Relationships 2.0: The Price of Disconnection
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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Some years ago, a homeless woman was being discharged at a Philadelphia hospital. On her way out, nurses noticed the woman was wearing flip-flops. It was January, and January's in Philadelphia can get very cold. Nursing director Julie Munger had an idea. Her daughter was a basketball player and had left a bunch of old sneakers in the trunk of Julie's car. Would one of those pairs fit the homeless woman? They went out and took a look, but the shoes were all a size and a half too small for the woman's feet. That's when, Julie told a reporter from WTXF-TV, things took an unexpected turn.
So as I was leaving, she's like, your shoes are nice. I said, well, what size are your feet? And she's like a 10.
Julie looked down at her own shoes. They were a size 10. They were also super comfortable and she loved them.
I'm like, these are a 10. Do you want these? And she just cried and thought it would be great. So I just gave her the shoes.
Julie unlaced her shoes and handed them to the other woman. Perhaps you've had experiences like this yourself. Our sister show, My Unsung Hero, often features stories like this where people reach out to help one another in unusual acts of generosity. But the reason these stories stand out is because they're at odds with the way most of us feel treated as we go about our days. We don't feel seen and heard. We feel ignored and passed over. This week on Hidden Brain, and in a companion story on Hidden Brain Plus, we examine the reasons behind the growing disconnection in our schools, hospitals, and workplaces, and what we can do about it. It's also the start of a series that has long been a favorite with listeners, Relationships 2.0.
In the coming weeks, we will look at the art of negotiation and ways in which we can get along better with the people in our lives. When boarding a train or subway or going shopping at the mall, we may take in hundreds of people at a glance. On a Zoom call for work, the faces of our coworkers fit into a grid. Even when we're spending time with close friends and family, our familiarity can get in the way of really seeing the person in front of us. Alison Pugh is a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University. She studies how we relate to one another and how this has changed over time. Alison Pugh, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you so much for having me. Alison, growing up, you were the youngest of five children. You have a story about the first new bathing suit you ever owned. Can you tell me that story?
Sure. You know, right. The youngest of five. It was a generally loving environment, but I would say it was one my mother still sometimes calls it benign neglect. So I did not get a bathing suit that wasn't owned by someone else until I was in college. Wow. And I went myself to a department store and picked out, I think, a pink bathing suit that I that I wanted instead of the, you know, scores of other kinds I had had over the years.
The bathing suit story is one of many incidents where Allison remembers she was seen as one kid in a crowd. It wasn't about being treated badly. It was about being ignored. Another time, Allison remembers coming home in middle school, upset because some boys in her school were bothering her. She told her mother what had happened.
I remember coming home kind of full of outrage and being like, this is not okay. They shouldn't be doing this. And I was trying to figure it out. I just didn't know how to handle it. And she did not take it seriously at all, unfortunately. She just kind of said, oh, that's because they like you. That was her reaction. That was her rationale. And at the time, I remember a really sharp disjuncture between my own, I would say, half-desperate outrage and her kind of semi-humorous, oh, you know, they just like you.
So you felt that you weren't really seen by your mom?
No, that was a big moment of a kind of cognitive dissonance between what I thought was going on and her response, for sure. I did not feel seen.
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