close to, rather than seeking out new information, they're the people I confide in.

And so the base idea is when you answer that first question, you are essentially capturing your network of confidants, meaning the people we're most likely describe as your strong ties. And I'm happy to tell you I did it just now, and I wrote three names. One is my wife, Tara, one is my... You don't have to tell me yours, but I don't have a problem telling you mine. One is my dear friend from College, Bell from Carleton College.

Nicholas Epley:

Oh, all right. Probably a good person.

Mario Small:

Excellent Northfield in Minnesota school, one of at least the two best colleges in that town. And the third one is my childhood friend, Maria Lee, who lives back home where I grew up.

Nicholas Epley:

Okay, so for decades essentially sociologists have thought about these close ties as being the folks that we've gone to.

Mario Small:

Absolute. No ambiguity about that in the field.

Nicholas Epley:

Who do we actually go to?

Mario Small:

So the question you first heard was a very standard question for eliciting strong ties. They're like, well, who are the people you talk about the most important things you're concerned about. I listed the people I would respond and answer to that question. But in the second set of questions was the practice-based question, which is now think about the things you're actually worried about, right? Literally your actually lived experience. Now think about the last time you talked to somebody about that and who was it.

So I'm happy to share mine just for the sake of this discussion, even though they're personal, it's okay, I'm going to describe them in general. One was violence in very general terms, probably not that hard for you to figure out where. The second was my children's schooling, a bunch of concerns involving that. The third one was really just work-life balance, just stress in general, just been a concern. And what's interesting is that the last person I talked to about any of those three was not any of the three people I mentioned. It was Ryanne. A former-

Nicholas Epley:

This afternoon.

Mario Small:

Literally this afternoon back in 2012. And yeah, 2012 because she graduated, a former student of mine, her daughter was coming here and I hadn't seen her in a decade or more. And she said, "Hey, you want to have a coffee?" And I said yes. And we were talking about how life had changed over the last 10 years and Ryanne asks a lot of questions. She's a very good student. She does. And I ended up confiding about some of the issues I was having around-

Nicholas Epley:

So let's get just a quick show of hands. How many of you did something thing like Mario did just now, that is look at the people that you listed in response to that third question, the people who you've recently talked to about something that's bothering you, people you've actually confided in. How many of you have new people in response to number three that are not listed as the people you confide in in number one.

Mario Small:

That's about right.

Nicholas Epley:

Another way to ask that is how many of you talked with your closest confidant about the thing you listed in number three.

Some, but not all.

Mario Small:

Some, exactly.

Nicholas Epley:

The show of hands looks about what you find often in your work, that it's around half roughly.

Mario Small:

Yeah, slight majority actually. Yeah. And so part of what that showed us, I think... And by the way, in a nationally representative study of US American adults, we found a very similar thing. You ask people who are the people you're close... it doesn't matter actually how you ask, who are the people you're close to? Who are your strong ties? Who are the people who are important in your life? Who are the people you normally talk to? You get the same answer. They name usually about three people, some people name about five people. And then you turn the page so to speak, and you ask them, well, think about the things that are actually worrying you right now. You can use the same wording as you used before, but focused on actual things as opposed to on people. And then you ask them who the last person they talked to and slightly more than half of the time it was a new person they hadn't mentioned. Sometimes it was something totally surprising, sometimes literally it somebody like Ryanne.

There is no scenario I can think of where anybody could have asked me any question about the nature of my networks where her name would've shown up. I literally hadn't even heard from her since 2012. But she was there and clearly I needed to talk, and so we talked. And a lot of what we learned as a result of this work is, and again, we're going back to the theme of, okay, there's a theory that's great, but what happens if you actually capture people as they're making their decisions, is we tend to see ourselves as fundamentally rational in our self-protective distrust, meaning we don't want to put ourselves in vulnerable positions. But the truth is, when we are going around our business, we need to talk so often that we just do it all the time with a lot of people in airplanes and train stations. I flew Southwest on the way here. I was telling Nick earlier, Southwest, for some reason everybody's always talking at Southwest, all sorts of personal issues.

Nicholas Epley:

They've read some research.

Mario Small:

Exactly. Health stuff, deep confidences about cancer. Actually twice somebody tried to, before I was married, set me up with their friend. So it's funny, I believe that the need to talk is so fundamental that it supersedes our belief that we're only willing to do it with the people we're really close to. And I think that's what many of you saw in your answers.

Nicholas Epley:

There's another interesting thing about your work here too about strong ties and that is these are people we also often avoid talking to. Again, this is one of these really deep insights that you get when you take this qualitative approach and really ask people about their lives. So my bet is that in that number one list that you have of the people you confide in most, there are probably some topics that you would never talk to those people about.

