These scientific rules of connection can supercharge your social life

Several psychological biases undermine our ability to make new friends. Understand them and you’ll know the secrets to building meaningful relationships that last

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 generally liked the other participant” and “I could see myself becoming friends with the other participant”. They also rated similar statements about the other person’s perceptions of them, such as “the other participant generally liked me” and “the other participant could see themself becoming friends with me”.

As Boothby and Cooney had suspected, most people were overly pessimistic about their ability to connect. They believed that their partner liked them less than they liked their partner when, in fact, their warm feelings tended to be reciprocated. Boothby and Cooney dubbed this psychological bias the “liking gap”, and the experiments they followed up with showed that it can linger way beyond first impressions. In one survey of undergraduates, for example, students continued to underestimate how much their roommates liked them for up to eight months after they met.

The source of our social self-doubt isn’t entirely clear. Studies by WWolf Wouter Wolf at Utrecht University in the Netherlands suggest that it often emerges at around the age of 5, when we start understanding the concept of politeness and the idea that people might be hiding their true feelings. Whatever its cause, the liking gap might discourage us from following up on a pleasant conversation with a text or an email, or from making fruitful collaborations at work. Moreover, our reserved behaviour may confirm the other person’s perception that we don’t like them as much as they like us, eroding their social confidence.

Since the liking gap was discovered, the list of psychological barriers to social connection has grown substantially. Most of these biases do their damage by undermining the foundation upon which all close relationships are based – what researchers call “shared reality”. This is the sense that we experience the world in the same way as another person.

Shared reality

The power of shared reality can be seen in an experiment carried out by Maya Rossignac-Milon at the University of Navarra in Spain. Working with Boothby and others, she placed around 200 participants into pairs and got them to discuss the events depicted in a series of ambiguous film clips. After 12 minutes, they were asked to rate their agreement with a series of statements designed to measure their sense of shared reality, such as “we saw the world in the same way” and “we often anticipated what the other was about to say”. Rossignac-Milon found that these scores could predict a participant’s overall feelings for the other person: the higher the score, the more they trusted the other person’s judgement and wanted to continue the discussion. In other words, the more they felt they had “clicked”.

Multiple studies have replicated this finding. Whether we are considering close friends, romantic partners or passing acquaintances, the sense of shared reality predicts how close we will feel to someone. However, flawed social intuitions, such as those demonstrated by the liking gap, can lead us to act in ways that erode this sense of shared reality.

For instance, a natural tendency for egocentric thinking can prevent us from effectively signalling our attention to others. When in conversation, we tend to rely too much on body language and so-called paralinguistic signals, such as murmuring assent, to show that we have heard the speaker and agree with them. We assume that these cues will be read in the way we intend them to be understood. However, it is easy to fake such responses while your mind is wandering elsewhere, so others don’t necessarily trust them, and this can weaken their sense of shared reality. For this reason, it is much better to demonstrate your attention explicitly in words. Try paraphrasing what someone has just expressed – because that is very hard to do if you haven’t been listening. And if you agree with their viewpoint, be sure to express that validation verbally, rather than simply nodding.

You might also consider whether your conversations tackle the right type of subject matter to allow a shared reality to develop. Due to our natural reserve, many of us stick to superficial topics that skate over the more important issues in life. Research shows that when we share our intimate thoughts and feelings, this can put us on an accelerated path to intimacy. Yet most of us are reluctant to do this, as a team led by Michael Kardas at Oklahoma State University found in a study that encouraged “self-disclosure”.

Participants were placed in pairs and given a set of conversation prompts designed to promote greater connection, such as “for what in your life do you feel most grateful?” and “if a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, your future or anything else, what would you want to know?” Beforehand, people worried that the conversation would be extremely awkward compared with standard small talk about someone’s background or what they did on a public holiday. They were also concerned that their partner would have little interest in hearing their intimate thoughts and feelings. In reality, the encounter wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as they feared. Participants found themselves caring more about the content of the conversation and feeling closer to the other person than they had expected. In other words, the creation of a shared reality was much easier than they had anticipated.

