How To Know a Person—David Brooks

Notes

1: The Power of Being Seen

• Being open-hearted is a prerequisite for being a full human being, but it’s not enough - people need social skills. E.g.,
  • Disagreeing without poisoning the relationship
  • Revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace
  • Being a good listener
  • Knowing how to end a conversation gracefully
  • Knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness
  • Knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart
  • Knowing how to sit with someone that’s suffering
  • Knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced
  • Knowing how to see things from another’s point of view
• Social media: stimulation has replaced intimacy; there is judgement everywhere and understanding nowhere
• Truly seeing another person and making another person feel seen is at the heart of being a good human being
• George Bernard Shawquote (from his play The Devil’s Disciple):

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity

• Three motivations for being better at knowing another person:
  • Pragmatic - if you want to thrive in the age of AI, you better get exceptionally good at connecting with others
  • Spiritual - the only way to truly appreciate one’s qualities is to see them reflected in others
  • Pluralistic - our existing social skills are not equipped with the increasingly pluralistic societies we live in; empathy is required at a national level
• In every group there are illuminators and diminishers
• The novelist E. M. Forster was said to have inverse charisma - speaking to him brought out the absolute best in yourself
• Sometimes people in longterm relationships (e.g., a marriage) understand each other very poorly because one person has a fixed idea of the other and doesn’t adjust their understanding when they learn new information about the other person

2: How Not to See a Person

• The size up is the judgment (of which we are all guilty) we make about someone based on surface-level information
• Other tendencies of which diminishers are guilty:
  • Egotism - being wrapped up in one’s own self leads one to be incurious about others
  • Anxiety - being too worried about what other people will think leads one to being closed rather than communicating openly
  • Naive realism - thinking that your view of the world is the objective one
  • The Lesser Minds Problem - we only have access to other people’s thoughts that are expressed, while we have access to everything in our own mind; this leads to the feeling that we are much more complex than other people with whom we are interacting
  • Objectivism - thinking about others as members of different groups and attributing qualities based on their group memberships
  • Essentialism - thinking that someone’s tribal/immutable attributes mean they must behave in a certain way, and that those behaviours themselves are immutable
  • Stacking - an extension of essentialist thinking; presuming that you can reliably predict attributes of someone from other (essential) characteristics
  • Static mindset - not updating your mental model when someone changes
• The untrained eye is not enough - we need tools to properly see each other
• Korean word for knowing another person: nunchi (concept signifying the subtle art and ability to listen and gauge others’ moods)
• In German: “Wissen“ is used for knowing something for a fact, while “kennen” denotes knowledge that is based on experience and familiarity

3: Illumination

• Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede—Iain McGilchristquote

• Presuming that within every person is a soul (ignoring any religious connotations) is a useful lens through which to view and interact with people
• Tendencies/traits of an illuminator:
  • Tenderness - some amount of gentleness/tenderness is required to make someone else feel welcome and safe
  • Receptivity - overcome insecurities and self-preoccupation to open yourself up to the views of another; resist pushing your own viewpoint
  • Active curiosity - make it obvious when you want to know more
  • Affection - warmth, not just procedural behaviour, is important to bring out the best in someone
  • Generosity/charity - resist the urge to reduce someone to their most obvious/extreme characteristic; everyone has every virtue, just in different amounts and proportions
• The way we attend to someone determines the kind of person we will become - appreciating virtues in another will cause you to exhibit them

4: Accompaniment

• After the illuminating gaze, accompaniment is the next stage in getting to know a person
• A lot of normal life is going about your business with other people - just doing stuff together
• If you don’t talk about the little things fairly regularly, it can be hard to talk about the big things
• You want to act in way that allows others to be completely themselves
• Patience - people need to feel safe to open up; being good at accompaniment means being good at being in a relaxed state of awareness
• Playfulness - play isn’t an activity, it’s a state of mind; people are themselves when at play

5: What Makes a Person

• There is the objective layer of what happened and the subjective layer of how what happened is perceived, understood and reacted to - the latter is often more important in knowing a person

• We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are—Anaïs Ninquote

• People can change their model of the world (normally gradually but massive events can cause rapid change) - we should update our own models to take this into account
• Constructionism - each person constructs their own subjective view of reality; this does not mean that an objective reality does not exist, but individuals do not have access to it (related tonaive-realism)
• This isn’t just a psychological idea - our brains are constantly interpolating and extrapolating using the the limited data our senses deliver