I was in somebody's office the other day who was telling me, "I believe this research on the importance of connecting and talking to people and yet I just can't do it with this person, Even though I know it, I can't do it. And it was with my dad. And what is the magic trick to do this?" I wrote a little prescription on a napkin for... They can't do that for everybody. But this is a very different way of thinking about our close confidants. These are people we turn to. But these are also people we often avoid with stuff and we have a hard time talking with them about as well. So how do we think differently about what these social networks are like or these close confidants are like, what these questions are asking us if close confidants are also people we actively try to avoid sometimes?

Mario Small:

So I'll tell you by telling you how I arrived at that finding. So it also began with a qualitative study. We started doing interviews and we were interviewing graduate students in their first year in their PhD programs because we wanted people who were going through very difficult times. Literally that was a purpose of the decision. And we drilled deep down and the people would tell us the people that are close to and they would just... Tell me about what you're worried about? And they would of course say money, graduate school, etc. Who do you talk to? And what about these people you just named? And they very often would say, "No way."

Example. Bless you. There was a young woman, I remember her distinctly, she described her mother as almost like her best friend. And the young woman had been in a long-term relationship and she'd had a conflict with her boyfriend and there was just no scenario where she was going to tell her mother. She was just no way. And I was like, well, how come? She's like, "Well..." And so I will tell you what she said, but first I'll tell you what we realized about avoidance. And this is just a way of giving people sort of exactly what we're trying to understand.

So it turns out I think it has to do with the many complicated roles. The people who are very close to us fill. So my wife, she's obviously my wife, but she plays very different roles in my life. So she's obviously my intimate, we have children. So she's also a co-parent with me. She's a journalist and so she's also a critic of my work. The book, she read all that book multiple times over. She's my supporter, she's my advocate for certain things. So there's actually very different kinds of roles. And our relationship works to the extent that she enacts the role I need to her enact when I need something.

So when I give her my papers, I don't want her to give me a hug. I want her to tell me what's wrong with it. I want the critic role. If I'm having a terrible day at work, I don't want her to tell me what I'm doing wrong. I want the supporter role and she gets it. But when we fear that the people who we're close to might enact the wrong role, meaning that our expectations about what they should do are incompatible, we're, I believe likely to avoid them.

So going back to the young woman and her mother, she knew that if she started talking to her mother about her boyfriend, she was going to get the protective mother, not the supportive, just give me a hug. She didn't want to hear all of the bad things about her boyfriend and how he's not good enough for you or any of that stuff. She just wanted the equivalent of the hug. And so it's not that people want hugs all the time, it's that people can enact very different roles. So I think a lot of avoidance happens because for certain things, some of the people we're close to are just the worst people in the world, even though they're in fact close to us.

And so that is the the other side of the paradox about how we think about how those were close to. We even call them our confidence. But the truth is in practice we're not only very willing to confide in a whole bunch of random people, for lots of reasons, including they might know more, we actually, in fact, and we know that's empirically because after that study we ran a national... I just heard it make the papers, almost done. We ran a national representative survey, US American adults, so we know this for sure, the average American adult, if you take the people they describe as the people they're close to is as likely to avoid those people as they're to talk to those people when they're actually facing something. We avoid as much as we talk. We do both. It's not, oh, I'm close to you, therefore I know I can trust you. I'm close to you, therefore it's complicated. For some things you're awesome and for some things I just need to not talk to you.

And so I think being aware of this aspect of our relationships, actually I think is... it can do wonders because we don't expect people to do everything. We know how to communicate what we want and what we need. My wife now jokes because she's read the book and the paper, she jokes to me, she's like, "Mario, I don't want that critic role. I just want the supportive role right now." Like, okay, here's the hug. So I think it helps our relationships as well.

Nicholas Epley:

So the other interesting thing about this most recent paper, which the results are not in the book, but this is the brand new thing, is that basically everybody is approaching and avoiding in roughly equal measure across pretty much every demographic strata you could possibly find. And it's easy to imagine. So if you had asked me to predict rates of approach and avoidance across... I would've had all kinds of different theories about all these differences. And basically it's all the same. We're doing this all in roughly equal measure [inaudible 00:39:27].

Mario Small:

Oh my goodness, I'm a sociologist so I always think, oh, there's class differences. Clearly higher income people are going to avoid more because it affects their careers. Nothing, not income, not education, racial difference, none. Women avoid a little bit less and men avoid a little bit more. Women talk a little bit more, men talk a little bit less, a little bit. And that's it. Other than that, everybody does it.

