In the last post, I examined advice from three websites on making new friends. Much of the advice was excellent as far as meeting people, but they didn’t really give any instructions on how to connect. I’m not necessarily shy, but I am incredibly aloof, and it’s difficult to get to know me. Or at least, that’s what I’ve been told. I think I often assume that if I don’t attempt to learn anything meaningful about other people, they won’t retaliate and get to know me better. This is stupid. Obviously. Stupid. But I tend to direct my conversation to things instead of people. It seems safer, but it’s also unproductive. I decided to go a little academic for this one. In Sam Gosling’s Snoop, he mentions studies done by Northwestern professor, Dan McAdams. Seemed like a good place to start.

I began with McAdams’ famous, What do we know when we know a person? McAdams’ divides “getting to know you” into three levels. 1) Traits – “which provide a dispositional signature for personality description. No description of a person is adequate without trait attributions, but trait attributions themselves yield little beyond a ‘psychology of the stranger.’” 2) “Personal Concerns” –”personal strivings, life tasks, defense mechanisms, coping strategies, domain-specific skills and values, and a wide assortent of other motivational, developmental, or strategic contructs that are contextualized in time, place or role.” 3) Integrated picture — “psychologists may explore the person’s identity as an internalized and evolving life story.”

Of course, no one ever really gets to level three without going through the first two steps, and it usually takes time to make further observations and reassess previous hypotheses. That’s why the show-up factor seems particularly important in the how-to’s examined in Part 1. You need time to get to know someone. Damn it. That really sucks.

Of course, you can spend a lot of time with someone and never really know anything about them. One reason I have such a difficult time spending so much of it around the same people is because, deep down, I think I don’t want to be known. I don’t want to get to level 3. Maybe some other people don’t want that either. Or maybe we don’t want to be dismissed in some Nancy Grace interrogation fashion. Just something to keep in mind.

Driving home, McAdams and his wife compare notes on a fellow partygoer, named Lynn, whom they had just met. McAdams acknowledges that you can’t get to level 3 from just one casual social encounter. Time, again, is needed to observe and most importantly to 1) describe the observations and to 2) explain the observations — why are they so gregarious? Why do they react like that? Why are they prone to drinking so much? etc. McAdams is also careful to point out that the truth of a person may not necessarily be revealed in the stories he tells, but in how he sees himself or how he wants to be seen. Only after we spend enough time with someone and learn how they respond to things, how they see the world, how they see themselves, etc., that we begin to get to level 3.

Then you get married.

While McAdams’ paper isn’t so much an advisory piece on how to get to know people, it does seem to offer at least Five Tips to Making Social Encounters More Efficient:

1. Observe. Some people are flattered when you pay attention to them. As I mentioned before, one reason Bill Clinton was considered so magnetic was because of the interest he seemed to take in other people, even if it was something as superficial as a directed gaze during a handshake. Of course, I’m not all that flattered when people pay attention to me. I tend to think, “Great. Now I’m going to feel bad when they get let down.” That’s why I went into journalism — so I could observe, not be observed.

2. Don’t Judge. The reason I don’t want to be observed, again, is because I don’t want to be judged and dismissed. It’s probably some residue from childhood. However, the more you keep an open mind and accept things about a person without doing some moral white glove test, the more likely you are to get a complete picture as time goes on. Even the behavioral discrepancies, as McAdams discusses regarding his analysis of fellow partygoer, “Lynn”, can be particularly revealing, even if they are easily dismissible as signs of duplicity, inadequacy, or other inefficiencies. I think we often look for reasons not to like people. It probably protects us, but it doesn’t necessarily help us make new friends (unless we bond with someone else over our dislike of another person. But that’s how genocide begins).

3. Describe –  to yourself the traits you are observing, and other aspects that have been revealed. The traits may not always be linked to the roles or personal concerns later revealed however. An asshole may act like an asshole for a number of reasons. You can’t always blame it on his race, religion, political party, economic status, or whatever. Feel free to blame it on his mother. If you want. That usually shuts down the operation, but maybe there’s a line. There is a certain type of chronic asshole that should probably be left to himself. Otherwise, you may end up being one of those notoriously pitiful prison penpals that ends up married to a serial killer “who’s just a little misunderstood.”  Just a heads up.

4. Explain – again, if only to yourself. Why is this person this way? How do they see themselves? The world? Their responsibilities and roles in it? Likes and dislikes? True likes and dislikes? The more you can flesh out the narrative of their identities, the closer you get to level 3.

5. Silence Your Inner Critic and Just Listen — even if you can tell that this person is obviously embellishing or blatantly lying, this can reveal more about the speaker than the story alone. This is so difficult for me, as I’ve mentioned several times before. As you begin to glean how this person wants to be seen, ask questions that prod the person to elaborate in a way that allows them to comfortably present themselves as they want to be seen. I think this a key aspect to getting to know a person is letting that person know they can be comfortable revealing themselves, even if, at first, all they do is reveal a polished version of themselves. You don’t have to be gullible, but you don’t always win points for pointing out a person’s flaws. You may, however, win a lonely night at home, wondering, “Why am I so unpopular!?” (Actually, you’ll probably wonder, “Why are people so stupid and beneath me!?”)

In the last post, I mentioned Gretchen Rubin’s strategy of setting a goal for making friends. While I’m not as sold on the numbers thing (for myself), I think it’s okay to go into a situation with an agenda of getting to know someone better. This way, you keep the focus on them, and if you’re like me, focusing on someone else makes it a lot easier to not focus on yourself and get all self-conscious and desperate for more tequila.