A related psychological barrier sabotaging our ability to connect through communication is called the “beautiful mess effect”. Imagine that you are preoccupied by a failure at work, for instance. Most of us assume that if we share such worries by speaking with colleagues, say, they will see our confessions as weakness. In fact, people are more likely to appreciate our honesty and recognise the courage in speaking up, according to research by Anna Bruk at the University of Mannheim, Germany, and her colleagues. If we had a little more faith in the empathy of others, we may be surprised by the support we would receive.

The gratitude gap

Similarly, most people hold back when it comes to telling others how much they appreciate them, fearing that such compliments will sound ingratiating and unctuous, but the kind words are mostly welcomed – and the people giving and receiving them end up feeling much happier after the interaction. This bias, which I call the gratitude gap, prevents our acquaintances from knowing how much we notice and value their better qualities, which again undermines shared reality. Perhaps more surprisingly, so does our reluctance to share our own strengths and achievements. We fear that we will seem boastful, but this can backfire in the long run. When the other person discovers your good news from another source, your previous modesty seems paternalistic and insulting, as if you don’t trust them to cope with the jealousy that your success might provoke. The truth is that people are much more likely to feel confelicity – vicarious happiness – than we expect. It is simply another form of shared reality that can strengthen our bonds.

The mere awareness of these biases can put you on the path to correcting them. In many cases, however, you must also make a conscious decision to change your behaviour. One proven way to do this is with “implementation intentions”, which take the form of statements that set out a concrete plan of action. For example, imagine that you have decided to make more effort to meet new people – an excellent starting point for anyone who wishes to supercharge their social life. You might have the vague goal of “talking to strangers”, but you also need some specific strategies dictating when, where and how you will do that. Your implementation plan could be as simple as “when I am queuing for lunch, I will exchange a few words with the person next to me” or “next time I am at the supermarket, I will offer to help someone carry their shopping to the car”.

Practice makes friendships

You might feel some nerves the first time you put this into practice. You will probably overestimate how awkward the interaction will be and underestimate how much you will enjoy the exchange. But these anxieties will dissipate with time, as Gillian Sandstrom at the University of Sussex, UK, has shown. Working with Boothby and Cooney, she set participants a week-long “scavenger hunt”, which involved finding different kinds of people – such as someone with a tattoo or someone who looks artistic – and then striking up a conversation with them. By the end of the fifth day, the participants had much more positive attitudes about talking to strangers: they anticipated less rejection and awkwardness and felt more confident in their conversational ability.

Needless to say, you should respect other’s wishes to be left in solitude if they show no interest in a conversation. Fortunately, though, the research suggests this is much less likely than we imagine. Most people welcome the chance to converse with others in their community, they are just too shy to make the first move themselves.

Of course, some of us are shyer than others. But you need not fear that your personality will prevent you from tapping into the new science of social connection. Research shows that both introverts and extroverts get a boost in well-being from acting a little more gregariously (see “Why friends are good for your health”, below) The big difference appears to be in initial expectations: introverts tend to be especially prone to those negative predictions about how much they will enjoy socialising. Once they have taken the plunge, however, they find just as much pleasure in their interactions as extroverts.

Having immersed myself in this research for more than three years while writing my book, I am convinced that we all have the potential to find greater connection, along with all the benefits for our health, happiness and creativity that it brings. The social life you crave is closer than you think.

Why friends are good for your health

The benefits of a vibrant social life can seem unbelievable. According to an analysis of the results of many studies, it could reduce your risk of premature death by as much as 30 per cent. Conversely, lacking strong social relations is as bad for your health as being overweight, physically inactive or drinking too much alcohol (see main story).

There are many potential mechanisms through which connection results in such effects. One is that social support helps to soothe life’s stresses via emotional and practical means. Friends can give you a lift to the doctors when you are sick, for example, or provide childcare when you need to work extra hours.

It is also possible that loneliness is itself dangerous because humans have an evolved response to social exclusion. If our prehistoric ancestors were alone in the wild, they were at increased risk of attack by predators, so they may have adapted by releasing inflammatory chemicals that reduce the chance of infection from injury. While this would have improved short-term survival in the past, it increases our chances of stroke and heart attack today.

Given all this, it is no wonder medical authorities are now paying serious attention to the importance of relationships. The World Health Organization, for example, has just founded a Commission on Social Connection. Its aim is to raise awareness of loneliness as a global public health priority.

David Robson is a writer based in London. His new book The Laws of Connection will be published in June

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