Nicholas Epley:

You had another interesting finding in this about the experience of approaching and avoiding on people's well-being. Because the experience of having somebody to talk to versus needing to avoid a confidant, those feel like fundamentally different experiences, right?

Mario Small:

Absolutely. Yeah. So it's interesting. So you might remember, some of you, there was a debate some years ago where people were arguing that Americans were becoming more socially isolated. And part of this was on the idea that... but it turned out to be wrong empirically, but for a while, the newspapers that should have had more quantitative literacy and studied the papers more carefully, they were reporting on the findings. People believed that Americans were reporting... You know how he did this exercise and you named certain numbers of people, some small proportion of you couldn't name anybody. And also most of you named some number, and I'm going to guess most of you named about three people. It's just a guess. Well, apparently people thought the probability that you named nobody went up and the average number of people you were naming went from three to two. And so the idea is well, people have fewer people to talk to and therefore they're more socially isolated, therefore well-being is coming down. Turned out that empirical finding was wrong. It's still about three.

But I think that even though that empirical finding was wrong, it regardless was missing a more important issue, which is that avoiding people and talking to people are not actually opposites. The opposite of talking is just not talking. Right now, I'm not talking to a whole bunch of people, I'm not talking to the man in the camera. But avoiding means in my head I'm thinking I might talk to you, but I'm going to decide I'm not going to do it.

We looked in our survey and there's a couple of other ways of avoiding. Sometimes you're avoiding that, you would never think about it. But most of the time in terms of what we're talking about, it's really active avoidance as in I have this real big problem. Oh, Nick's here, should I talk to Nick? Better not. I'm avoiding Nick. We found, and this is only an association, this part is only brand new, we don't know, we have to test it, that the positive effect of talking was smaller than the negative effect of avoidance on well-being, meaning having to avoid the people you talk to is worse for your well-being than getting to talk to them is good for you. Because if you think about it, think about the stress of being like, well, I really have to talk about my work-life balance or my children or whatever it is. Should I talk to Amy? I don't know. Maybe. That process, we believe it's particularly detrimental to well-being.

Nicholas Epley:

So this reminds me a little bit of the work on secrecy in psychology where what seems to be detrimental, what's hard about keeping a secret is not having things that you're not sharing with other people, but the actual act of concealment, the act of trying not to talk about this thing. So that raises a question that maybe is a little harder to address with the qualitative approach because that can tell you what is happening in the world. But is that pain that we go through avoiding, is that well-placed in these cases? Are we avoiding too much? Is there anything in the data that you've collected that helps to give us a handle on that?

Mario Small:

That's a great question and I don't know for sure, other than resorting to your work, but my sense is that a lot of avoidance is misplaced, meaning not that people are wrong, we know the people we're close to and we know who can fly off the handle and so on. But the truth is we already have a natural tendency, especially around sensitive issues, to overstate the negative consequences of a possibility of talking to somebody.

And so one way of thinking about this is prescriptively. Suppose we all cultivated our qualitative literacy in our capacity to interview and talk and listen how people are thinking, and we all conquered this fear of... or this tendency of overstating how bad things are. I'm going to use again, my wife as an example, let's say I'm actually worried about it. In fact, I just gave you an example. She's worried about me not getting it. All she has to do is, and she does it, say, "Hey, Mario, I know you know X, but I don't need information right now. I just need you to listen." Or, "I'm not looking for advice, I just need to brainstorm or I just need an ear." Literally just literally communicating that fact. She gets all of the benefits of talking on the plus side and she undercuts the stress of avoidance because she knew our relationship is multi-role and what to do to get me.

Moreover, I hear that and I'm not offended. I'm happy because I'm going to be useful in exactly the way you want. She says, "I need you to listen." I'm like, ah, bet." I don't have to think about... Seriously, I won't screw it up. I won't screw it up.

Nicholas Epley:

Just tell me what to do,

Mario Small:

Just please. No, by the way, my wife is extremely lovely and a very good communicator, which also helps. I will say that. But I was just saying earlier, before I did this work, it had not occurred to me to think about my close relationships as multi-role relationships. If you'd ask me about my wife, I'd say, well, she's my wife, she's my best friend. Something like that. That's the kind of stuff people say. But if I actually break down the very different aspects of our relationship, it becomes clear that actually they're very multiple roles and they're not actually all the same role, which by extension means I probably are also for her multiple kinds of roles, which means that I should be as attuned to that as if I'm the person confiding.

And so I think it's conquerable is the short of it, and if it is conquerable, then I think it is in fact the case that we're not quite right in avoiding as much as we do if our aim is overall well-being.

