Why are frenemies more stressful than enemies? It’s the unpredictability.

And research also shows we have a higher bar for rating someone positively than negatively, and our positive impressions are more easily reversed than our negative ones.

Since we can’t improve our people-reading skills that much, we have to focus our efforts on making others more readable.

The Friendly Journalist Method™ doesn’t focus on making your lie detection skills better; it focuses on making their lie-telling skills worse. How do we do that?

If it scares you, say it. You don’t need to go full bore just yet.

What is closeness? Closeness is when your vision of your “self” scooches over and makes room for someone else to be in there too.

“The Barnum effect refers to the tendency for people to accept as uncannily descriptive of themselves the same generally worded assessment as long as they believe it was written specifically for them on the basis of some ‘diagnostic’ instrument such as a horoscope or personality inventory.”

Doesn’t matter if you’re actually guilty or not: it’ll get a confession out of most people.

not being vulnerable kills friendships.