Description

Nicholas Epley is the John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science, and Director of the Roman Family Center for Decision Research, at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He studies social cognition—how thinking people think about other thinking people—to understand why smart people so routinely misunderstand each other. He teaches an ethics and happiness course to MBA students called Designing a Good Life. His research has appeared in more than two dozen empirical journals, been featured by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Wired, and National Public Radio, among many others, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Templeton Foundation. He has been awarded the 2008 Theoretical Innovation Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the 2011 Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association, the 2015 Book Prize for the Promotion of Social and Personality Science, and the 2018 Career Trajectory Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. Epley was named a “professor to watch” by the Financial Times, one of the “World’s Best 40 under 40 Business School Professors” by Poets and Quants, and one of the 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics in 2015 by Ethisphere. He is the author of Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want.

Abstract

Reaching out and connecting with other people tends to increase wellbeing, and yet people are often reluctant to reach out and connect with others in the very ways that would increase their wellbeing.  Part of this reluctance may stem from misunderstanding the outcomes of our social interactions.  In this talk I will suggest that our expectations about social interactions, particularly about conversations with strangers, are guided by static features of an interaction while overlooking the dynamic features that actually account for our positive experience in these interactions.  This gap between the factors that guide our social expectations versus our actual social experiences can leave us being overly avoidant for our own wellbeing, can lead us to choose suboptimal ways of interacting with each other, and can create or consumer products that leave us overly disconnected from each other in our daily lives.