via Canva/Photos
A man and woman chatting over some wine.
A lot of people are uncomfortable making small talk, but it’s an essential skill that can make or break your love life, career, and social experiences. Many people believe that being good at chatting with others is something innate, but those who excel at it work at their craft and pick up small tips along the way to become better communicators.
One of the tricks that all great communicators know is that you will be more likable when you're more interested than interesting. Study after study shows that people love talking about themselves, and if you ask people more questions, they will like you a lot more than if you did all the talking. So, how do we do this without creating a one-sided conversation where your conversation partner learns nothing about you? The folks at the Science of People have shared the statement-plus question technique.
The statement-plus technique
“One of the smoothest ways to keep conversation flowing is to share a brief personal statement followed by a question,” the Science of People writes. “This technique accomplishes two things: it gives the other person information about you (making you seem more approachable and interesting) while also redirecting focus to them.”
Coworkers having a nice conversation.via Canva/Photos
Here are some examples:
Instead of asking “What do you do for work?” say:
“I’m a writer for Upworthy, and I enjoy seeing my work read by millions of people. What excites you about your job?”
Instead of asking, “Where do you live?” try:
“I live in Long Beach, California, and it’s really nice living by the ocean. What do you love the most about where you live?”
Instead of asking, “How do you know the person who threw the party?” say:
“I met Sarah at a church meeting seven years ago. Do you remember the first time you met her?”
These questions enable you to discuss yourself while maintaining the focus on the other person. They are also open-ended, so you don’t just get a one-word answer. You learn their job and what excites them about it. You know where they live, and they get to brag about what they like about the city. The technique also broadens the conversation because, according to the psychological phenomenon known as reciprocal self-disclosure, people are more likely to disclose things about themselves after you share something about yourself.
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What is reciprocal self-disclosure?
“The most likely result of your self-disclosure is that other people will do the same. In the field of communication, we refer to this as 'reciprocity.' When you share information about yourself, the most likely result is that people will start to disclose a similar type of information from their own lives," communication coach Alexander Lyon says. "In our presentations, we talk about this as a magic wand. Disclosure is the closest thing we have to a magic wand in terms of a concept in communication. When you disclose, other people almost automatically reciprocate."
Ultimately, people love to talk about themselves, and if you give them the opportunity, they will like you more for it. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t reveal some aspects of yourself at the same time while keeping the focus on them. The statement-plus question technique allows you to reveal some things about yourself while making the other person feel seen and comfortable telling you more about themselves. It’s sure to elevate your small talk to something more substantial in a relaxed way that doesn’t feel like an interview.
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A young boy reaches for food at a buffet
School lunch in the United States has a complicated history. While many of us who grew up in the 80s or 90s are nostalgic for some of the menu items we remember fondly (rectangle pizza, anyone?), some of the serving choices were bizarre. We really grew up with someone handing us a tray of pizza, french fries, chocolate milk, and soggy green beans every morning at 10:30am.
The offerings have improved somewhat over the years, but everything's still so... beige. The main choices are typically pizza, chicken nuggets, or some form of questionable ground beef like burgers or meatloaf. Some people are stunned when they find out that school lunches from around the world can look very different.
A photo of lunch served at a school in South Korea recently went viral and had everyone's mouth watering.
from pics
A user on Reddit posted the photos to r/pics where they immediately racked up over 17,000 upvotes.
The colors on the tray stick out immediately, most notably the noodles covered in creamy red sauce. But it's really the stuffed lobster tail that's the star of this particular tray; potentially lobster thermidor.
You expect to see some cultural differences in the food offerings in different countries. Korean food is inherently different than American food in a number of ways. But Americans love lobster! Yet can you imagine American schools serving lobster tail to kids under any circumstances?
Lobster dinner with a glass of beerCanva
The response from mostly-American users was fascinating. Some were in awe while others rightly pointed out why a lunch like this would never fly in the USA.
One of the main sentiments was that school lunches in other countries often put ours to utter shame:
"I used to teach in Korea and the lunches were always amazing, the beef and quails egg stew was a constant highlight."
"I studied in Korea for 6 months on uni exchange. The food at the uni cafeteria looked just like this, and was 10/10. My private room at the uni lodge was $500USD for the WHOLE semester, and included unlimited food."
"I live in Spain and my kid's school invited the parents to taste lunch one day. It was fantastic. Also, at the end of each month they share a calendar of the meals that will be served during the next one, day by day. They're all balanced, and prepared with proximity food. They prepare specific meals for every kid with allergies/intolerances/any kind of dietary restriction, e.g. restrictions related to religion. They also share a list of dinner suggestions - again, for the whole month - so you have ideas for dinners that are healthy, easy, cheap, and tasty for kids. It's a public school."