Nicholas Epley:

So there's a way maybe from this research to recognize that you've got a little more agency in your relationships than you might imagine to ask for the type of support you need at this moment-

Mario Small:

I think so.

Nicholas Epley:

... to avoid a little less?

Mario Small:

I think so.

Nicholas Epley:

You might not need to seek out a different person. It occurs to me that we probably can do this with lots of other people as well, not just our close confidants who we do have multiple different kinds of relationships as well. But even with our acquaintances, I've got a number of colleagues here who I love and are wonderful friends, and I could probably, just like I could with Jen, my wife who's wonderful on many dimensions, we have the same kinds of roles that you do, I could probably ask them to do different things as well to support me in different ways as needed, critique this paper or just let me vent for a minute or tell me how to solve this problem here.

Mario Small:

Absolutely. It's funny that you mentioned it. I was just thinking about, I have a student and it's a student and I'm pretty busy and I'm a no nonsense advisor. And so we meet and our role is student-advisor and that's it. I had him in a class one semester, and so I had a second role, I was the evaluator in the class. But the student, they went through a very particular difficulty, very personal difficulty, and he came to my office and we talked and I just heard him out. And he's a tough kid. He's not a kid. Tough young man. And at the end of the meeting he just looked at me, he's like, "Can I give you a hug?" And I said, "Sure." I wasn't going to come and hug him for a lot of reasons. The modern workplace, we all get it.

But I thought it was smart and brave, but more smart than brave of him to do. So he just said, "Look, I need..." Think about it, anybody asks you, "Can I just give you a hug?" You're not going to say no, you're just going to do it no matter what, and it'll be a quick hug. And he just felt a relief and he said, "Thank you, dog." And he just went off like nothing happened. And so I think absolutely.

It's interesting, you're making me realize that even in multiple roles that we wouldn't have expected, you can make a huge difference to somebody by just doing the obvious thing you would've done, which means of course that if you're on the other side, the number of people who would be completely happy to do the equivalent of giving you a hug, listen in the airplane about your cancer story or tell you about their daughter who hasn't gotten married and he's worried about not having grandchildren. Obviously this is all true stories.

Or I was thinking about this recently. So I do yoga and I have for about 15 years or so, and there was a studio I used to go to. And in this studio I made a friend, but it was like a yoga friend. So you literally talk, and some of you know what I mean, you talk in the 10 minutes, it takes you to put out your shoes back on and dry off your face before you got into your car. But you do it enough times and you get to talking. And so the one time we just had a conversation, this was somebody who I only saw in the yoga studio, had never seen outside of the yoga studio. I liked very much. We were friends, but we were yoga studio friends. We literally never even had a coffee.

And they were down one day and I said, "Well, what's going on?" And it's a tough story, but it's all fine in the end, she confided that many years earlier, her partner had taken his life and blamed her for it, which is about the... I mean, I can't imagine more difficult emotional interpersonal pains than that. But in that moment, I mean I listened and I was sympathetic. We talked and you could just feel the relief of... And I guess it must have been the anniversary or something, some event had brought it back to mind. But I just think you can imagine the weight that somebody like that has. And on the other side, comparative ease of talking to somebody. I mean, I was literally the yoga person, just enough to talk, just enough to feel comfortable about it, but clearly known enough that there was just no way I was going to violate that confidence. Either do something wrong or do anything other than say, "Hey, I feel for you."

Nicholas Epley:

So there are a couple of things that occur to me in that story. One is the power of releasing this thing that you otherwise just suppressing and trying to avoid to somebody.

Mario Small:

Absolutely. It's going to eat you.

Nicholas Epley:

But you also made yourself... you made it clear that you were willing to listen to this, that you made yourself into a role that would work for that. So we talked just a bit about what your research can tell us about how maybe to work with our relationships a little better to avoid less. Are there things that we can do as confidants? So my bet, if I knew that I was on somebody's list in the number one spot, but not in the number three, they were avoiding me for some active reason. I would feel terrible about that. I would feel bad about that. So there're probably people in our lives who are avoiding talking to us about something. How do we be better confidants?

Mario Small:

Yeah, it's a really good question. So the first thing I would do, and I have done this since doing this work, is think about the multiple roles I'm playing in this person's life as a close person. We all have multiple, I mean, that's the key, it is never just one thing. Well, it's often just one thing if it's somebody you don't know that well, you could just be the yoga friend. But for somebody you're close to, relationships end up being what people call multiplex, meaning you're close in multiple different ways or for multiple different reasons.

And so the first thing I would do is think about all those multiple roles. So for example, this happens with a lot of my students. I teach them in a class and they ask me to be their advisor, then I hire them for a project. So I'm boss, collaborator, instructor. Those are very different roles. And so the first thing is literally awareness of the multiple roles you play in their... To me that's been revelatory beyond belief.

