Your colleagues like you more than you realise…
Eat Sleep Work Repeat - better workplace culture
Bruce Daisley
4.7 • 989 Ratings
🗓️ 16 April 2026
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr Gillian Sandstrom is a researcher whose work explores her fascination with our conversations with other people - whether colleagues, friends or strangers. She’s just published a fabulous new book ‘Once Upon A Stranger’.
Her work says that we often have a ‘liking gap’ when we talk to people - we think they like us less than we like them - even if they are work colleagues. It turns out not to be true - our co-workers like us more than we realise.
It's a brilliant discussion - and potentially a prompt for you to change how you live your life.
This week's newsletter is about talking to colleagues.
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Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat. It's a podcast about workplace culture. Hello, I'm Bruce Daisley. |
| 0:08.3 | I saw a tweet said, smoking a sig outside a bar will yield you more dates than every dating app combined. |
| 0:18.0 | That's sort of today's podcast, really. If you follow the newsletter, last year I posted |
| 0:22.9 | about research conducted by Nick Epley at the University of Chicago that said that if we talk to |
| 0:28.8 | strangers, we tend to anticipate the experience will be awful, but it tends to be delightful, |
| 0:34.5 | tends to be one of the highlights of our day. Nick Epley's based in |
| 0:37.8 | Chicago, but I saw that someone in the UK had done adjacent work. Gillian Sandstrom had explored |
| 0:44.5 | similar themes about strangers and our interactions with maybe people we don't know well or weak |
| 0:50.7 | ties. One piece of work she did, she got people to record whether they had |
| 0:54.6 | conversations with people they knew well or people they didn't. She found that both make us happier. |
| 0:59.8 | There's joy in chat into strangers. One of the challenges she found is that we misjudge these |
| 1:05.1 | interactions. There's a liking gap where we feel that other people didn't enjoy them as much as we did. |
| 1:10.8 | Interestingly, it also goes for flatmates and worker colleagues. |
| 1:15.1 | We think people aren't into us. |
| 1:18.1 | I think if you combine that, there's an interesting phenomenon I talk about in the newsletter today, |
| 1:23.0 | of fubbing, which is sort of phone-based snubbing, some psychologists have attempt to measure. |
| 1:29.0 | And they've said that those environments where we find ourselves with someone and they get their |
| 1:33.2 | phone out, quite often we interpret that as a sign that people don't like us or they're not |
| 1:39.1 | interested in us. It's interesting because I guess if you combine this idea that we don't necessarily think people enjoy our interactions, then we're surrounded with people who appear to be sort of rejecting us, spurning us. |
| 1:52.8 | It's no wonder that the amount of people saying they've got a friend at work is the lowest level ever. |
| 1:59.3 | I was really interested in the relevant to all of this for work |
| 2:03.0 | of how talking to other people might be a skill that we can develop and actually just makes us |
... |
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