All of us want to "seen" by the people around us. We want to be recognized as unique individuals. Yet the experience of being seen in this way can be dispiritingly rare. This week, we kick off our "Relationships 2.0" series by talking with researcher Allison Pugh about the psychological benefits of what she calls "connective labor." She explains why this labor is often overlooked, and how to cultivate the superpower of making other people feel seen. In this episode, you'll learn: *The definition of connective labor, and why this skill is like "engine grease" for our personal and professional relationships.*Why connective labor is vital to success in a surprisingly broad array of careers. *The gender stereotypes around connective labor, and why these stereotypes overlook the role that men play as connectors. *How connective labor affects our mental and physical health.*How connective labor by teachers may affect students' ability to learn. *How to slow down in interactions with other people and explore the emotional context behind their words. If you have a follow-up question for Allison Pugh after listening to this episode, and you’d be willing to share it with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone. Once you’ve done so, email it to us at [email protected]. Use the subject line “connection.” And thanks for listening!
Chapter 1: What is the story about Julie Munger and the homeless woman’s shoes?
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.
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Chapter 2: Who is Allison Pugh and what personal experiences shaped her understanding of being 'seen'?
At the time, we were living in California and there would be old boxes or, you know, interesting rocks or, you know, kind of things that they'd be on the sidewalk. Obviously, either somebody, part of nature that was just there or some things that other people were putting out for either garbage or for people to pick up. And my daughter was always the one picking. to pick them up.
So she had a name for them. She called them her inventions. She was very young. I think she meant that they were a kind of art or maybe that she was inventing, that she would be imagining what she could do with them or something. But I really viewed them as junk. I actually threw them out. And she still remembers that and reminds me.
And, you know, to me, it's really a primary moment of me not seeing her and how she viewed these small, we'll call them treasures.
Allison started to notice these moments of unseeing or misseeing as she went about her days. One time, during a visit to a new doctor, her physician did a quick evaluation, saw some elevated numbers, and advised Allison to eat fewer cookies.
Now, Allison happens to love cookies, but she also wanted to tell the doctor, shouldn't you learn more about me and my lifestyle before leaping to a conclusion?
it didn't land well at all. I have a very unusual lifestyle, I think, that she probably doesn't see very often because I row crew and I have done so for 30 years. And right now I'm involved in a team that's very intense. in Washington, D.C., which involves one to two hours daily. I also don't have any caffeine. I don't have any alcohol. I think I'm an unusual person health-wise.
And so when she was like, these are elevated, try not to have so many cookies, she didn't see the person she was talking to. She didn't really have all that context that can produce a good witnessing moment, and along with it, good advice.
And I think many people have these experiences, right? You go to the doctor and even if the doctor is very competent, he or she spends all their time staring at a computer screen and asking you questions and glancing at you once every 15 seconds. I think many of us have had experiences like that. And you have the sense, is my doctor actually listening to me or watching me or seeing me or not?
Yeah, the fabulous writer Abraham Verghese has called that the eye patient, that we're all to some degree an eye patient, meaning a patient that exists almost more by computer than in our holistic embodied selves in front of each other. And if that is how you feel, that often will affect whether or not you do what they say.
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Chapter 3: What is connective labor and why is it important in various professions?
I mean, all these stories in some ways reflect something that is an underlying theme here, Alison, which is that when we are not seen, when we're not heard, you know, we notice it. You know, we bring home a set of rocks and twigs and our mom throws them out and, you know, it feels like a big deal to us, even though it doesn't feel like a big deal to the other person.
On the other hand, someone spends 10 minutes listening to you and looking you in the eye. It makes a huge difference to us. Talk about just the emotional effect of feeling seen and feeling unseen.
Yeah, I think that's the most important dimension of this for me is the emotional impact because so many of the other impacts get kind of carried on along on the emotional impact. The emotional impact of being seen, people feel like they have dignity. People feel like they have understanding. People feel like they have purpose, right?
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.
None of us wants to be just another face in the crowd. All of us want to be seen for the unique individuals we are. And yet, the experience of being seen in this way can be dispiritingly rare. When we come back, the psychological benefits of being seen and why it often doesn't happen. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam. Alison Pugh is a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University. In the course of conducting detailed interviews with people, she came to see she was performing a sort of therapy. She wasn't trying to be a therapist, but the people she talked with reported the experience of being deeply seen and heard felt therapeutic.
