Natasha Wiscombe

The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; k

Brackett reports that when you ask people in public where they are on the mood meter, almost everybody will say they are having positive emotions. When you ask people in confidential surveys where they are, 60 to 70 percent will put themselves on the negative-emotion side of the mood meter. That result is haunting, because it suggests that many of

Curse of Knowledge : The inability to communicate your ideas because you wrongly assume others have the necessary background to understand what you’re talking about.

Countercultures tend to be educated middle-class individuals who self-isolate based on alternative value systems — e.g. hippies, radical political movements, religious cults.

Ickes finds that the longer many couples are married, the less accurate they are at reading each other. They lock in some early version of who their spouse is, and over the years, as the other person changes, that version stays fixed—and they know less and less about what’s actually going on in the other’s heart and mind.