Hidden Brain
Relationships 2.0: The Power of Tiny Interactions + Your Questions Answered: Erica Bailey on Authenticity
Mon, 14 Apr 2025
As you go about your day, you likely interact with family, friends and coworkers. These relationships can help you feel cared for and connected. But what if there’s a whole category of people in your life whose impact is overlooked? Today, in a favorite episode from our archives, psychologist Gillian Sandstrom reveals some simple ways to make your life a little more joyful and maybe even a little less lonely. Then, we talk with researcher Erica Bailey, who responds to listeners' questions about authenticity and how to reveal our true selves to the people around us.In this episode you'll learn: The sociological concept of "weak" and "strong" ties, and the important roles they play in our lives.How "weak ties" contribute to our happiness.How to talk to strangers — including how to start, maintain, and end a conversation.How to decrease feelings of loneliness and increase feelings of connectivity in your daily life.If you enjoyed today's conversation with Gillian Sandstrom, be sure to check out these other Hidden Brain episodes: You 2.0: The Gift of Other PeopleHow Others See You
Chapter 1: What is the importance of social connections for well-being?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Ask yourself what makes you happy. Many people would say spending time with close friends, quality moments with family, playing with a pet. Most of us can agree relationships are at the heart of a life well-lived. Social science research bears this out. Countless studies suggest that our emotional ties to others shape our well-being.
Long-running analyses that track people over time show that social connections are not just about our emotional well-being, they're important determinants of our physical health. But it's one thing to say that relationships are important. It's another to go about getting them or preserving them. Lifelong friends move away to other towns and countries. Romantic relationships come undone.
Relatives pass away. And especially as people get older, many find it difficult to form new relationships, even as they yearn to feel close to others. New psychological research suggests a solution to this problem, or at least a partial solution, and it's one that's easily accessible to everyone.
Last week in our Relationships 2.0 series, we looked at the common mistakes we make when negotiating with other people. This week on Hidden Brain, we bring you a user's manual on how to boost your social connections and your happiness. Rigorous studies suggest that the problem of loneliness is growing around the world. Many people feel they don't have others in whom they can confide.
Making friends can be hard, especially if you're someone who is naturally shy. At the University of Sussex, psychologist Gillian Sandstrom studies what we can do to combat the growing challenge of social isolation. Gillian Sandstrom, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Hi, thanks for having me.
Jillian, I understand that you were somewhat introverted and shy as a child. Can you describe the younger version of yourself to me?
I was definitely a shy kid, very bookish. And so I remember, you know, anytime we went to my grandma's house for Christmas and all the cousins and aunts and uncles were there, I would be off in a room somewhere with a book, just finding the quietest place in the house, just sitting there reading. And my dream when I was a kid was that I would grow up and I would live on an island.
I don't mean like a tropical island. I mean, an island that was just me. My own island, where I had a big library, and that was my dream.
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Chapter 2: Who is Gillian Sandstrom and what inspired her research on weak ties?
It doesn't get into politics and religion and all the heavy stuff that we avoid at the Thanksgiving dinner table. a fun interaction. So I just let him talk a little bit, but yeah, it just sort of drew to a natural close and I moved on.
Can you talk a little bit about how when we have conversations that are awkward or conversations that start off being interesting but end up in an odd place, many of us draw the wrong conclusion from this, which is that the next conversation is also likely to be difficult or the next conversation is likely to be unpleasant. In some ways, we overcount the likelihood of negative interactions.
So, yeah, I've run a bunch of studies in the lab where I've asked people to predict how a conversation will go. Then they actually have a conversation with a stranger, and then they tell me how it went. And the people's worries before the conversation are quite high, but after having the conversation, they say, you know, none of those things actually happened.
But if you ask them to predict what would happen if they had another conversation right now, those fears sort of creep back up, not all the way to the level that they were at before the study, but definitely higher than they should be based on having just had a pleasant conversation. So it seems that people have trouble generalizing.
And, you know, it makes some sense because every human is unique, right? So it'd be easy to think, well, just because I had a nice conversation with this person, why would I expect to have a nice conversation with the next person?
Jillian wanted to figure out if she could override people's tendency to undercount the likelihood of good conversations and overcount the risk of bad conversations.
The only way I can think of to fix this would be to get people to have a lot of conversations so they can start to see a pattern, start to see that most of these conversations are pleasant. But how am I going to do that when people don't even want to have one conversation with a stranger, let alone lots? And so I kind of stole an idea.
I was thinking, you know, I need people to, I need to turn it into a game. I need to make it fun somehow. And so I was thinking, maybe I could turn it into a bingo game or something. But a researcher in my department had placed posters around the building. They were recruiting people for a study involving a scavenger hunt. And it was a study about memory. But I thought, oh, scavenger hunt.
I could get people to do a scavenger hunt game that involves finding and talking to strangers.
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