America’s Crisis of Social Connection, With Adam Grant

In the following excerpt, Derek and Adam Grant discuss building connection and the difference between allies, pals, and companions.

Derek Thompson: Thank you so much. Well, reading your book is now helping to shape my book, which currently does not exist, but in the next few years, I hope, and certainly my publishers hope it will. I want to start with how we misunderstand social connection and friendship. You have done this incredible deep dive into the national and international studies on friendship and closeness. What are the most important myths about chemistry and closeness? And are there any myths that you found particularly depressing?

Adam Grant: Yes. So, I think the big myths about at least making friends and building connection are one, that we have to be similar to each other to get along, that we need to have similar backgrounds and similar personalities. That’s just not true. Two, that instant chemistry means we’re going to be close. Sometimes that’s just attraction, and we don’t actually have compatible goals or interests or values. And three, that closeness always takes time. Sometimes we can go deep with people very quickly. And I’ve become a big fan of actually skipping small talk, which we could talk about.

Thompson: Yeah. We’ll definitely talk about skipping small talk. There was a finding in your book that I was particularly interested in, about this sort of liking gap between how some people have been asked to estimate who are your friends and then all of those friends are asked to estimate who their friends are. And sometimes they don’t necessarily overlap. I wonder what the pessimistic and optimistic interpretation of this result is.

Grant: Yeah. Derek, when sociologists do this exercise, it turns out about half of the people you think are your friends don’t friend you back.

Thompson: Oh, man.

Grant: I thought it was depressing when I first read it.

Thompson: That is haunting.

Grant: Yeah. OK, which ones? Who are the people that don’t actually like me that I think do? But I think it’s pessimistic if you stop there and you say, look, we’re just not always good at reading what people really think of us and we’re overestimating our connection with other people. But I actually think there’s a silver lining in this story, which is it also means there are people who are not on your friend list that think of you as a friend, that want to be closer to you. And I think that’s good news for all of us who want to have more people in our lives.

But I think what’s really going on here is “friend” is almost a useless term. It’s such a broad category that we don’t exactly know what it means. Some people basically use it to describe anyone who’s more than an acquaintance. Some people even include their acquaintances in it, and other people reserve it for their inner circle. And so I think we need more precise language so we can actually align our expectations and avoid missing out on meaningful connections.

Thompson: Let’s get that precise language. You draw lines between allies, pals, and companions. Why is that three-part categorization useful as people navigate their social life?

Grant: I think it’s helpful because if we don’t know what we expect from our friends, it’s easy to be disappointed and even betrayed. So after synthesizing data from many countries and hundreds of thousands of people, it turns out that in most countries around the world, these categories of pals, allies, and companions come up over and over and over again. So your pals are basically people who share your interests. You have fun together. You might want to invite them to karaoke or pickleball. Your allies are people who share your goals. You are on a mission together. They’re not always the people you like the most, but they’re the people you can rely on to get things done. They’re your best collaborators. You might want to work with them. You might want to volunteer with them.

And then finally, your companions are people who share your values. You have deep affection for each other. They’re your closest confidants. They’re the people that you can get compassion from. They’re the people that you can be vulnerable with. And I think that making these distinctions is really helpful because we’ve all had experiences of … I actually had this happen to me. I had a really difficult experience with grief. And I opened up to a friend, and he basically said, “Oh, that sucks,” and never mentioned it again. And at first I wanted to unfriend him, like, “OK, you have failed. You’re dead to me.” But I’ve realized now with this framework that he was just not a good companion for me, but it’s turned out that he’s a great ally and pal.

We’ve hosted an event together that was a hit, that we planned, and we also have had a lot of fun playing racket sports together. And so instead of feeling like he let me down and he just couldn’t be there for me, I’ve realized there’s a role he plays in my life. It’s not the one that I thought he was going to play.

Thompson: I love this for the way this kind of categorization can be therapeutic in exactly the way you said, that there is an impulse, I think, when someone disappoints you, to cut them out. But when you cut them out, that tends to be cutting them out of a circle that has one category, which is friend. It might be just as useful to demote or recategorize them as you’re not a companion, but you are a pal. We can still host things together. We can still get a drink together. You’re just not the person when my grandmother dies, when my father goes into hospice, that I am going to unload my feelings onto expecting that you’re the sort of person ready to hear them. They can remain in your life, but in the right kind of way.

I also thought about that categorization in the realm of our experiences on the internet. I’m sometimes interested by the idea that people who spend a lot of time on Instagram or Twitter are surrounded by people with like-minded or similar interests. If I’m on Twitter, there’s a lot of people that I’m talking to about the economy or AI or football, but they’re not my pals. They’re my acquaintances. Meanwhile, I think a lot of people in the modern world, when they spend less time socializing, spend less time out of the house, there are fewer pals in their network, even if they’re on their phones all the time talking with people about things that are interesting to them. Am I over my skis in wondering whether a feature of modern life is that a lot of people have more online acquaintances, more overall acquaintances than they used to have, but fewer pals than they used to have?

Grant: I think you’re onto something here. I’ve never thought about it quite that way. But I think it actually tracks with one of my favorite Substack pieces written by Derek Thompson, which I did not understand this trend until you captured it, that the whole point of having social media on the internet was to bring people together. But you wrote that basically now we’re using our phones as little TVs and watching short-form reels alone. And we do interact about the content we see online. We leave comments, we have debates, but I think that we have these simulated pal interactions that aren’t real relationships. There are people who have real pals on the internet, but I think a defining feature of having a pal is you don’t just interact face-to-face. You also interact side-to-side. You do things that are fun with your pals.

You have shared activities that you plan because our peak moments of fun are not typing sentences back and forth. And they’re not even having phone conversations with people that we hardly know. They’re immersing ourselves in a concert where we can find collective effervescence moving to the same beat. Actually, I can’t dance, so you won’t find me doing that at a concert, but we might be going to a sporting event and cheering for … for me, it would be cheering for the Detroit Lions or the Pistons or Sixers, maybe. And that experience brings us closer together, moving together, putting ourselves out there together.

And I don’t think we’re creating space for people to interact as pals like we used to because we find people who have common interests that don’t live in the same place as us. They’re online, but we can’t find them in real life. And it’s hard to then become closer pals or to do much that would maybe even cross the bridge from pals alone to also having some elements of being allies or companions.

This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Adam Grant
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman