You 2.0: Change Your Story, Change Your Life

July 28, 2025 1h 17m

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We all tell stories about ourselves, often without realizing we’re doing so. How we frame those stories can profoundly shape our lives. In our latest You 2.0 episode, we bring you a favorite conversation with psychologist Jonathan Adler. He shares how to tell our stories in ways that enhance our wellbeing. Then, Max Bazerman answers your questions about the science of negotiation.

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This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

When Leon Fleischer was a small child, his older brother took piano lessons.

The brother didn't much care for them.

But afterwards, little Leon would climb onto the piano bench and play, note for note, the pieces his brother had practiced.

That's when his mother realized Leon was the one who should study the instrument.

Leon Fleischer made his debut at Carnegie Hall in 1944.

He was just 16 years old.

who was to perform Brahm's piano concerto number one in D minor.

A New York Times music critic said this performance established him as one of the most remarkably gifted of the younger generation of American keyboard artists.

He went on to perform with the world's top orchestras throughout the 1950s and early 60s.

Pause his story here, and Leon Fleischer's life is a triumph.

But then, something unexpected happened.

He started to notice an odd stiffness in his right index finger.

His fourth and fifth finger started curling under.

The pain and stiffness grew steadily worse.

Within a matter of months, his career as a concert pianist was virtually over.

As you can well imagine, without becoming melodramatic, it was I was in a

despairing state of depression for about two years.

If we were to take stock of Leon Fleischer's life at this point, we might say it was a tragedy.

But Leon Fleischer still had so much music in him, so he reinvented himself, becoming a much-admired conductor and teacher.

Meanwhile, he continued to try every available measure to heal his right hand.

Eventually, a combination of Botox injections and deep tissue massage started to help.

In 2003, Leon Fleischer made a triumphant return to Carnegie Hall.

He was 75 years old.

The next year, he released a CD, his first two-handed recording in more than 40 years.

Today, we conclude this year's U2.0 series on purpose, passion, and meaning.

We'll bring you a favorite episode about the stories stories we tell about ourselves and the many subtle and powerful ways in which our personal narratives shape who we are.

How the way we understand the ups and downs of our lives can shape the ups and downs of our lives.

This week on Hidden Brain

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As we make our way through life, it can feel as if we are buffeted by a swiftly moving series of events.

Sometimes, it's all we can do to keep our heads above water as we wait for the next wave to crash over us.

But research in psychology hints at a different process unfolding beneath the waves, an undercurrent that has powerful effects on our well-being, mental health, and life outcomes.

At Olin College, psychologist Jonathan Adler studies how our minds are shaped by this undercurrent and how becoming mindful of it can help us better deal with setbacks and failure.

Jonathan Adler, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Oh, I'm so excited to be here with you.

Jonathan, I want to take you back to your college days in Maine.

You were a capable and hardworking student, but you were also struggling with a secret.

What were you going through?

Yeah, like you said, I was a good student.

I was curious and took classes in a ton of different departments.

But socially, I was more reserved.

I had a really tight group of friends in high school, and I was sort of angry that that chapter of my life had closed just because high school had ended.

And I was also struggling with my sexuality, though that's not something I was necessarily conscious of for a big chunk of college.

So you came up with a solution to these challenges, and it was something of a radical solution.

What did you, what was the plan you devised?

Yeah.

Well, so a lot of college, a lot of students at the college spent part of their junior year studying abroad.

And that seemed to me like a rare opportunity to take a break from my regular life and figure out some things about myself.

So I ended up in Perth, which is on the west coast of Australia.

Wow.

Which it's literally as far away from my life as you could get.

I mean, if you draw a line from New England through the center of the earth, you end up off the coast of Perth.

And this was your way of reinventing yourself.

Well, it felt like an opportunity to step outside my life and sort of explore who I was in a context that wouldn't then have any ramifications for the life that I was living.

Uh-huh.

So, okay, so you fly all the way to Australia.

What happens?

Did you find that your social life improved, that you found deep connections with other people?

No.

When I arrived, I knew that I was going to need to find some friends.

So I auditioned for the theater department's play.

I was studying psychology and theater in college, and I knew that being involved in a show was a surefire way to make fast friends, and that it also was a place where there might be opportunities to date.

And so the play that the department was doing that semester was this weird postmodern adaptation of Chekhov's classic Uncle Vanya by the admittedly brilliant British playwright Howard Barker.

