Below, Vanessa Bohns shares five key insights from her new book, Should I Say Something?: The Science of What to Share―and What to Keep to Yourself.
Vanessa is a social psychologist, a tenured professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University, and an award-winning researcher and teacher.
What’s the Big Idea?
Should I ask what’s wrong? Should I apologize? Should I share this news? We ask ourselves these questions constantly and almost always get the answers wrong. Our instincts about what to say (and what to keep to ourselves) are systematically, predictably off—and knowing how they’re off is the first step to saying the right thing at the right time.
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1. Organize your thoughts.
Social dilemmas are tricky to solve. There’s no obviously right answer. And the reason so many of us feel paralyzed is that we’re trying to process too many competing considerations at once.
The framework I use to slow down and better organize my thoughts is built around three questions:
- How will saying something impact the other person?
- How will saying something impact how the other person sees me?
- How will saying something help me achieve my goal in this situation?
Almost every decision to share something involves trade-offs. Telling someone about your struggles may make them feel closer to you, and less alone themselves, but it may also make them a little more wary of giving you difficult tasks at work because they aren’t sure you can handle them. Which of those things matters most to you? Answering that makes the choice easier.
2. Trust other people to manage their emotions.
One of the biggest reasons we hold back from saying something is empathy. We don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings or embarrass them. It pains us to cause other people pain or discomfort. The problem is that we tend to fixate on the short-term effects of our words while ignoring the long-term benefits of speaking up.
People’s emotional reactions are not one-dimensional. More than one emotion can be felt at a time. Consider two friends who have been struggling to get pregnant and one announces she’s expecting. The other may feel both a pang of envy and genuine happiness. Those two feelings can coexist.
“Deciding someone is too fragile, or that it would be too awkward, isn’t kindness.”
As much as we should be sensitive to other people’s feelings, it’s not up to us to decide what someone can handle. Deciding someone is too fragile, or that it would be too awkward, isn’t kindness. We’re being patronizing. We’re taking away their autonomy to receive information they may very much want or need. A better strategy is to ask the other person what they are open to hearing. Then, respect their answer. This is a great way to make sure you’re not giving unsolicited advice. You’ve honored their right to decide for themselves what they can handle.
3. Ask yourself: Should someone tell them?
Discomfort cuts both ways. We often frame silence as an act of kindness toward others, but a lot of the time, we stay quiet because we don’t want to deal with the awkwardness of speaking up. And that’s not a great reason.
Here’s a useful research-backed trick for separating your own discomfort from an accurate read of the situation. When researchers asked people to recall a time they saw someone doing something poorly—speaking too quickly during a presentation or making repeated typos—they underestimated how much that person would want to hear that feedback, but only when they imagined themselves delivering it. When they imagined someone else giving the same feedback, they were more accurate at gauging other people’s desire to hear honest feedback.
The antidote is to change the question. Instead of asking “Should I say something?”—which puts your own discomfort front and center—ask yourself: “Should someone tell them?” If the answer is yes, that’s a strong signal that the answer to whether you should be the one to do it is probably yes too.
4. Be curious about people—not about what makes them stand out.
My husband once dated a woman who was six feet tall. She later told him she appreciated that he didn’t ask about her height when they first met, because everyone always asked her about it.
Research consistently shows that people are more comfortable answering personal, sensitive questions than we expect, and that asking deeper questions builds real closeness in ways that surface-level small talk simply can’t. Asking someone about the last time they sang in front of another person will bring you far closer than asking about the weather. So the general advice to ask deeper, more personal questions is good advice.
“Asking deeper questions builds real closeness in ways that surface-level small talk simply can’t.”
But I like to put a boundary around this recommendation: make sure those questions are about how someone thinks and feels, rather than about how they look. When you ask someone about their height, their accent, or any other physical trait that sets them apart, you’re not connecting with them—you’re singling them out. You’re becoming the hundredth person to make them feel like a curiosity rather than a person.
Be genuinely curious. But be curious about their opinions, their experiences, and what they like and don’t like. Don’t ask them about that thing that makes them stand out from the crowd. Just don’t make them explain the obvious for the thousandth time.
5. Find people who can celebrate with you.
We usually think of social support as the people who are there for us when something goes wrong. But close-relationships researchers know that an equally important form of social support is having people around to celebrate with us when things go right.
Sharing good news makes us happier through a process called capitalization: the positive feelings we get from a success are amplified when we share it with someone else. And the people around us often feel happier through a process called BIRGing—or “basking in reflected glory.” If you’ve ever bragged about your friend who was on Jeopardy or your cousin who works for NASA, you are BIRGing. You’re letting their success reflect a little light on you.
“If you’ve ever bragged about your friend who was on Jeopardy or your cousin who works for NASA, you are BIRGing.”
While envy is a possibility, research shows envy isn’t always a bad thing. In fact, envy can sometimes look more like admiration and inspiration than resentment. But even when someone does feel a pang of envy, that feeling can coexist with real happiness for you and a genuine desire to help you savor the moment.
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