Alison, as you noticed the effects of people feeling seen, you started to recognize the importance of this in different settings. You noticed this in your kids' schools, in doctors' offices, in community settings. In fact, you started to see this everywhere.
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.
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Chapter 4: How does connective labor impact emotional well-being and relationships?
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.
So when you started talking about connective labor in public, did people resonate with that idea? Did people recognize what that was, Alison?
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.
So when you started talking about connective labor in talks about your research with people, people would recognize that this was an important part of what it is that they were doing. But you say that they used the word magic to describe the power of connection, that they themselves had seen firsthand that when they connected with other people, magical things seemed to happen.
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.
I mean, I think we've all been in workplaces where, you know, perhaps, you know, one boss is replaced by another boss and the new person basically, you know, really has a human touch to them. And within, you know, days or weeks sometimes, you know, a very toxic environment can be transformed and people are suddenly working together and they're cooperating together.
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Chapter 5: Why is connective labor often invisible yet critical in daily interactions?
A feeling of connection might also help us learn new things. What have researchers discovered about the effects of being seen and heard for students, Alison?
So this is a really voluminous area. I have a couple of favorites. One author reviewed 1,000 articles with 355,000 students and came away with this meta-finding that, you know, among school-age children, he says, the effect size of teacher-student relationships is bigger than most typical educational innovations or curriculum changes.
So like the teacher-student relationship that underlies whether or not someone is learning algebra or can, you know, parse a sentence, that is more powerful, has a greater impact than, say, standard curriculum changes or other innovations. You might expect that to be true for the younger kids, maybe, but maybe less true for middle school or high schoolers. And actually, it's the opposite.
The effect sizes are larger in studies that are conducted in higher grades. And Teacher-student relationships are even more important when kids are academically at risk. You know, kids from disadvantaged economic backgrounds, for example, and kids with learning difficulties.
So it's like even more important for adolescents, even though we don't usually structure those schools to enable it to happen very well.
So this type of emotional connection also seems to be related to physical health. We touched on this a little bit earlier in our conversation, Alison. What is the effect on patients of feeling seen and heard by their doctors?
There's a lot of research that talks about how being seen by one's doctor leads to better health outcomes. and leads directly to patient well-being. And my favorite, perhaps, study here is a meta-analysis that has extremely strict inclusion criteria. So it's only randomized controlled trials in which the relationship between doctor and patient is experimentally manipulated.
So they tell the physicians to do or don't make eye contact or do or don't interrupt, et cetera. And based on that, these scholars, researchers conclude that the impact of clinician-patient relationship on health outcomes was significant and exceeded that of taking an aspirin every day to ward off heart attacks.
Wow. So I mean, it has sort of actual physical consequences here, not just psychological consequences.
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Chapter 6: How do gender stereotypes influence the perception of connective labor?
Yeah, they've done great work on this stuff. The study that I most enjoy thinking and talking about is they experimentally varied how cafe customers interacted with baristas, and then they measured their well-being afterward.
And they gave some participants, they gave them instructions to like, you know, have a genuine interaction with the cashier, smile, make eye contact, and have a brief conversation. That was the social condition. And then they had the efficient condition.
Those participants were told, make your interaction with the cashier as efficient as possible, have your money ready, and avoid unnecessary conversation. And it found that people who took the time to have a social interaction with the barista, that increased people's sense of belonging.
You know, the study and its two conditions point to one reason many of us don't stop to see one another. And that's because many of us, in fact, are frenetically busy and harried as we move through the day. And it's hard to notice the person in front of you when you feel like you have to be in two places at the same time.
Yes, that is a quite profound observation, actually, because what makes us busy? There's a couple of things that lead to it. But in the United States, a lot of times what makes you busy is an inordinate work schedule, kind of overworking schedule. can really shrink the amount of time we have for the other parts of our lives.
And research like this suggests that if you don't kind of give the time and space to those unscripted, trivial encounters throughout your life, if you're always trying to make everything so efficient so that you can maximize the time that you have available for other pursuits, that can have well-being effects.
I mean, it is the case that sometimes when we see people who are masters of communication, people who are just really good and fun to be around, they often have an unhurried air about them. And sometimes these are very busy people, but they somehow are able to communicate a sense that they're not in a rush.