And there's this relatively minor character in the original play, Astrov, who's this brooding intellectual who just thinks but never does anything.

And I figured, oh, that's perfect for me.

But much to my astonishment, I got cast as Vanya, which is one of the only leading roles that I'd ever had.

Wow.

Yeah, so most of Chekhov's plays are about people who are stuck in their lives and sort of consumed with what might have been the joke about Chekhov is that nothing ever happens.

And so this playwright, Barker, took this play and decided to imagine what would happen if the same characters just did whatever their impulses told them to do.

So in this version, there are gun battles and unconstrained sex and a whole lot of chaos.

It's total liberation.

And I was an anxious actor, and so having to carry this play in a role that was deeply unsuited to my natural tendencies was all consuming.

I had gone looking for the kind of liberation that these characters were given by their playwright, but in finding it in this fictional world, it completely shut down my own world.

I felt I had to spend my time mastering this incredibly complex and unnatural language.

I mean, the first line of the play is just the word uncle repeated over and over.

And I just lost all the bandwidth for everything else.

It ended up being one of the loneliest periods of my life, with me actually starting to count down the days until I could come home.

And what I had envisioned as a time for freedom and exploration actually became this burdened, lonely time.

And I think it set me back in the process of coming out.

So you returned to Maine after the semester abroad.

You're back now in the same college where you were previously frustrated.

What goes through your head at this point?

I think I felt profoundly disappointed in myself for not having capitalized on this rare opportunity and stifled to be back in my old life without having figured anything out.

And

yeah, so I think I just sort of put my head down and kept doing what I knew how to do, which was be a brain, not a fully integrated body.

Jonathan's time in Australia felt like more than a misadventure.

It felt like a sign.

He had made the trip with high hopes, hoping to become a new person.

When he returned no different than before, it didn't just feel the same.

It felt worse.

Many of us have had experiences similar to Jonathan's.

We suffer setbacks and failures, humiliations, and disappointments.

When these happen to us frequently enough, we start to think that we will never be happy, never be whole.

When we come back, why unhappiness can breed unhappiness and how to break the cycle.

You're listening to Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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Jonathan Adler spent much of his young adulthood feeling unsatisfied, yearning for more.

He sensed he was gay but didn't feel comfortable coming out.

He spent a semester in Australia to break free of the constraints of his college life in Maine, but found that he was just as lonely on another continent.

Sometime after he returned to the United States, however, Jonathan made a discovery.

He came by the work of a pioneering scientist in a field known as narrative psychology.

Dan McAdams at Northwestern University was arguing that the stories we tell about our lives have profound effects on our well-being.

Jonathan moved to Northwestern, became Dan's PhD student, and later his scientific collaborator.

In time, Jonathan came to see his own life through the lens of his research.

He realized that he had been telling the story of his life in a way that was self-defeating.

And he came to see that by telling that story differently, it could make a profound difference.

We'll get to that in a moment.

First, I asked Jonathan to explain to me the basic idea behind narrative psychology.

You can't totally control the things that happen to you in your life.

You have some more say about how you make sense of it.

And it's important to remember we're talking about stories here.

So we know from research on memory that we're not very good at recording the objective facts of our experience.

For a long time, that frustrated cognitive scientists, but in more recent years, it's become clear that our memory works like this for a good reason.

So if you think about why we have memory in the first place, it's not so we can hold on to every single thing that's happened to us in some veritical way.

We have memories so that we can make sense of what's happening to us right now and anticipate what might happen next.

So, if you walk by a cave and a bear jumps out, you don't necessarily need to remember that cave and that bear, but you need to remember that dangerous things might hide in dark places.

So, the slippery, reconstructive nature of memory is a feature of the system.

It's not a bug.

And stories are an amazing tool for holding on to the meaning of our past experiences.

So the objective facts of our lives are what they are, but the stories are about where we draw connections between things, where we parse the chapter breaks of our lives.

And those are narrative acts, not historical acts.

And the way we do that can have big implications for our well-being.

Jonathan and Dan McAdams have found that one of the most crucial choices we make in telling our stories, and it's important to underscore that most of us make these choices unconsciously, is where we start and stop the different chapters of our life story.

All lives have good and bad in it, and so stories that start bad and end bad don't feel great.

And stories that start good and end good, those feel good.

But what we find in the research is that where we draw connections between the negative and the positive matters a lot.

