#160： How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make You Healthier, Happier, and Smarter
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Summary
In this episode, Dr. Susan Pinker joins me to talk about her new book, The Village Effect, and her research on the benefits of face-to-face contact. She talks about how social interaction can make us healthier, happier, and smarter, and how you can get more of it in your life.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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So for this past year, I've been doing a lot of research on the benefits of face-to-face
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conversation and looking for ways to incorporate it more in my life.
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And one of the books I found extremely helpful in my research is a book called The Village
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And in it, she highlights all this research, not just the psychological benefits of face-to-face
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contact, because I think that's what we usually focus on when we talk about the benefits of
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conversation, but also there's physiological benefits of face-to-face conversation.
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It reduces blood pressure, increases longevity, and that's just to start with.
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So today on the podcast, I have Susan Pinker on, and we're going to discuss how face-to-face
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contact can make us healthier, happier, and smarter, and how you can get more of it in
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It's all about the science of face-to-face conversation or interaction.
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I'm curious, was there an experience that you had that inspired your decision to research
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and write about the benefits of face-to-face conversation?
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You know, when I finished my last book, which is called The Sexual Paradox, I was struck by
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a puzzle, and that's that everywhere in the developed world, women live on average five
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And this sex difference in longevity really puzzled me, and I decided to pursue the question,
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And I found out a couple of things that started me off on the journey of writing this new book.
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One was, there is one place in the world where men do live as long as women and where people
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live extraordinarily long lives in general, and that's a place in Sardinia, part of Italy.
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And I decided to go there and explore a little bit more about what's going on there.
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And the other is that I found some emerging research from the field of social neuroscience
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that was very clear that our relationships have a huge impact on how long we live and
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Most people think about, when they think about social interaction, they think how it affects
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It's good for if you're depressed and you get out there and speak with people.
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They don't really think about the physiological benefits of it.
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So what did you discover in this small town in Italy?
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What was it about social interaction that contributed to longevity in both men and women?
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Well, I'm going to give you two answers to that question.
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In terms of Sardinia, what was most striking in terms of the experience is that older people
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and people there live into their hundreds and many till, you know, 105, 110.
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And what's extraordinary is that unlike here in North America, they are never left alone.
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They are always surrounded by friends and family.
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And that struck me, especially since I was creating a radio documentary about this phenomenon
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and I could never get any clean tape because they were always surrounded, as I say, in their
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living rooms with, you know, four, six, sometimes eight people who were constantly with them,
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which is very much in contrast to the way we age in America where, you know, essentially
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you're left alone most of the time, you know, where solitude is part of your experience.
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And the other part of the question is that there's new emerging evidence from the field
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of social neuroscience that your body and brain really don't distinguish between emotional
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In other words, if you feel lonely or if you feel sad or abandoned or isolated, that is
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going to have a direct impact on your heart rate, how well you heal from wounds, how, you
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know, easily you're going to lose your memory, how well you're going to recover from cancer.
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And this was like completely shocking to me and very new.
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And I thought it was interesting throughout the book, you talked about the differences between
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How does socialization affect men and women differently?
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Well, for one thing, women have evolved specific hormonal pathways that allow them, they, we've
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evolved them initially to allow us to communicate with nonverbal babies and children, small children.
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So when women reach out to others, oxytocin is released and this makes them feel great, but
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it also tamps down their stress levels and increases their immunity, not just oxytocin, but dopamine
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But it also has to do with the way women live their lives and the priorities that they set
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I mean, research from social science tells us that women spend a lot more time building,
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I mean, most people can see that they spend more time initially, you know, talking over
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their porches or back fences than using telephone.
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But in general, they choose jobs where they work with people they like and respect, where
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And they tend to enjoy life much more when they spend time with friends and family.
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So one of the really huge sex differences is what happens when you lose your spouse.
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This is a piece of research called the widowhood effect.
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We've known this for several hundred years, that men who are single die faster than men who
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are married, and especially men who are married who lose their wives are at tremendous risk
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of dying themselves within the first six months to a year after they've been widowed.
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And it's not because women aren't as sad to lose their spouses.
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It's because women tend to have established huge support networks outside their marriage.
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And so they have lots of friends and family who are there for them.
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Whereas for men, it's much more often the case that their wife is their only intimate
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Not only that, but their wives bring in friends and family.
