Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong

What is empathy? Empathy is when the line between you and another blurs, when you become confused where you end and another person begins.

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

negative judgments about people will be less reliable than your positive judgments.

Truth be told, if you wanted to focus on something, skip body language and laser focus on their speech. When we can hear someone but not see them, empathic ability declines only about 4 percent. When we can see someone but not hear them, the drop-off is a whopping 54 percent. Pay less attention to whether they cross their legs and more attention to

not being vulnerable kills friendships.

First impressions are generally accurate. But once they’re set, they’re extremely hard to change.

Canada and the UK have both dropped Reid-style interrogation, finding it to be coercive and unethical.

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

“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.”