Gif of student choosing between healthy or tasty meal via Giphy
"I am from a third world country where many public schools lack a ton of funding and even we have better more healthy lunches than the slop that’s given to US students. I know because I went to school in the US and also in my home country."
"America hates its f*cking kids. It will always mistreat them and deny them opportunities."
"Lobster as a school lunch??? I need to go back to elementary school... I'll quit work for education and a lunch like that!"
Others, while impressed with the selection, had their doubts about if American schools could ever adopt something like this:
"This lunch is orders of magnitude better then US school lunches. And most American kids would utterly hate it."
"American kids have no palette! It’s all chicken nuggets and mac & cheese! ... I know some kids that would starve rather than try anything on that tray."
Some pointed out that those metal chopsticks would likely be used as a weapon almost immediately, and discontinued ASAP.
Americans, as a whole, have a dreadful diet devoid of enough nutrition and it causes catastrophic health problems in the longterm. For clues as to why, you can look at what we feed our kids — and why.
Two young students eat lunchCanva
No, most American kids probably wouldn't like lobster tail. But there is a lot that goes into how our palette develops that might help explain it.
For starters, fresh produce and lean proteins are extremely expensive in America. It's far more cost-effective to pump people full of cheap, empty calories and sugar. School lunch used to be cooked fresh every day in the schools before major government budget cuts forced districts to more heavily on lean on frozen or reheated options. Kids get used to chicken nuggies all day every day from a young age!
The irony is that school lunches in American, while not overly exciting, at least meet some basic nutritional guidelines. But they're not free for everyone, and even kids who qualify for free or reduced lunch may not end up participating due to stigma or red-tape. When parents on a shoestring budget have to buy their own lunch supplies, things can get a lot worse than meatloaf and green beans. We all knew a few kids in school who had Pop Tarts for lunch every day. To be fair, we were all jealous at the time.
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And finally, Americans sure love to get fired up about our "right" to eat like crap. When Michelle Obama tried to clean up the school lunch program, she ran into massive pushback. RFK Jr. wants to do his own version of it, and we'll see how that goes.
The viral photo from South Korea shows what might be possible with a few key cultural and political shifts. Treating feeding our kids more like "preventive medicine" versus a cost to manage would definitely be a start.
This article originally appeared earlier this year. It has been updated.
Harvard researcher Arthur C. Brooks studies what leads to human happiness.
We live in a society that prizes ambition, celebrating goal-setting, and hustle culture as praiseworthy vehicles on the road to success. We also live in a society that associates successfully getting whatever our hearts desire with happiness. The formula we internalize from an early age is that desire + ambition + goal-setting + doing what it takes = a successful, happy life.
But as Harvard University happiness researcher Arthur C. Brooks has found, in his studies as well as his own experience, that happiness doesn't follow that formula. "It took me too long to figure this one out," Brooks told podcast host Tim Ferris, explaining why he uses a "reverse bucket list" to live a happier life.
Many people make bucket lists of things they want in life. Giphy
Brooks shared that on his birthday, he would always make a list of his desires, ambitions, and things he wanted to accomplish—a bucket list. But when he was 50, he found his bucket list from when he was 40 and had an epiphany: "I looked at that list from when I was 40, and I'd checked everything off that list. And I was less happy at 50 than I was at 40."
As a social scientist, he recognized that he was doing something wrong and analyzed it.
"This is a neurophysiological problem and a psychological problem all rolled into one handy package," he said. "I was making the mistake of thinking that my satisfaction would come from having more. And the truth of the matter is that lasting and stable satisfaction, which doesn't wear off in a minute, comes when you understand that your satisfaction is your haves divided by your wants…You can increase your satisfaction temporarily and inefficiently by having more, or permanently and securely by wanting less."
Brooks concluded that he needed a "reverse bucket list" that would help him "consciously detach" from his worldly wants and desires by simply writing them down and crossing them off.
"I know that these things are going to occur to me as natural goals," Brooks said, citing human evolutionary psychology. "But I do not want to be owned by them. I want to manage them." He discussed moving those desires from the instinctual limbic system to the conscious pre-frontal cortex by examining each one and saying, "Maybe I get it, maybe I don't," but crossing them off as attachments. "And I'm free…it works," he said.
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"When I write them down, I acknowledge that I have the desire," he explained on X. "When I cross them out, I acknowledge that I will not be attached to this goal."
The idea that attachment itself causes unhappiness is a concept found in many spiritual traditions, but it is most closely associated with Buddhism. Mike Brooks, PhD, explains that humans need healthy attachments, such as an attachment to staying alive and attachments to loved ones, to avoid suffering. But many things to which we are attached are not necessarily healthy, either by degree (over-attachment) or by nature (being attached to things that are impermanent).
"We should strive for flexibility in our attachments because the objects of our attachment are inherently in flux," Brooks writes in Psychology Today. "In this way, we suffer unnecessarily when we don't accept their impermanent nature."