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Their wives are the ones who invite people for holidays, who send the cards, who make
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the phone calls, who send over, you know, the casseroles or cakes when someone is sick.
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So when they lose their wives, suddenly their social, their face-to-face social network falls
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I thought it was interesting how you pointed out how the differences between men and women
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You said that women focus on more of those tight-knit, close relationships, and men are
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I'll tell you a little anecdote of a couple of people I profiled in the book.
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And this was another occasion when I was very much surprised by my research.
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So I interviewed one fellow who I introduced to the reader at the beginning of the book,
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John McCogan, who's a musician and he needs a kidney transplant.
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And he had four compatible people in his network who stepped forward.
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And this was partially because of the type of outgoing, gregarious person he is.
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But when I asked him, oh, like, give me an example of some of your friends, he flipped
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So he had this enormous network, but many of them were people he hadn't seen in many years.
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And in contrast, one of the women who I thought was fantastically socially integrated into a
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community was a great civic participator, had a lot of friends, swam on a swim team, etc.
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You know, when I said, well, how many people are in your social network?
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And what was striking about that is that that surprised me, but that's actually very typical
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because women tend to have very tightly knit, well-integrated, well-interwoven networks of
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people who will step forward and help them when they need it.
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Men tend to have much larger, more dispersed social networks, weaker ties.
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So think of, for example, all the men that someone might know who's been in the military
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or who's been working in a huge multinational corporation.
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Are these people who are going to step forward to bring him to his chemotherapy appointment?
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Or who will step forward if he needs to borrow $1,000?
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So when we look at networks, men's networks on average tend to be larger but shallower connections.
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Women tend to have smaller but more tightly knit, interwoven social lives.
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So many more intimate contacts that they keep in touch with.
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And social scientists distinguish between those two kinds of contacts, and we need both of them.
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We need the close-knit contacts, and we need the kind of looser ones that we have with neighbors,
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So the close ones we call social support, and that's a hugely powerful predictor of our health
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and how long we live, how many of those contacts we have and how strong they are.
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And what's really important about that, Brett, is that that's changing now.
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We have many fewer of both types of contacts than we used to even since the mid-'80s.
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So in one generation, our face-to-face contacts are diminishing.
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I mean, it's kind of—I guess that raises the question.
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So does, like, social media and email and texting, that has no effect on our health?
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That has no effect on our—you know, the benefits that come with weak ties?
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It's early days, so I can't say it has no effect.
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I would say it has a differential effect depending on who you are.
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So I think you could say about your contacts over the Internet that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
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So people who are already outgoing and gregarious and get out there and meet people and see people,
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well, they just use whatever online tools they have to do more of that, okay?
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But what is concerning many social scientists is that people who don't feel comfortable going out there
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and meeting people, perhaps introverts or people who work long hours
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or just don't feel that comfortable reaching out,
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they use sometimes online contact as a substitute as opposed to amplify their real social lives.
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So I don't think it's fair or true to say that the Internet is unilaterally a bad thing
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or erodes our social lives, because I think it's just not true.
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I think what is true, though, is that people tend to conflate the two types of contacts,
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It would be like saying eating a drive-through fast food meal in your car is the same thing
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as sitting down with a group of friends and having a home-cooked meal, you know,
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It might still give you a hit of 2,000 calories,
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but the impact on your body and brain is completely different.
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And everybody now acknowledges that there's a difference between, say, you know,
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eating a chocolate bar and eating a home-cooked meal
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or going to the store to pick up milk with your car versus walking there or biking there.
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But when it comes to social contact, which I might add is the most powerful predictor,
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your lifestyle predictor of how long you will live compared to almost anything that you can control,
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we still haven't reached the point where we've acknowledged that there's various different types of contact
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So, I mean, what's going on with face-to-face contact that you can't get in social media or text messaging?
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I mean, what is going on between the two individuals?
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Well, for one thing, that the honest signals that are communicated don't come across over the screen.
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I think we're getting better at it, at getting those signals.
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But, for example, you know, when you're in person and you're communicating with somebody,
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you move forward, the other person moves forward.
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You move backward, the other person moves backward.
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You might sort of raise your eyebrows, and instinctively the other person does, too,
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And all these synchronous little cues and acts that you're together in communicating and receiving the message
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And it's very difficult for that to happen over the Internet.