So stories that we narrate as starting bad and ending good, we call that a redemption sequence.

And stories that start good and end bad, we call that a contamination sequence.

I see.

So a redemption sequence is in some ways something bad happens to you, but in some ways you're rising from the ashes, redemption.

And a contamination sequence is things are going pretty well, but then something bad happens to you, and then everything is downhill from there.

So one basically has an upward trajectory, the other one has a downward trajectory.

That's right.

And again, we're remembering these are stories, so this is how we narrate the experience, not necessarily the objective facts of our lives, because all lives have good and bad.

I mean, your story about going to Australia, for example, you know, you go to Australia with high hopes.

You get the starring role in a play.

We know many people would say that's a very good thing to have happened to you.

And then the play turns out to not be quite what was best for you, or the role turns out to be not what was best for you, and you end up being very lonely.

And then you can sort of see a downward sort of spiral in some ways.

And in some ways, it becomes a contamination story, a story where something good turned bad, and then you come back to the United States.

And now it feels like the bad thing that happened in Australia is with you even now.

And that's sort of how contamination works.

It has a contagious effect and spreads and infects other things.

That's right.

And again, I didn't know about Dan's work at that moment in my life.

So I wasn't thinking about it in storied terms.

But indeed, I think I was living out what I can now retrospectively see was a contamination sequence.

I want to talk a little bit about the effects of these sequences on our life, the effect of a redemption narrative and a contamination contamination narrative.

What effects do these different stories have on our lives?

What's the difference on our mental well-being and happiness of redemption stories versus contamination stories?

I have a nice short example of this from a participant in one of my earliest studies.

Briefly, this was a little middle-aged man.

He's recounting the story of the first date that he went on with the woman that he ultimately goes on to marry.

And the facts of the story are: they go out when he brings her home, they're standing on her front porch, and he leans in for a kiss and then her dad opens the front door and interrupts them.

So in the version that this man narrated when he shared his life story as part of participating in our research, he frames the experience as a redemption sequence.

He says, it really brought us close right at the very start of our relationship and we stayed that way ever since.

So this embarrassing moment had given them something to laugh about on their second date and maybe it accelerated their connection.

But he might have narrated the exact same sequence of events by concluding that it was this stain on the beginning of their relationship that could have contaminated the relationship in a way that they moved on from, but never could erase.

So neither version is more accurate in the historical sense.

These are narrative interpretations that take on different thematic arcs, redemption and contamination.

But these different ways of narrating our lives have different implications for your well-being.

We find over and over that when redemption sequences occur in people's life stories, they tend to be associated with positive well-being,

good life satisfaction, lower levels of things like depression, higher self-esteem.

And it's just the opposite for themes of contamination.

So what's important here, and you've mentioned this before, is that the underlying facts of the story don't have to change for the story, in fact, to be a very different kind of story.

So, for example, in your own life, you're still a gay man coming of age at a time when homophobia is rampant.

You're still lonely in college.

The Australia trip was less of an escape and more of a setback.

But you can tell both a contamination story as well as a redemption story built around those facts.

That's right.

And again, the shift there is about where we draw the chapter breaks in my life.

So if we end that story, end that chapter when I get back to college, it feels like a contamination sequence.

But if I string it together with the things that came next, spoiler alert, it feels like a redemption sequence.

Tell me what happened next and how it becomes a redemption story.

As I neared the end of college, I largely dealt with my internal turmoil by just throwing myself into my work.

So I was one of the top students in my class and I got some awards and I took a research job after college at Harvard, which was, you know, my plan was going to graduate school.

And I felt like I had done everything expected of me.

And I didn't really seek out any mentorship as I applied to 10 very competitive PhD programs.

And then when the whole process was done, I only got into one program.

So now I always tell students, you only go to one school, so it only takes one.

And that is true.

But at the time, it felt like a shock.

Don't get me wrong, I was actually really excited by the one option in front of me, but I had sort of imagined that I might have more choice when approaching this next big chapter of my life.

And as you said, the one school I got into was in the Midwest, a place that I had never been for more than a few days.

And so I was thinking a lot about what it would mean to be a gay man living in this different part of the country than I was used to.

So how does this become a redemption story?

I'm still, it sounds actually the contamination is getting worse here because you apply to all these colleges and you don't get into them.

Right.

So here's what happened.

So I went to campus for my interview and it was spring break week.

So no one was really around.

