I'm Rufus Griscombe and this is the next big idea.

Today, Nicholas Epley on the scientific case for being a little more social. My mother lives by herself in a four-bedroom house.

She has many friends and a gift for connecting with people, but I don't think

she would mind me saying that living alone can be hard. It sometimes hurts being alone. And it's a

hurt that far too many people feel. The percentage of Americans who live alone has risen from

7.7% in 1940 to almost 28% in 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

There's a strange irony here. Over the last century, tens of millions of Americans have migrated

from rural areas to cities. We've never lived closer together. We, supposedly the most social animals on the planet, sit inches apart in waiting rooms,

doctors offices, airports, subway cars, coffee shops, staring forward, avoiding each other's gaze,

pretending that we're not surrounded by other human beings.

Doctors' offices may be the right place to sit alone,

because that's where our social isolation is driving us.

Loneliness triggers cortisol, our body's stress response,

which over time erodes our bodies from the inside.

It causes cancer, heart disease, everything bad.

It also may be part of the story of our political polarization.

It doesn't have to be this way, says Nicholas Epley, author of the new book, A Little More Social,

How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health and Connection. Nick has spent the last 15 years researching how we read and routinely misread the minds

of the people around us.

Through dozens of experiments with thousands of participants, his work reveals that the

paralyzing social barriers we experience are almost completely self-imposed built on a misplaced pessimism.

Again and again, his research finds that we underestimate how much other people want to hear from us,

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