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There are other things, like even a little pat or high-five or handshake or, you know, a little slap on the back.
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Those release, those hormones and neurotransmitters that are incredibly powerful in terms of your cognitive abilities,
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Like, the minute somebody touches you in a friendly or supportive way, you get a rush, a release of oxytocin.
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And those floods of hormones and neurotransmitters just don't happen over the Internet.
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What happens over the Internet is you get information.
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And information is incredibly useful if it's a useful part of communication.
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But that's not everything that we get out of communication.
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When we're mammals, essentially, and we've evolved to see the whites of each other's eyes,
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to be able to understand and generate trust by being near each other.
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And people who underestimate the kind of nonverbal signals that happen together when you're in the same place
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So, for example, we know now that in salary negotiations, if people are together in the same room
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and mimic each other precisely, even saying the same words back and forth,
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the person who's in the position of requesting a salary increase is going to enjoy a 20% to 30% boost in salary
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And we can measure this now in terms of, you know, it's ironically little iPhone-like devices called sociometers.
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You can measure, if you take away the content of what's being said,
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you can measure the signal that happens face-to-face and how powerful it is in generating, say,
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who is the most, in understanding who is the most cohesive in the group.
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Now, let me rephrase that because that's not quite true.
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It can predict, these sociometers can predict by crunching all the data who will be the leader in a group
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So, I think we, you know, to reiterate, we make a mistake when we conflate Internet-generated types of communication
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So, going on this idea of, like, mimicry and being in sync with others,
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you talk about how religion, church, is a great place for this to happen.
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I mean, how does religiosity contribute to someone's social well-being?
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What scientists measure when they look at religious participation is just that.
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How often do they participate in church activities?
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Because they can't get inside your brain and find out how powerful your belief in God is.
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But what we do know is that the more you participate in religious activities,
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the greater your benefit in terms of your health.
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And I think that the impact is really the social element.
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You have an automatic sense of trust by doing things together at the same time.
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Religion is kind of a shortcut to all sorts of evolutionary ways of knowing that you're with people who are like you.
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People who are religious tend to give more blood and give more to charity, for example.
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And all of these acts pull you together as a group.
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Yeah, I thought it was interesting, the example you gave of the pastor who would have his congregation say things to each other.
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And you're like, that guy probably read neuroscience studies.
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He's doing exactly what he should be doing if he wants to encourage group cohesiveness.
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Yeah, and what was so surprising to me is that, you know, as you started out when we started to chat,
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When scientists say, like Julianne Holt Lundstedt from Brigham Young University studies everything about your lifestyle.
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So she takes a huge group of people, 40,000 Americans, and measures everything about them,
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their weight, how much they drink, whether or not they're married, where they live, whether they've smoked or have given up smoking,
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whether they get a flu shot, whether they've had a heart attack, whether the air they breathe is clean or polluted,
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everything about lifestyle that we think so much about, especially things like diet and exercise.
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And then she just sat still and watched who would still be living and breathing after seven years
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and found that the most powerful predictor, lifestyle predictor, was social contact, more than smoking,
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more than exercise habits, more than your body mass index, more than your weight, more than cardiac rehab,
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more than drugs for hypertension, more than polluted air, your social contact was the strongest predictor of how long,
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And that really struck me, not just one type of social contact, but two types that I mentioned before,
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the intimate social contact that you call, we call social support, and what's called integrated social support,
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how much you get out there and participate in your community.
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You know, how often do you get away and out of your office, away from your computer, and see people,
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whether it's for, you know, civic participation, like playing hockey or bowling or volunteering in your church or elsewhere,
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or if it's just chatting with your neighbors or card games.
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It doesn't actually matter what you do, it just matters that you get out there and do it.
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Well, one way that, um, serious static, are you hearing that?
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Okay, well, one way that people get out there and socialize is through food.
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And I'm curious, why, what is it about food and drink that brings people together to talk?
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Um, because anytime someone wants to get together, they're just like, let's, let's eat and drink.
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I know, you know, in the, in the village effect, I talk about how when humans evolved and changed
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from being kind of solitary hunter-gatherers to living in communities about 10,000 years ago,
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and that was when agriculture started, more or less.
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Essentially, that's when we had the first evidence of community meals or community feasts.
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And I think it's extremely important in pulling people together and allowing them to trust each other.
