Vanessa Van Edwards: Hacking Social Interaction for Good
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2017
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today's guest, Vanessa Van Edwards , is a behavioral investigator and founder of human behavior research lab, the Science of People.
She's also known as a human lie-detector, master of influence and someone who has spent her adult life decoding human interaction, influence, social and power dynamics, charisma, likability and more.
As a geeky, modern-day Dale Carnegie, Vanessa Van Edwards' innovative work has been featured on NPR, Business Week and CNN. And, her book, CAPTIVATE: The Science of Succeeding with People, is a literal roadmap to decode and, to a certain extent, influence human interaction.
We wanted to learn all about these things, the ideas, the ethics and application. But even more, we wanted to know what unfolded in Van Edward's life that led her to become so obsessed with the study of what makes us tick. Because, it turns out, Vanessa wasn't always the social savant in the room. In fact, in her earlier life, she pretty much ran from interaction.
So, what happened? The answer, and the stories that emerged, took us by surprise, and also revealed why this pursuit is so close to her heart.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Fear is a cross-dresser. |
| 0:04.9 | Fear is this really interesting emotion that likes to cross-dress other things. |
| 0:09.7 | It's much easier to be angry than afraid. |
| 0:12.0 | It's easier to be hateful than afraid. |
| 0:14.7 | And so people will say the easier emotions instead of the underlying emotion. |
| 0:20.0 | So a lot of the time, fear is rearing its ugly head as something else. |
| 0:24.3 | Today's guest, Vanessa Van Edwards, really struggled to fit in as a kid. |
| 0:30.8 | Maybe that's not all that unusual. |
| 0:32.4 | I know I was not the most comfortable person in social scenarios either. |
| 0:38.1 | And honestly still, I'm not. |
| 0:40.7 | The thing about her is that as she grew up, the problem actually probably got worse and worse |
| 0:44.2 | until a moment where she was challenged by a professor to turn her fierce, fierce devotion |
| 0:51.0 | into knowledge and to academics loose on her ability to actually study and code human |
| 1:00.4 | social interaction. |
| 1:01.7 | That has become her profession. |
| 1:04.3 | And in fact, she's got a new book called Captivate, which basically reveals the code of |
| 1:10.4 | human interaction, which I found absolutely fascinating because I'm a little bit obsessed |
| 1:16.4 | with how people interact with each other. |
| 1:18.1 | And as somebody who was always the one who admittedly hung out in the kitchen during |
| 1:23.3 | parties and often still does, the ability to come out of the kitchen, the ability to understand |
| 1:27.6 | how to move into a room and feel okay, how to understand the most nuanced parts of social |
| 1:33.0 | interaction, the idea that that is actually trainable is profound on so many levels, not |
... |
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