By A Little More Social, University of Chicago professor Nicholas Epley’s book that can help repair our frayed civic fabric, opens with a hat story.
Riding a commuter train, Epley watches a woman in an elegant red hat take the last open seat beside him. Around them, passengers sit with “heads bowed in silence on the hunt for their own isolated acreage of solitude.” Then Epley says, “I love your hat.” She lights up. Thirty minutes of conversation follow — about families, jobs, and “how often we choose to ignore each other” in situations like this.
Epley’s paradox is simple: we are “social creatures whose happiness, health, and success depend” on other people, yet we are often reluctant to reach out in ways that positively connect us with them.
Through theory and empirical studies, Epley teaches us that our “overly pessimistic expectations about how others will respond” to our efforts to be social keep us from “doing good for others” and, in the process, “ourselves.”
Epley is not asking the socially awkward among us to operate hospitality wagons or engage in endless small talk. He wants us to notice the habitual reactions that keep us from helping build a more civil society.
Introverts might worry that Epley is asking them to transform themselves into extroverts. But Epley takes social anxiety seriously, drawing on clinical research to insist that the cure is not reassurance but exposure; anxious people “don’t think their way into feeling better; they feel their way to thinking better.”
The book’s first part is weakened by an overemphasis on studies of the benefits of extroversion. Introversion and extroversion can be fluid labels, as David Hume might have pointed out, and Epley’s best advice does not require extroversion. So, introverts, read on.
Reading A Little More Social reminded me of the years I flew Southwest. Weekly travel brought “A-list” status, and one woman flying regularly on the same route often stood near me in line. At first, she was only a familiar face. Then we began to talk, and eventually we sat together. The stranger in line became a person with a demanding job as an air traffic controller and a childhood marked by orphanhood. Epley’s experiments explain why that memory stayed with me: a small breach in routine silence turned a commute into meaningful engagement.
Other encounters are briefer: a kind word to a mother struggling with a child and luggage in an airport elevator, a passing compliment, a few minutes with someone we might otherwise treat as background. Most exchanges do not become friendships, but each weakens the habit of assuming strangers are best left alone. They are tiny acts of building a high-trust society.
In his biography of Thomas Jefferson, Jon Meacham recounts Margaret Smith’s first meeting with Jefferson, a scene that shows how the person imagined from a distance is often a shadow cast by rumor, party, and fear. Mrs. Smith’s Federalist world had taught her to distrust the “violent democrat” — “an enemy of all rank and order.” Instead, she found him gentle, attentive, and disarming. In conversation, caricature gave way to the human being. As Jefferson ended his visit with Margaret and Samuel Smith, he said, “I am your friend.”
Why, then, are we so eager, especially on social media, to make potential friends into enemies?
We treat our imagined version of another person as evidence for engaging with or dismissing them. From afar, the stranger, neighbor, opponent, or public figure becomes whatever our fears make of them. But Epley’s experiments show that contact usually corrects the forecast: conversation lets reality replace projection, often revealing the other person to be warmer, kinder, and more approachable than we assumed.
Across many experiments, Epley and his collaborators find that we systematically underestimate how good it feels to connect with others. Ask commuters to predict whether their ride will be better if they keep to themselves or strike up a conversation with a stranger. They expect solitude to be pleasant and conversation to be a small ordeal. Then send them out to do both. The result reverses the forecast: those asked to connect have the most positive commute, and those left to solitude the least.
“Reaching out wasn’t just positive,” Epley writes. “It was surprisingly positive.”
Although I once tested as an introvert on the Myers-Briggs scale, I learned Epley’s lesson decades ago when I overcame my internal resistance and began having extended conversations with the technicians and repairmen who came to our house. I look for opportunities to engage in conversations about their work and how they see the world. As in Epley’s experiments, the results have been uniformly positive.
On the surface, I had little in common with some of the technicians I befriended, including a large man whose main hobby was snowmobiling. But our shared humanity ran deeper than appearances.
In A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume calls man “the creature of the universe, who has the most ardent desire of society,” then presses the point: “A perfect solitude is, perhaps, the greatest punishment we can suffer. Every pleasure languishes when enjoyed apart from company, and every pain becomes more cruel and intolerable.” Epley argues that we are starving in front of an open refrigerator, and he offers actionable steps to remedy our hunger.
Why do we misjudge so badly, and in the same direction, repeatedly? A social decision, Epley observes, “is guided not by how a decision will actually make you feel but rather by how you think a decision will make you feel.” Our forecasts of how strangers, neighbors, and even friends will receive us are quietly, chronically too negative.
Epley notes that “we live our social lives in a confusing learning environment with incomplete feedback.” We cannot see how the conversation we declined to start would have gone. So the pessimism never gets corrected: “Being overly pessimistic is self-fulfilling. Fearing the worst in others means never giving yourself the chance to learn what others are like at their best.”
Epley resists treating sociality as merely a mood and instead treats it as a set of choices with moral content. The book’s third part turns to three of those moral choices — gratitude, kindness, and honesty — and in each, Epley finds the same gap between dread and reality. We withhold the compliment we could pay, the help we could offer, or the honest word a friend needs because we predict our overture will misfire. It rarely does.
Having written often on gratitude — and having received a lesson decades ago about the ingrate within — I found Epley’s chapter on gratitude perhaps the most valuable.
When William James received a letter of gratitude from his students, the founder of American psychology confessed he had missed something in his previous theorizing: “The deepest principle of Human Nature is the craving to be appreciated.” Epley devotes a chapter to that craving and to our reluctance to feed it in others. Hume wrote, “Of all crimes that human creatures are capable of committing, the most horrid and unnatural is ingratitude.”
A free society is held together neither by the state nor the market alone. It rests on a vast, unlegislated web of voluntary regard between strangers: the willingness to trust, extend goodwill, and treat the person in the next seat as a potential friend rather than, in the phrase Epley’s colleagues used, a “serial killer.”
When we underestimate one another, we do not merely forfeit pleasant interactions. We starve the trust on which a people committed to liberty depend.