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At a meal, you're usually sitting face-to-face with people and talking.
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And what's a little bit, I guess, unnerving about how this has changed in recent years
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is that now people bring their devices to the table.
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It used to be that there was television on while people were eating, but now people might
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be eating together and looking at their phones.
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And I think that many of us realize instinctively that we are kind of lessening the experience
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or getting less of a benefit when we focus on the screen instead of on each other at meals.
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And that's what it is, I'd say, kind of new emphasis, especially among the hipster generation
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or the millennials to stash their phones before they sit down and have a social occasion,
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whether it be a meal or drinks together, whatever, because they know that part of the experience
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of eating and drinking is what happens, not just what you put in your mouth,
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but as you look at each other and have that back and forth.
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Yeah, I mean, what are some of the, what does the research say about the benefits of,
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you know, particularly for family meals on children?
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Because essentially, if parents just want to change one little thing about family life
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to improve their child's prospects, it would be to have more meals together as a family.
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And it sounds kind of hokey, you know, but all the research is pretty much unanimous.
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And that is very rare in social science for people to agree.
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But this is one area where there's almost no dissent, that the more often families eat together,
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the less likely their kids are to drop out of school, to have problems with drugs or with anorexia
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Essentially, it's a huge predictor of how well they will do in school and how long they'll stick with it.
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It's a huge predictor of their verbal skills and their reading skills.
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Now, the why question is somewhat more complex.
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I don't think we can say that that easily why family meals predict all these great outcomes for kids.
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But I would hazard a guess that when you're together over a meal,
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sometimes that's the only time a family is together.
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I mean, when I was a clinical psychologist, I would often ask parents, you know,
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when do you spend time with, you know, Johnny or Jenny or whatever.
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And most of them, most parents just said, in the car.
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But in a family meal, you're usually face-to-face.
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You are talking about your day most of the time.
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You can generally communicate and show some emotional connection with your kids.
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Because what is, I would say, interesting and alarming about American family life is that much of family life is spent alone.
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You're in the house together, perhaps, but everybody's in their own room doing their own thing on their own device.
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Whereas at a family meal, you're sitting down at the table and you're interacting.
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Well, going off of that, so in the past few years, there's been increasing alarm about screen time, particularly for children.
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Was there any research yet about how screen time affects children's social and intellectual development?
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We don't have all the answers to that question yet.
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And a lot of the research is correlational, so we don't know what comes first.
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But we do know that it's what we call a dose-response effect, meaning the more you drink, the drunker you get.
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The more screen time the kid has, really, the dumber he is in school.
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It's really a very brute, unkind way of saying it.
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And the more behavior problems he or she has, you want to have an impact on your child's social skills and academic achievement, reduce screen time.
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It's absolutely, you know, astounding how, like, essentially how the research is pretty unanimous about the effect of screen time.
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Now, of course, I think there are kids who are immune to this.
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There are kids who will do well in school no matter what.
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These tend to be high-income kids, kids where parents are investing a lot of time and money in their education and their stimulation.
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And I would say for those kids, probably a little bit of screen time or a moderate amount of screen time is probably not going to make a huge difference to them.
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But I would say the middle range of kids and the lower range of kids, either kids who don't get a lot of time, their parents' time,
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either because their parents are working constantly to keep their heads above water financially or because they're single parents
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or because they're newly arrived to the United States or for a whole host of reasons.
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Those kinds of kids are at higher risk of doing more poorly in school because of increased game-playing screen time.
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Because what we know is that, you know, obviously not all time spent on the screen is the same kind of time.
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You could be reading books online or doing all sorts of challenging things.
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But what we do know is that really the path of least resistance is the rule, that if kids are going home and nobody's monitoring it,
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they're watching movies, they're downloading movies and porn if nobody's home to monitor what they're doing.
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And we do know that essentially American kids and British kids are spending more time on the screen on any other activity, including sleeping.
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That's the Pew Internet research that tells us that.
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So for preschool kids, we're talking about four to five hours at least on the screen a day.
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But for school-age kids and teenagers, they're spending more time alone and online than they are doing anything else,
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socializing with their parents, with their friends, or in their beds.
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You know, for our listeners who have kids who are teenagers, you talk about cyberbullying.