6: Good Talks

• Being a good conversationalist is hard
• Treat attention as on/off switch, not as a dimmer; listen with your eyes
• Be a loud listener - in conversations everyone is fighting a battle between self-inhibition and self-expressivity; passive listening causes the speaker to lean towards inhibition
• Favour familiarity - people would rather reminisce about a time together than hear story about a time that they weren’t there (even it’s novel)
• Make them authors, not witnesses - ask people to be much more specific when they are telling a story; dig deeper
• Don’t fear the pause - Japanese culture encourages pausing and reflecting before replying
• Do the looping - paraphrase back to the speaker what they’ve said
  • You’d be surprised how often you don’t actually understand what someone has just told you!
  • It shows you are listening

7: The Right Questions

• Asking questions can be a weirdly vulnerable exercise - you are admitting you don’t know
• “And then what happened?” is a pretty good default
• Evaluating questions (that don’t surrender any power to the answerer) are the worst (e.g., where did you go uni?)
• Closed questions are bad - you are (unnecessarily) narrowing the scope of the answer
• Specific but open-ended questions are best
  • What’s it like…?
  • How did you…?
  • Tell me about…?
• People are generally too shy about asking questions, not too prying
• Deep conversations don’t have to be painful - ask specific, open-ended questions about a person’s positive experience or characteristic
  • Why do you think you’re good at…?
  • How satisfying was it to…?

8: The Epidemic of Blindness

• Loneliness leads to meanness
• Distrust begets distrust
• High-trust societies lead to spontaneous sociability (Francis Fukuyama) - i.e., being more inclined and faster to socialise and work with other people in a society
• Society has failed to equip us with the necessary skills to build good relationships, and this is getting worse due to pandemics, technology and political polarisation

9: Hard Conversations

• Every conversation takes place on two levels: the official conversation and the actual conversation that is made up of the feelings flowing each way
• Every conversation happens within a frame - it’s important to be aware of where the frame lies and if it’s shifting; it’s sometimes important to consciously shift the framing
• Labelling (bad) - discrediting someone by associating them with a group
• Splitting (good) - explain what you are not trying to say before saying what you are
• Return to the gem statement (the one thing you both definitely agree on and care about)
• Affordances (psychology term) are the lenses through which we view and experience the world - think: wealth, fitness, class, ethnicity, attractiveness, personality traits
• It’s not just that different people have different experiences of the world - different people experience different worlds as a result ofconstructionism

10: How Do You Serve a Friend in Despair?

• Your duty to a depressed person is not to cheer them up, it is to hear, respect and love them
• Telling someone how they can get better can make them feel worse because they’ll feel guilty about not being able to enjoy what would otherwise be joyful things
• Asking someone why they are depressed is probably not productive
• Depression can be thought of as an extreme case ofconstructionism - you and a friend encounter the same objective reality, but the subjective world they experience is terrifying

11: The Art of Empathy

• Defences that people use that can make them difficult to know:
  • Avoidance - usually about fear (e.g., I have been hurt by emotions in relationships before, therefore I will avoid emotions in relationships and keep things superficial)
  • Deprivation - if someone is deprived of love when they are younger, or made to feel like they are never good enough, will experience irrational feelings of worthlessness later in life
  • Passive-aggression - if someone grew up in an environment where conflict was terrifying, they will use other means to “get even” when they feel hard done by (this is unhealthy, it’s a form of emotional manipulation)
• We all have a sacred flaw (from Will Storr)
• We usually develop these defence mechanisms as children - and they serve us well - but we must update our models as we grow up
• Outdated models can manifest as conceptual blindness
• Empathy can be broken down into three sub-skills:
• Mirroring
  • Being able to recognise and emote based on what the other person is doing
  • Good mirror-ers have a high degree of emotional granularity - they can precisely discern between lots of different emotions
• Mentalising:
  • When our brain looks up our own memories to try to find similar experiences to what the other person is going through
  • Also known as projective empathy (fromadam-smith) - the act of projecting my memories onto your emotions
• Caring:
  • Getting outside of your own experiences and figuring out what the other person needs
• Ways to increase empathy:
  • Contact theory - it’s hard to hate anyone up close
  • Draw it with your eyes closed - actors tend to be highly empathic because they are constantly studying the behaviour of others
  • Literature - reading complex character development-driven novels or biographies is shown to increase empathy
  • Emotion spotting - plotting emotions on an energy vs positive/negative quadrant graph can help you to identify what you (or your child!) are actually feeling
  • Suffering - going through more stuff makes you more empathetic (some things just need to be experienced first-hand)
    • Empaths (counterintuitively) soften their defensive architecture after experiencing traumatic events

12: How Are You Shaped by Your Sufferings?

