You Are Contagious | Vanessa Van Edwards

Hello, my name is Vanessa, and I am a recovering awkward person. This is me at the peak of what I like to call my plaid vest phase. Luckily, my years of social awkwardness led me to a fascinating career trying to figure out how people work. So what I didn't realize is that many years ago, I would do an experiment that led me right on this stage in front of you here today. My lab researchers and I were curious about TED Talks. We wanted to know why do some TED Talks go viral and others don't. So we embarked on a huge experiment. We analyzed thousands of hours of TED Talks looking for patterns. Now, I wasn't sure if we would find anything. So we were analyzing body language, hand gestures, vocal variety. We even looked at outfit choices, which made today particularly pressure-filled. And very quickly, there was a pattern in the data that made me curious. And after we coded more and more TED Talks, we realized there was a pattern. Now, before I tell you what that is, I have a personal question for you, which is when you see someone, what part of the body do you look at first? You can just call it out. What do you look first when you see someone? Face, eyes. So most people, shoes. They're very high. So most people say eyes, face, or mouth. But actually, when we first see someone, the first place we look is the hands. And this is left over from our caveman days. Because if we were approached by a stranger caveman, the first place we looked was the hands to see if they were carrying a rock or a spear. In other words, we wanted to know if we were safe, if they were friend or foe. Now, this actually still remains from caveman days. And when we can't see someone's hands, something interesting happens. So I just did something a little mean to your brain. You should start to feel just a little bit uncomfortable. And the reason for that is because when you can't see my hands, you wonder, what is she doing back there? And then the longer I leave my hands behind my back, you get more and more distracted because you can't see them. And eventually, your brain is just screaming, can she just bring her hands out from behind her back? And the moment I bring them back out, it feels so much better. And this is because our brain knows that if we can't see hands, we can't see intention. And what we found is when we compared the most viewed TED Talks side by side with the least viewed TED Talks, we found a pattern with hand gestures. Specifically, on average, the most popular TED Talkers use an average of 465 hand gestures in 18 minutes. Yes, we painstakingly counted every single one. I have 465 prepared for you today. And the least popular TED Talkers use an average of 272 hand gestures. Almost half. What's happening here? So when TED speakers take the stage, they're showing you first, friend, friend, friend, friend, friend. You'll notice when I walked out on the stage, I waved. I was saying friend, friend, friend, friend. And the other thing that TED speakers do, see if this looks familiar. So they come into the red dot, and they do something like this. Today, I want to talk to you about a big idea. I'm going to break it down into three different areas that are going to change your life. Right? So the most viral TED Talkers seem to sit in the same way with these hand gestures, because what they're doing is they're showing you, I know my content so well that I can speak to you on two different tracks. I can speak to you with my words, but I can also explain my concepts with my hands. And this way, they underline their concepts with their words. For example, if I were to say, Today, I have a really big idea. It's huge. You laugh, and you're like, Vanessa, it's so small. It's not very big. And that is because your brain gives 12.5 times more weight to hand gestures. So today, I have a really, really big idea, and I'm going to explain it to you in three different ways. My big idea is that we are contagious. Specifically as humans, we are constantly sending and decoding body language signals. We also do this emotionally and chemically. To explain this, I have a rather disgusting, but very fascinating study. So in this study, researchers collected sweat pads from people who ran on the treadmill. Then they collected sweat pads from skydivers on their first time skydive. Two very different kinds of sweat. Here's the disgusting part. Then they had four unsuspecting participants. I know. They had unsuspecting participants in the lab smell these sweat pads while they were in an fMRI machine. Here's where it gets interesting. Even though the participants had no idea what they were smelling, the ones that smelled the skydiving sweat pads had their fear response in their brain activated. In other words, they caught the fear. This means that our emotions are contagious. Our fear is contagious. Our confidence is contagious. And this begs the big question. If our emotions are contagious, how do we make sure that we're infecting people with the right ones? So I believe that we can be contagious in three different ways. The first one is non-verbally. Now to test this idea, I did a very simple experiment in the streets of Portland, Oregon. What I did is I stood in the street, and I looked up at nothing. And I wanted to see if people would