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And I think just recently there was a case here in the United States where a young person committed suicide
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What is it about the technology that encourages that sort of behavior online?
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And so the fact that really it's the Wild West out there.
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Nobody really has to own up to the horrible things they say or do online.
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For example, in Canada now, cyberbullying has become a criminal offense.
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But, and I don't know what will happen, you know, the more teenagers commit suicide, perhaps there'll be more emphasis on that.
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But because people do not have to put a face and a name to what they say or do on the Internet, there's a lot of aggression.
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There are trolls who do awful things on the Internet.
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And the difficult part is that parents cannot really monitor everything that their kids are doing on the Internet.
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Certainly at younger ages, they can control it because they're paying the bills.
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So they can control how many devices the kids have, if there are devices in their rooms,
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if they're allowed to have their computers or phones in bed with them or at mealtimes.
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And they're essentially controlling the purse strings.
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So they should be able to say who has what and when to turn it off.
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But as kids get older, it's harder to know what they're doing online.
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And that's really difficult because it can have a huge effect on their ability to concentrate and be happy.
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Yeah. And I guess the lack of honest signals contributes as well.
00:29:46.820
Because, I mean, you could possibly know who someone is online and, like, just see an avatar of them.
00:29:51.260
But it's not the same as being with them face to face.
00:29:56.340
No. You know, that is, I think, a huge mistake.
00:30:00.300
And I think that, you know, especially for kids who might be vulnerable.
00:30:07.400
They know if their kids are fragile and vulnerable and they worry intensely about them.
00:30:13.660
Those, the vulnerable kids, the ones who are socially isolated, the ones who are struggling in school,
00:30:18.740
the ones who are at some point having a difficult time are the ones who will be more open to going online more often
00:30:32.900
Okay. So I thought your section on dating and love was really interesting because more and more frequently,
00:30:38.500
because people don't have these villages, right, face-to-face contacts as much as they used to,
00:30:48.660
But can you talk about some of the research that shows that online dating isn't all that,
00:30:54.360
it's not cracked up what it's all, you know, it's not cracked up what it's to be?
00:30:56.940
Yeah, I mean, I would say that any way that you can meet somebody that allows you to form a rewarding relationship is great.
00:31:07.520
So I'm not knocking dating sites, you know, I'm not knocking them in general,
00:31:15.660
but what I am knocking is their ability to predict who is right for you.
00:31:19.860
There's no evidence at all that their so-called algorithms do anything of the sort.
00:31:25.480
And what often happens on dating sites is that people lie about themselves,
00:31:31.740
so you don't actually know who you're meeting when you set up a date,
00:31:38.960
And the research tells us that, you know, it's actually comical that men tend to exaggerate their height
00:31:46.600
and their income online, and women tend to diminish how much they weigh and how old they are online.
00:31:54.660
So, you know, one of the people who I quote in my book said he learned,
00:31:58.700
he went on something like 60 online, 60 dates of women he'd met online,
00:32:04.020
and he learned to watch out for sunglasses because, you know,
00:32:07.580
women would wear sunglasses to disguise how old they were.
00:32:11.360
And even in their photos, they'd post photos of themselves, you know,
00:32:17.140
So I think it's more, not that online dating sites are bad,
00:32:23.140
but that there is really no regulation about what they're promising you,
00:32:29.540
and it's essentially a consumer environment out there.
00:32:34.020
So very few people would go out and buy a car or buy a treadmill
00:32:37.680
or make any huge decision without doing their homework first.
00:32:41.840
And yet they engage in a lot of activity and invest a lot of time and effort
00:32:48.360
in meeting people on these sites where there's absolutely no regulatory environment.
00:32:55.860
it's a great way to get you out there meeting different people,
00:33:00.160
then that's the moment where you could figure out
00:33:07.220
I think, for example, if you live in a rural place
00:33:18.400
limits on what kind of contact there will be online.
00:33:21.620
But yeah, I mean, I would say that anything that gets you out there
00:33:24.600
meeting people in a safe environment is a good thing.
00:33:28.820
And so, you know, some of the dating sites can be, you know,
00:33:32.300
very useful to people if they use them judiciously,
00:33:35.440
just as they would for anything that they're, quote,
00:33:39.740
as long as you realize that it creates that Christmas shopping feeling.
00:33:45.000
You know, I've had a lot of contact with friends who, you know,
00:33:59.000
where there is no man alive who fits those criteria.
