Tips on building better friendships & more love from Eric Barker's new book Plays Well With Others.
Eric Barker, the author of Barking Up the Wrong Tree, an excellent book on the science of success, has a new book that just hit the stands. In it, he argues that there is surprising science that suggests that everything you know about relationships is mostly wrong, and that most books in this genre just tell you what you want to hear. That's not what he's doing, he says, and the truth will set you free. Plays Well With Others is a guide to connecting to everyone in our lives. I just started it and will be sharing some of his best tips, bit by honest bit.
Tip #1 (Chapter 5, p. 51) How to tell if someone is lying to you. In love and life, people lie to you. A first step in having good relationships is choosing to relate to good people. As I argued in an earlier piece about friendship, you want to make the right decisions about who is in your innermost circle. Liars are everywhere, unfortunately. Spotting them is an important tool. Barker says that all the techniques we've heard about for spotting liars involve creating and observing emotional stress. Those don't work. Here's what you've got to do:
Create Thinking Stress. Ask Unanticipated Questions. Lying takes a lot more brainpower than telling the truth. Lying requires a high "cognitive load." A liar has to think harder. To figure out whether someone is honest, you want to ask them questions that are easy for an honest person to answer but require thinking for a liar and then observe how hard they had to think to answer. Barker's simple example of this is that if you wanted to figure out whether someone is a liar you wouldn't ask them their age. Instead, you'd ask them what day they were born. It is easy for your Match date to say "44" (especially if you had indicated in your profile that you were looking for a match under 45). But if they are not actually 44, and you asked them what day they were born well, then you'd witness them churning some numbers in their head in order to respond.
The best way to deploy this technique is by first asking some expected questions. That sets up a baseline for how they respond. Then fire away, CRUSH Readers, ask the unexpected.
Get Plays Well With Others here.
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