What Arthur C. Brooks suggests that we strive to detach ourselves from our wants and desires because the simplest way to solve the 'haves/wants = happiness' formula is to reduce the denominator. The reverse bucket list, in which you cross off desires before you fulfill them, can help free you from attachment and lead to a happier overall existence.
Photo credit: Canva
Should you let a dog lick your face?
They don't call them Man's Best Friend for nothing. With nearly half of the households in American having at least one dog, there's a lot people need to know about them. Our furry friends come in wide variety of breeds, each with their own unique traits and needs. "Man's best friend" can be a guardian, a helpful worker, a loyal friend, and a snuggly companion, but there's one thing almost all dogs have in common: Licking.
Some dogs lick way more than others, but it's rare to find a dog who never licks anyone or anything. Many dogs communicate and show affection by licking, which is sweet—if a little gross—depending on how slobbery they are. There's a common saying that dogs' mouths are cleaner than humans', which is a bit hard to believe when you see what some dogs put in their mouths, but it is true?
What does science say about dog tongues and saliva? Is a dog licking our face something we should worry about?
We've all heard the myths about dog mouths. Are they true? Photo by James Barker on Unsplash
It turns out, the answer to whether a dog's mouth is cleaner than ours isn't super straightforward.
An 8th grader named Abby tackled this question in a science experiment that won her a Young Naturalists Award from the American Museum of Natural History in 2011. Her family had gotten a dog and her mom kept telling her not to let the dog lick her face because dog mouths are full of bacteria. Instead of arguing, Abby decided to find out herself if this was true.
"I hypothesized that human tongues would be cleaner than dog tongues," she wrote. "I thought this because humans brush their teeth at least once a day. I hypothesized that dogs' tongues would be dirty because they were always licking dirty things like garbage."
After diving into the research about bacteria that live in and on humans and dogs, Abby decided she had a testable hypothesis. But this wasn't any old middle school science experiment. She applied for and got a grant to the State Hygienic Lab at the University of Iowa, where she was assigned a mentor to work with her.
You can read the nitty gritty details of her experiment here, but it involved a lab, swabs, agar plates, and more. Here was the conclusion:
"Will I continue to let my dog lick me? Yes!" Photo by Ashley Levinson on Unsplash
"I concluded that dog and human mouth flora are very different. (Flora means the bacteria found in a mouth or anywhere else.) The bacteria found in human mouths are more similar to another human's oral bacteria than the bacteria found in a dog's mouth.
"I also concluded that dogs' mouths are cleaner than humans' in some ways, and dirtier in other ways. Humans have more bacteria in their mouths than dogs do, based on the total number of bacteria. Most of the humans had a 'moderate' number of bacteria, and most of the dogs had 'few' bacteria. A possible explanation of this might be that dogs pant a lot, and maybe while panting, bacteria falls off their tongues along with their saliva. But dogs had more types of bacteria. The average number of different bacterial colonies in a dog's mouth was about 5.7. The average number of different bacterial colonies in a human's mouth was about 4.1. I think this is so because dogs sniff and lick a variety of things, like carpets, floors, chairs, grass, etc., so they pick up bacteria from many places."
But what about the licking of our faces? That's a bit of a subjective call, but Abby's results gave her some peace of mind:
"In conclusion, will I let my dog continue to lick me? The answer to the question is yes!" she wrote. "I will feel guiltless about letting my dog lick me because I found out that human and dog oral bacteria are different, so my dog's oral bacteria present no harm to me."
Kisses approved by science. Giphy
What do the experts say?
According to Colin Harvey, professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine and executive secretary at the American Veterinary Dental College, comparing dogs' mouths to humans' mouth is "like comparing apples to oranges." As Abby found, the microbes in a dog's mouth are very different than those in a human's.
The American Kennel Club elaborates:
"Most of the bacteria in your dog’s mouth aren’t zoonotic, which means you probably won’t get a disease from a big old doggy kiss. There are exceptions to this. Dogs that eat a raw diet are at an increased risk of contracting salmonella, which can be spread to humans. You also probably shouldn’t share kisses with a dog that regularly raids the litter box.
In other words, kissing your dog is less risky than kissing another human, but that doesn’t mean that your dog’s mouth is necessarily cleaner than a human’s—they just have a mostly incompatible set of germs."
Not necessarily cleaner, but different. Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash
Keeping your dog's mouth healthy through regular teeth cleaning and dental check-ups can also help prevent issues that could potentially come from dog licks.
So there you have it. If your dog doesn't eat a raw diet and doesn't go snacking in the cat box (or some other equally fecal-bacteria-ridden place), their kisses are probably not going to hurt you. Guilt-free pooch smooches for the win!
This article originally appeared in April. It has been updated.
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