Yeah. I mean, I've seen that, too. I'm always amazed. One of my brothers, for example, is always really good at honoring the moment, kind of just being there present with the other person. And but he's also also often late. Yeah. And I, on the other hand, am really almost never late and I really need to teach myself.
I have needed to teach myself to pause and, you know, who's this person that I'm kind of blowing by. Yeah.
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Chapter 7: What responses did Allison receive when discussing connective labor publicly?
Yeah. I mean, like, maybe we should we who are not late should be more understanding that those who are are helping to knit us together as a society, you know.
Seeing others for who they truly are has many benefits, for their emotions, for their health, for their learning. It also has benefits for us, and yet many of us feel it occurs too infrequently in our harried world. When we come back, how to actually see another person and the surprising transformations this can produce in them and in us. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Alison Pugh is a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University. She's the author of The Last Human Job, the work of connecting in a disconnected world. Alison says it's possible for people to learn to get better at seeing other people. In fact, she teaches this skill to students.
Yes. I realized that the in-depth interviewing that I do that involves this kind of seeing is a clinical practice. And it's a clinical practice like nursing and like teaching and like... And what do all of those professions have in common is they have an apprentice model of teaching in which someone does something in front of other people and then gets immediate feedback.
One of the first things that they have to do is kind of get out of the way. And I often like to think about airspace as like a soccer ball and who is controlling the soccer ball. And you want to pass the soccer ball, you know. If you're too present, then the other person just doesn't have the space to put themselves in there. Right.
And that can preclude, that can impede seeing of the other for sure.
It's also the case that sometimes as people talk, we have very quick interpretations of what it is that they're saying, and sometimes we have very quick reactions to what they're saying. Talk a moment about the importance of trying to set those things aside as well, setting aside our assumptions and expectations in order to be truly good listeners and how difficult that can be to do.
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Chapter 8: Why do people describe the power of connection as 'magical'?
Yeah. So if you're like completely sure that the other person is really passionate about such and such and you say that to them and they're like, no, actually, it's more like this. This is what I actually care about. You have to hear that. And actually, the correcting process. can help people feel even more seen. If they are able to correct you and you say, oh yes, now I get it.
The other thing I would say is in our quickness to leap into a conversation with somebody with our own views or assumptions, what I think is really important is actually hearing what the other person is not saying, hearing the emotion that they're not naming. If you can hear an emotion behind what someone's saying and say, wow, it sounds like you're feeling nervous about that.
Or it sounds like you're feeling, it sounds like that gives you a lot of pride. It doesn't have to be a negative emotion. It's like, if you can kind of hear whatever emotion is behind, that's very powerful for people. If they didn't say it and you name it, they feel very seen. And kind of in the naming, when you're doing that kind of naming, you're making it safe for them.
In some ways, being able to get one level below what they're saying, to sort of say, I can recognize that you're feeling pride, or I can recognize that you're feeling sad, that might be even more effective than just simply repeating back to people, here's what I'm hearing you say, or repeating back their words to them, because it really shows that you have actually taken in what they've said, you've understood it, and you're actually trying to give the essence of it back to them.
Exactly. That's why it's a boost, a huge boost. Now, I would also say it's a little more challenging, maybe. But it is true that if you can bump it up a level and go to what's not being said out loud, but that you really perceive, that is very powerful. Yeah.
You see, Alison, that if we happen to not see someone accurately, if we mis-see someone, this can itself be an opportunity. If we stop to show the other person that we really do want to see them and to correct ourselves. You interviewed a therapist whom you call Sarah, who told you that an episode of mis-seeing was actually crucial to her patient's progress. Can you tell me that story?
Yeah. So Sarah was a therapist at the VA hospital. And so she was seeing veterans. And she said she had she told me about a woman she had been seeing who had experienced sexual trauma in the military. And at the end of like the third or fourth week. The woman leaves the session with a comment saying that she might not be able to come back.
You know, how she might get busy is what she said to Sarah. And Sarah said to me, you know, something was just kind of off. Like it didn't feel the same. It just didn't feel right. So she calls her before the next week. And she says to her, you know, I think I said something. You know, I'm wondering if I maybe missed something or didn't hear something right. The session felt different today.
And I think it could be helpful to talk about that if you're able to come in again. So the woman comes in. She comes back. And they were able to talk. And Sarah said at that point, the relationship really shifted. And she ended up making tons of progress there. And so at the end of the treatment, Sarah asks the woman, you know, what worked for you?
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