• Some people assimilate traumatic events (just taking it on the chin and getting on with life), while some people accommodate them (update their models)
• Excavation is the process of reviewing suffering many times
  • Not for emotional self-harm
  • But to develop multiple perspectives on the same event
  • Analogous to reading your own writing
• The illuminator model of moral character counters the warrior-statesman model of strong, aloof personalities
• Rather than using reason to tame intrinsic human passions with the goal of self-mastery, the Illuminator can only build their moral character through their interactions with others:
  • The gaze that says, “I respect you”
  • The question that says, “I’m curious about you”
  • The conversation that says, “we’re in this together”
• Morality is a social practice

13: Personality - What Energy do you bring into the room?

• Myerrs-Briggs is nonsense
• Big Five actually has some decent supporting evidence:
  • Extraversion:
    • Drawn to positive emotions
    • Driven more by positive reward (and always seeking it) than fear of by punishment
    • High risk, high reward
  • Conscientiousness:
    • Disciplined, self-regulating, gritty
    • More likely to experience guilt, don’t deal well with ambiguity
  • Agreeableness:
    • Compassionate, forgiving, attentive, high EQ
    • Describes a person’s relationships with other people
  • Neuroticism:
    • Drawn to negative emotions
    • More likely to worry, than be calm
    • Always noticing threats
  • Openness:
    • Describes a person’s relationship with information
    • Powerfully driven to seek out new experiences
    • Associative rather than linear

14: Life Tasks

• If you want to understand someone well, you have to understand which life task they’re in middle of, and how their mind has evolved to complete this task
• Some developmental psychology theories have now been debunked:
• People develop all the way through life, not just until ~21
  • People do not move through discrete life stages
  • Each task requires a different level of consciousness
• The imperial task:
  • Adolescents looking for their first evidence of competence in the world
  • People in this task crave external validation
  • People that don’t complete this task bounce around from thing to thing viewing each as an opportunity to prove themselves as a winner
• Interpersonal:
  • Fitting in and making friends at the expense of individuality
• Career consolidation:
  • The desire to be really good at something
  • Focus and discipline
  • The end of this task is marked by the observation that you are over-differentiated compared to those around you and a feeling to look for something deeper
• Generative:
  • Looking to the next generation
  • Sees themselves as a steward of something important
  • Respectful of institutions and traditions
  • Often occurs at the beginning of parenthood and in later career
  • Seeking to serve
• Integrity versus despair (old age):
  • Taking joy in the little things in life
  • Developing a thirst for knowledge later in life

15: Life Stories

• People are bad at predicting how much they will enjoy conversations and how willing other people are to talk
• Paradigmatic thinking (we do this too much!):
  • Using data and facts to make decisions
  • Good for making decisions
• Narrative thinking (we don’t do this enough!):
  • Communicating through storytelling
  • Good for getting to know a person
  • Experience someone else’s experience
• Instead of asking “what do you think about X?”, ask “how did you come to think that way about X?”
• You need to craft a coherent life story of your own to know where you’re going next
• Four things to look for when speaking to someone:
  • What is their inner voice sound like? Generally? Right now?
  • Whatimago do they have? What stage are they at in defining their identity? Diffusion/moratorium/foreclosure?
  • What are the plot lines they are weaving? Everyone has a life narrative: hero? redemption? just riding each wave as it come?
  • How can you help them tell their life story? Most people haven’t made a conscious effort to craft one

16: How do your Ancestors Show up in your Life?

• Step up close to see and independent individual
• Step back to understand how they fit into/between/outside different cultures

17: What is Wisdom?

• Wise people are good at understanding another’s struggle
• The knowledge that you get from an encounter with a wise person is personal and contextual
• Wisdom does not live within one person - it only exists between people

Review

See good to be good. Attention is a moral act.