00:34:06.640
So it creates unreasonable expectations that can never be fulfilled.
00:34:30.680
Do they feel like a cold fish when you get together?
00:34:44.880
because I feel like a lot of, particularly American culture,
00:34:48.580
isn't conducive for, you know, a village life, right?
00:34:58.580
They don't have that face-to-face contact at work anymore.
00:35:01.560
Are there any practical tips that you can give people
00:35:05.300
on how they can recreate a quote-unquote village
00:35:08.180
in their own life, despite the culture that doesn't help that?
00:35:12.600
I mean, and I'm so glad that you mentioned that,
00:35:18.500
You know, when I called the book The Village Effect,
00:35:27.480
What I mean is that we need to create a village around us
00:35:30.620
to mimic the kind of effect that those Sardinian centenarians had.
00:35:37.640
You're quite right that in North American culture,
00:35:40.380
where our lives are, you know, as George Burns clicked,
00:35:43.620
you know, happiness is having a large, loving, caring,
00:35:58.500
And I would say start with the bricks-and-mortar stuff of where do you live?
00:36:04.800
You know, if you're moving, what kind of place do you choose to live in?
00:36:08.400
And I would say if you have the luxury of choosing a new place,
00:36:12.620
choose a neighborhood where people know and talk to their neighbors.
00:36:22.500
Look for the places in your neighborhood where people connect.
00:36:35.320
or, you know, any kind of area where people congregate?
00:36:40.000
It doesn't have to be something as formal as a community center,
00:36:43.160
but it has to be an area where people are outside and walking around.
00:36:54.260
Build real contact into your work day, not just emails.
00:36:57.940
I mean, you mentioned that many of us work alone,
00:37:07.360
And I had to really craft social contact into my day
00:37:15.660
So, for example, I used to swim laps at the YMCA by myself.
00:37:22.360
That way I get the double whammy of the exercise
00:37:30.500
I also get a coach, which is much better for my fitness level.
00:37:35.620
if you don't have time to, say, do something like sports
00:37:40.100
or with colleagues, get up and talk to people at work.
00:37:46.640
If you work in an office with other people, move around.
00:37:54.000
and it generates trust, and it's good for your business.
00:37:57.000
And I have a whole chapter in The Village Effect
00:38:06.300
people do not communicate about big deals over the Internet.
00:38:11.540
They get on a plane and talk to each other in person.
00:38:14.660
You know, if there is diplomacy that has to be done,
00:38:19.640
people get on aircraft and talk to each other in person.
00:38:23.160
And we have to let that filter down to us at all levels.
00:38:32.700
build social contact in, in some way, into your work day.
00:38:45.560
Commit to face-to-family meals without screens.
00:38:52.060
and ramping up only gradually as they get older.
00:39:02.200
We didn't really talk about education that much,
00:39:24.500
You know, you spend $1,000 on a laptop or tablet
00:39:35.600
And here's something that I think is really important,
00:39:41.780
is make sure you create a village of diverse relationships.
00:39:45.240
And that was another thing that was completely new to me
00:39:51.020
is that it's not just those close contacts that matter,
00:39:54.240
but it's not just like your two or three close people,
00:40:01.120
in your social set who make a difference to you,
00:40:07.520
So, you know, that was what happened in Sardinia.
00:40:18.260
And it wasn't just the person's daughter or son
00:40:29.740
get to know the shopkeeper where you, you know,
00:40:47.840
as opposed to just looking at the sort of fingers on one hand.
00:40:58.560
And, you know, something that we didn't get to talk about
00:41:03.600
Not everybody is going to go to a potluck dinner
00:41:23.640
So you have to adjust the ratio of your face-to-face contact
00:41:42.820
not what other people think might be good for you.
00:41:54.000
they need social contact as much as anybody else does.
00:42:07.980
They recover less quickly from chronic disease.
00:42:15.220
but certainly just like everybody needs food and drink,
00:42:23.120
So I would say to adjust the face-to-face to screen time
00:42:33.360
but amplify your online contact with real contact.
00:42:48.900
unless you're making the mistake of considering,
00:42:55.320
is pretty much the fast food of your social interaction.
00:43:03.800
And thank you so much for your interest, Brett.
00:43:30.920
that helped get the word out about the podcast,