Call us old-fashioned, but at Chapter Two we have a fondness for the printed word. And when a book excites us, we tell people about it. In coming blogs look for our book recommendations on a wide range of subjects: aging, marketing, neuroscience, branding, behavioral economics, and more. We hope you’ll share your comments and pass along recommendations of your own. Read and enjoy.

“Serving the Ageless Market,” by David B. Wolfe (1990)
This is the book that was Ground Zero in the boomer book explosion. Think of it as the insider’s guide to the mature market, whereas Ken Dychtwald’s “Age Wave” was for the general public.

“Ageless Marketing,” by David B. Wolfe (2003)
You cannot market to a 60-year-old boomer the same way you would to a 30-year-old. Their values make them almost two separate prospects; this book explains why.

“After Fifty,” edited by Leslie M. Harris (2003)
Great overview, chocked full of statistics, on the mature market. Some of the numbers might be a little dated, but the demographic patterns hold up.

“The Retirement Myth,” by Craig S. Karpel (1995)
This little gem of a book tried to warn us (in ’95) that we’d better get over the idea of a tidy little retirement for the boomers. He even coined a new phrase: The Dumpies (Destitute, Unprepared Mature People).

“A Whole New Mind,” by Daniel H. Pink (2005)
The biggest shift that will occur in the next century will be the shift in our thinking from the left-brain hemisphere to the right hemisphere. Remarkably, only one book has addressed this dichotomy. This is it.

“The New Retirementality,” by Mitch Anthony (2001)
Remember when people looked forward to retirement? This book is both ominous and prescient. It’s also helpful, with worksheets to let you see how you’re doing, and cautionary thoughts like, “Work may always be a part of your life.”

“The Stories We Live By,” by Dan McAdams (1993)
Think of yourself as the brand you always wanted to be. According to Dan McAdams, that’s exactly what we do; although we’re not always true to the brand, hence the stories we all live by.

Father Greg Boyle's remarkable work is just one of the books from my work bookshelf that I have enjoyed.

It’s been a long week, and I wanted briefly to recommend the following books from my work bookshelf:

1.The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By, by Dan McAdams. Northwestern Psychology Professor McAdams makes the point that we orient our lives around stories and advances the ideas both that Americans tend to live stories of redemption and that lives can be evaluated through the concept of ‘generativity’-or, what they create.  He peppers the work with examples from people he’s known and throughout history. 

2. Super Crunchers, by Ian Ayres.  This data hounds shall inherit the earth, according to Ayres in this provocative book.

3. Mission Rejected: U.S. Soldiers Who Say No To Iraq, by Peter Laufer. Prolific author Laufer profiles soldiers either who do not take their assignment or who come back from their tours and do not endorse the war.

4. City of American Dreams, by Margaret Garb.

Garb looks here at how homeownership played out in Chicago during the years after the Great Fire and the end of the First World War.  Hint: poor people and people of color don’t do real well.

5. G-Dog and the Homeboys: Father Greg Boyle and the Gangs of East Los Angeles, by Celeste Fremon.  Journalist Fremon writes a very personal account of the priest who created Homeboy Industries, which brings together former sworn enemies and has them work together.

Common Ground tops the list of must-read books going forward for my Social Studies Methods students.

It’s the final day of our Social Studies Methods Class, and today I am sharing some of the books that can be useful in developing their content knowledge:

1. Common Ground, by J. Anthony Lukas.  This Pulitzer-Prize winning work tells the story of three families in Boston during the turbulent decade that began with Dr. King’s assassination, and it is very much an American story about race, class, history and neighborhoods.  A master work.

2. There Are No Children Here, by Alex Kotlowitz.  Former Wall Street Journal reporter and my former professor Kotlowitz expanded stories he wrote about brothers growing up in the Henry Horner Homes on Chicago’s West Side.  The title comes from a quote by the boys’  mother.

3. The Burning Tigris, by Peter Balakian.  Acclaimed poet, memoirist and literature professor Balakian tells the story of the human rights movement in America that sprung up to protest the Armenian Genocide.

4.  The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer.  Journalist Shirer provides one of the definitive accounts of Hitler’s rise to power and move toward genocide.

5. The Redemptive Self, by Dan McAdams.  This book by Northwestern professor McAdams talks about the concept of generativity, or what people create with their lives.  It can provide a useful framework for how teachers can evaluate what they and their students have accomplished.

“What is truer than truth?”, asks writer Isabel Allende at the very beginning of her TED talk, below. “Answer: The story.”

How similar to Amy Tan (still from the same interview that I quoted from in my last two posts):

I think that’s why I’m a storyteller. I take all these disparate events and I have to connect them. I have to make them seem inevitable and yet surprising and plausible. That’s what I think life is like, too. I have the luxury to do exactly what it is we all need time to do, and that is just think about the mystery of life.

And how similar to a less poetic author, Dan McAdams, a psychology professor at Northwestern who has

a life-story theory of identity, which argues that modern adults provide their lives with a sense of unity and purpose by constructing and refining self-defining life stories or “personal myths.”

It’s all about the story, in other words. Human beings remember and understand things only insofar as they learn them in a story.

The absence of such a story is what, in my opinion, limits so many non-fiction books. They have an idea or a thesis, but don’t wrap it into a story. So people read until they get the basic idea, then drop the book at page 50. After all, once you “got it”, why waste your time?

In my book, I’m trying to do the opposite. It is non-fiction, but true stories can be more suspenseful and surprising than fiction. And there is an idea, but it comes out through the story.

This is also my main rebuttal to my mom so far, who worries incessantly that I am giving away too much of my secret sauce in this blog, for some anonymous villain to steal it all. What, I keep thinking, would he (or she) steal? The idea without the story? Good luck. As Allende said, you need the story to get the truth. So, mom, for now I’ll keep blogging. Let me know what I’ve overlooked.