catch or mirror my non-verbal. So you can see this video. I stand in the streets looking at nothing. And slowly, one by one, I infect people walking by. And slowly, we begin to gather a crowd. So this poor woman, you know, she was standing there with me, and we're standing there. And remember, we're looking at nothing. I just want to improve it. And we're standing, and I'm going, how long are we going to stand here? Who's going to break first? And after about 40 seconds, we're looking, and she leans over, and she says, is he going to jump? And this experience taught me that we catch emotions, and then we create rationales for why we've caught that emotion. Now, this is actually a good thing. As humans, this keeps us safe. Dr. Paul Ekman has studied something called the microexpression. It's a universal facial expression, and he's discovered there are seven of them. Across genders and races, we all make the same expression when we feel an intense emotion. This is the fear microexpression. So fear is a really important emotion because we want to catch it from someone else to warn us if something's about to go wrong. And this facial expression also keeps us safe. So imagine for a second that you're walking, and you see a snake. Your eyelids and your eyebrows jump out of the way so you can take in as much of the environment as possible. Is there another snake? What's my escape route? Then your mouth opens so you can take in oxygen in case you have to fight, yell for help, or flee. We make this face before we consciously realize we've seen a snake. Now, what's interesting about it is you should be starting to feel a little bit anxious. And that is because when we see other people have fear, if we saw this face in the subway, we would be like, what's wrong? What's going on? Because it keeps us safe. So I want you to try it with me. So open your eyes as wide as possible. Raise your eyebrows up. Very good. Now, take in a sharp breath. Perfect. Do you feel anxious? What's interesting about facial expressions is they cause our emotions. So not only do our emotions cause our face, but our face also causes our emotions. It's called the facial feedback hypothesis. So when we see someone with this face, we catch their emotion, and then we are ready to fight, flee, or yell for help. Luckily, this also works with positive emotions. So one of the faces behind me is a real happiness micro-expression, and one of them is fake. So the real happiness micro-expression is when the smile reaches all the way up into these upper crow's feet muscles, those upper cheek muscles. And this is really important, because you know when you tell a frenemy good news, and they say they're happy for you, but you know they're not really? It looks like this. Oh yeah, I'm so happy for you. So try the fake expression for me first. So just try this fake smile, only on the bottom half of the face. You can even go, uh, uh. It doesn't feel so good, right? It feels inauthentic. Now go all the way up into your eyes. So smile all the way up into the upper cheek muscles. Ah, that feels so much better. So what's interesting about this facial expression is it causes our own happiness. And we also catch it when we see it. Researchers at the University of Finland looked at these two facial expressions, and they had participants look at photos of people with real happiness and fake happiness. They found that when they showed participants pictures of the real happiness smile, those emotions caught, they caught the positive emotions, and they themselves had a positive mood change. But when they looked at the face with the fake happiness smile, they caught nothing. In other words, if we show up to events that we're ambivalent about, interact with people that we don't really like, we become less memorable. This doesn't just happen in person, it also happens on the phone. So I work with a lot of different clients, corporate clients who are on the phone all the time. They said, Vanessa, I get being happy in person, but how about on the phone? So we decided to do an experiment where we had participants in our lab record different versions of their hello, their first impression on the phone. We wanted to know if people could hear happiness, sadness, or anger. So we had people record different versions of their hello with happiness, sadness, anger, and while power posing. We wanted to see if they would sound different. So I want to play you two different versions of hello and see if you can guess which one is the happy hello. Are you ready? Alright, same person. Here's A. Hello. Here's B. Hello. How many people think A is the happy hello? How many people think B is the happy hello? Very good. We can hear this difference. We can hear this micro expression. Now I thought this was interesting, but I wanted to take it a step further. So we devised a second part of our experiment where we had participants in our lab listen to these recordings and rate that person on likability. We wanted to see if the happiness micro expressions or the anger micro expressions or the power posing expressions did better. Here's what happened. After we asked people I do like this person a lot, I like this person a little, or I do not like this person, we found that the happiness micro expressions across all trials for both men and