Allison Pugh
speaker
77 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Allison Pugh’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Those are all things that other researchers as well as my own research has found. And when you're not seen, it can really dissuade you from following good advice because you don't hear the good advice. You don't think that it's relevant to you or it doesn't feel like it recognizes the particularities of your situation.
That's right. It's kind of most obviously true for therapists. It's also true for teachers. It's also true for primary care physicians. So those seem like almost the most obvious cases. But it's also true for, you know, I interviewed people who were like community organizers. I interviewed people who were funeral home directors, home health care aides. sex workers, even police.
I interviewed a detective. I interviewed somebody who works with prison guards, people you wouldn't expect to be particularly empathetic or who themselves might not talk about relationship as an important part of their work. But seeing the other is part of how people do their jobs across many occupations.
Connective labor is the act of seeing the other and the other feeling seen. You know, this is very common in sales, for example. If you want to sell something to somebody, they're more likely to buy it if you convey to them that you see that they have a particular problem that this solves or you see that they have a particular approach that this solves.
you know, kind of works with or whatever, you know, like the seeing is kind of the engine powering so many different outcomes that we are pointing at and thinking about that is so important in so many different occupations.
Exactly. What I felt was not known is how much these different occupations have in common and how it extends well beyond prototypical ones. So like the hairdresser also needs to be able to see you, to be able to give you a haircut that you want and have you accept that haircut. And it's actually a dynamic.
And that dynamic is common in many different kinds of jobs, not just the ones that have articulated how important relationships are.
So you can force yourself to learn, even though you hate that teacher and they're not really seeing you and you're sitting in the back of the class. You can kind of roll that rock up the hill, but it's not going to be a pleasant or joyful experience. And also, you probably won't go as far as you could go. And that's true in many different fields.
Exactly. Yeah.
Absolutely. This concept of connective labor, I'm really thinking of it can be deployed for all kinds of reasons. So it could be deployed for well-being, as the teachers or the therapists might do. But it could also be... Deployed for like persuasion, you could say, and that might be the sales people or it could be deployed for control.
And that might be as, you know, the hostage negotiator or the detective or, you know. So many of those jobs, I'm sure you can hear, are occupied by men. So I think, for instance, lawyers definitely need this. Judges need this. And many of those are occupied by men.
People would definitely come up to me afterward and say, you know, I'm a nurse and thank God that you're writing about this because I need to be able to go back to my employer and say, you know, I'm doing more than bedpans. I'm doing more than, you know, medication products. timing. You know, this is important work of sitting and seeing the patient, you know, or the client.
And they felt, I suppose they felt seen themselves, but it felt like it had important potential impact for them in their conversations about their work.
Yeah, they definitely used the word magic to describe what they saw of the effects of seeing patients or students. You know, people definitely would come up and describe it as magical. I think they use that word because we don't really understand it well. It's tied to this invisibility in that there's this really important...
process that's happening underneath all these you know economic tasks that we value and this kind of underlying process shadowy you know opaque We don't understand it well. And that's why people use the word magic, because it feels like it just comes upon us as this great gift without really understanding what goes into it and what produces it.
Yeah. I mean, I've had that experience. And what I like about that example, actually, is that you're talking not just about, you know, the impact of one person seeing you, but also how we can create a kind of culture in which people are seeing others, that you're not the only person doing the seeing.
So it really, a warm, competent leader can make an enormous difference in part by catalyzing this kind of magic.
Yes, I love that study. I think it's so well done. What they did was they had pairs of people who don't actually know each other tell stories to each other. And then they measured, I guess they had, you know, kind of... wires attached to them while they did this, but they measured the emotional arousal of the storyteller and the story listener.
And they found that when the listener conveyed that they heard and understood the other person, and you can imagine that's through nods or facial expressions or encouraging noises. The storytellers actually noticeably benefited. They felt calmer. Their emotional arousal decreased. And the more their listeners conveyed this kind of affiliation, the stronger the impact.
And meanwhile, it also had an impact on the listeners. So the more the listeners were allied in this way, you know, nods, facial expressions, encouraging noises, et cetera, the more they experienced increased arousal.
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