And the second thing is articulating it. hey, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here are the roles. And that turns out to help in some circumstances. I've had a student come to me and say, "Hey, can I ask you a question, not as Professor Small, but as Mario?" You bet. And suddenly, once you articulated the fact that, hey, I'm your professor, but here I have to be your boss. And they understand that, it becomes a lot easier for them to say... I mean what they did, and this happened to me, what that student did, this is a different student, is the equivalent of my wife saying, "I don't need the critic, I just need the supporter." Or, "I don't want the funny man, I want the whatever." And so articulating that makes it easier for the other person to invoke it, which makes it easier for you to actually play the role. That's the first thing that comes to mind.

Nicholas Epley:

The other thing that's important here, and I agree it would be very powerful, you're aware of these multiple roles that you play in your life, that can also help to explain some of the conflict you get in with people where you think you're in one kind of relationship and they are imagining you in a different one and that creates a lot of conflict. It can, yeah.

The other thing that occurs to me from your work that was just really a powerful insight, I think, was there's... one way to read your work is as an advocacy for acquaintances. That is, it is true that we can acknowledge that people in our lives play multiple roles and we can call on them and we can also offer up those roles to other people. What do you need from me now? And we can do that. But the other thing is I read that research about increasing isolation and declining confidence with some anxiety. And I think about this in my own life as I have kids and work, I have fewer friends. And that's scary.

On the other hand, your work, I think also champions acquaintances, people who are the yoga person in our life, broadening out that base so we don't have a peak in our relationships, but something that looks more like a pyramid, a few confidants, some friends, but then a big base of acquaintances who can also turn to, for all the complicated things in our lives that we might want to turn to people for at times when we don't have other people available to us.

Mario Small:

I think it's absolutely the case. In fact, they can even be better. One of the things, what we found in that study that was that a lot of the time what people were looking for when they needed to talk was cognitive empathy, meaning not sympathy like pity, but empathy in a cognitive sense. Literally somebody who can say legitimately, I understand. And the thing about that is that we all live multifaceted lives, and many times the small number of people we're close to can be very sympathetic, but not actually cognitively empathetic. Meaning they can give us a hug, so to speak, but they can't legitimately say, I understand.

In one of the case studies we found there was a study of doctors who made medical mistakes and how they dealt with it. Imagine if you're a doctor, you screw something, you can kill somebody. I mean, it's a really, really difficult thing to do. And the study was about who they literally talked to when processing, I almost killed somebody, or I killed somebody, or I injured them. I always remember when I think about that study, when I went to have my ACL replaced, the doctor came and said, "We're going to take good care of you." And I said, "It's the other knee."

And I was like. No, really. And so you can imagine... Exactly. But what's interesting in that study was that they found that the proportion of doctors who spoke to other specialists about their mistakes was greater than the proportion who talk to their own spouses. If my wife were a doctor and she said, "Oh my goodness, I screwed something up and the baby's going to be whatever," I would feel terrible and I'd give her a hug, but I would just not understand even how one makes that mistake. There was just no any legitimate claim whatsoever for me to have actual cognitive empathy, even though I would have deep sympathy. But the other oncologist or whatever it is would understand exactly what you did and exactly how it happens, could legitimately tell you, "Oh my goodness, I also did this." Or, "I could have seen how that could happen." Literally, they can give you something that the people you're close to actually cannot give you.

And so I think an important part of the reason weak ties are valuable is that the tie who's most cognitive empathetic for many of the things that face us, things about work, things about finance, whatever it is you're doing, is more likely to be a weak tie. I am not married to a Panamanian sociologist expert on networks who likes Chicago. We marry people we're compatible with who have very different kinds of capacities and my wife doesn't do yoga, so if I pull the muscle and talked about yoga, she would just say, "Well, that's bad." Whereas my yoga friend would know exactly why the psoas was hurting in the particular way. It's a totally different level of understanding. And we need that. I believe we, again, I'm not a psychologist, but I've seen a lot of evidence that we need that understanding and we can get it through the weak ties for many things far better than from the strong ties.

Nicholas Epley:

All right, so the role I need to play for you now in your life, Mario, is to get you to the airport on time so that you can get home to Tara and your kids this evening. And so I want to thank you so much for coming here. This has just been a wonderful day for me to spend time with you. Thank you so much for coming.

Mario Small:

Thank you very much.

Nicholas Epley:

And thank all of you for coming. This is our last talk of the quarter. We will resume in the fall and I will look forward to seeing all of you back with us in the fall. Thank you so much for coming.