women they became more likable. Whereas the same person made an anger or sadness micro expression were less likable. This is the happy side effect of having your confidence be contagious. Not only do you infect someone else with that happiness, you also become more likable. We talked about nonverbal and I have to talk about what comes after the hello. How do we infect confidence verbally? So in this study we did in Portland, Oregon we took 500 speed networkers and we asked each of these speed networkers to go through a conversation starter round. Eight of these rounds. So we assigned each conversation starter to have with a stranger. Then we set up corners, cameras in all corners of the room and we analyzed each of these speed rounds for patterns. We were looking for body language patterns, leans, nods, laughs, smiles, confidence. We were also looking for volume differences. In a really good conversation usually the volume goes up, in a really awkward, bad conversation there's lots of silences and the volume goes down. And we also asked each of the participants to rate the conversation starters. We wanted to know which ones produced the highest quality of conversation. What we found was is that the conversation starters that worked centered on this little chemical called dopamine. So dopamine is the neurotransmitter that we produce when we feel pleasure or when we get a reward. And I noticed that most of our chit-chat that we have at parties and networking events is the same. It sounds like this. So, what do you do? Where are you from? Live around here? Well, I'm going to go get some more wine. It's great talking to you. Those conversations happened over and over again. It was almost as if they were socially scripted. My brain was on autopilot. What we found was is the worst ranked conversation starters. The ones that got the lowest ratings. The ones that produced the lowest volume. The ones that got the most leans away. Worst head nods and worst micro-expressions. Those were the ones that we used the most. What do you do? How are you? Where are you from? From a physiological perspective have no effect. No pleasure. So what we tried was to find conversation starters that could spark or create some kind of excitement. Can you verbally trigger dopamine? We found that the brain is really interesting. If you ask the brain a question it tends to look for hits and not misses. What I mean by this is if you ask someone, been busy lately? Their brain immediately looks for all the hits of been busy. They think about all the negative things that have happened. The stress, the busyness, all the bad things in their life. Whereas if you ask someone, working on anything exciting recently? Their brain immediately begins to look for all the hits of excitement. They start thinking of all the good, all the happy things, all the excitement that's going on in their own life. And that does two things. One, it creates pleasure for them. You're literally asking them to borrow excitement from other places in their life and bring it to the situation that you're in. And the other thing that it does is it makes you more memorable. Dr. John Medita found that dopamine when it's triggered in verbal conversation makes a mental post-it note. In other words, when you ask someone else to think of what's exciting in their life, the happy side effect is that you become more memorable. So here's my big challenge for today. Instead of using the typical, what do you do? How are you and where are you from? Let's banish those conversation starters forever and let's try ones that ask the brain to look for pits of excitement. Try working on anything exciting these days. Have any vacations coming up? Anything good happen today? I think this is the greatest gift we can give our fellow human beings. We are asking them to flip into optimism. We're triggering dopamine and excitement and getting them off autopilot. The last way that we're contagious is emotionally. So this study is one of my favorites. In this experiment, they asked students to sing the song Don't Stop Believing into an accuracy software. Now, this is a very nerve-wracking experiment. They're graded on vocal tone, words, and they're given no preparation. But they did three different trials of this experiment. First they had them just walk into the room and sing into an accuracy software. The second group got into the room and had to say out loud, I'm nervous. And the last group had to walk into the room and say, I'm excited. They found that this simple reframe, the nervous group got 53% accuracy, the control group got 69, but the I'm excited group got 80% accuracy. Why? Anxiety and excitement are very similar emotions. The only difference is mindset. So my challenge for you today is to think about how you want to infect people. When you want to harness incitement or trigger excitement, ask dopamine-worthy conversation starters. Use more hand gestures, make authentic smiles, and never pick up the phone in a bad mood. Now the last thing I want to do is I want to end on a note of excitement. I want to make you really infectious. So what we're going to do to end this talk is on the count of three, with all the energy you can muster, I want you to yell out I'm excited. Are you ready? One, two, three, I'm excited! You rock, Ted.