But after the formal formal stuff was done, I sort of casually walked by the LGBT student group's office, and there was this little yellow envelope of business cards tacked to the bulletin board outside that said something like, questions?

Email us at, and then, you know, some generic email address.

So when I got home, I sent this email saying, I'm thinking of coming here for graduate school.

I've never lived in the Midwest.

What's it like to be there and be a gay person both on campus and in the surrounding community?

And we didn't even have internet at the house that I was renting with some friends.

So I had to sneak into the computer lab at the nearby college to check my email.

So a few days later.

I got a perfectly nice and very thorough email reassuring me from a senior undergrad about what it was like to go to school there and live in the town.

And I'm sure it was a copy and paste of an email that he had sent many times before, but I appreciated how clear it was and the bits of humor sprinkled in.

And I wrote back to say, you know, thanks.

That was so, super helpful.

And then this student said, I'm actually graduating early, but I'm going to be hanging around.

I'm handing off the listserv, but if you have questions, you know, just send me an email.

And so quite a bit of time goes by, and I did commit to going to school there.

And when it was time for me to start looking for an apartment, I reached out again.

And More than 20 years later, we are now married and have two kids and a dog.

So those first emails weren't even remotely flirty, but they were attuned and connected and kind and funny.

And eventually they did get flirty, as did my responses.

And so I look back at this turning point in my life with a profound sense of, first of all, gratitude, but also redemption, right?

What at the time felt like close to failure, right?

That all my work in college and all my ignoring of my personal life for the sake of my intellectual life had presented me with only one option, now feels like the universe trying to make sure that I found my way.

And within a year, I was having a more gratifying intellectual experience than I had ever imagined, and I was in love.

I'm wondering, in some ways, if the narrative changing played some role in sort of these things happening in your life.

Is it just that you had a series of bad luck and bad events happening to you, and then you had a series of good luck and good events happening to you?

I mean, that might be the case, but that's not particularly

interesting from a psychological point of view.

Do you think that the way you were thinking about your own life and your exposure to Dan's ideas

had reshaped your ability or your willingness to be open to thinking about a relationship in a different way or thinking about flirting on email with someone?

Yeah, it's really, I really appreciate you bringing that up because indeed, one could say, well, the objective facts were things were bad and then things were good.

It really matters where we draw the chapter breaks in our lives.

So yeah, one could say, well, that horrible chapter is over and this new chapter is just a good chapter.

But I actually think it is the way I have woven those two experiences together in my life story where it feels like redemption.

Instead of being a story where it was bad and then it was good, this is a story that is about a shift from loneliness and compartmentalization to professional and personal fulfillment and identity integration.

Notice where you start and stop Jonathan's story makes a profound difference about whether the story is a redemptive story or a contamination story.

If you draw a connection between his unhappiness in college, his setbacks in Australia, and the fact he got into only one graduate school after working so hard in college, that story looks like an endless loop of setbacks.

On the other hand, if you tell the story of a lonely closeted gay kid who just happens to get into the one school where he is going to be professionally successful and personally happy, then it looks like the heavens have parted and a star is pointing the way forward for Jonathan.

The objective facts of the story don't change, but the way you think of the story changes profoundly.

You can see how powerful this is in a study conducted by William Dunlop and Jessica Tracy.

They were researching the stories told by people fighting addiction.

They looked at the relationship between personal narratives and the maintenance of sobriety among people navigating alcohol dependence.

So they asked people involved in Alcoholics Anonymous support groups to tell the story of their last drink.

They actually had two samples: one of people who had remained sober for four years or longer, and another sample who were in the earliest stages of sobriety.

And in both groups, they found that people who told redemptive stories of their last drink were more likely to stay sober than people whose stories didn't contain redemptive themes.

So, for example, they talk about one participant who felt like the last drink for him really symbolized the low point.

And it was the moment when he committed to really turning his life around, which he then goes on to do.

And that is emblematic of many findings in the field, some that look at behavior, some that look mostly at mental health outcomes, where we find that the stories that we tell about our lives are strong predictors of how we're doing.

Jonathan has also found that the way we tell stories about our lives can have biological effects.

In one study, Jonathan tracked a group of parents experiencing chronic stress.

His co-author on the study, Ashley Mason, was interested in the science of telomeres.

So telomeres are the end caps on our chromosomes that protect them from getting frayed or tangled each time a cell divides, because each time the cell divides, they get shorter and shorter, and eventually the cell is left unprotected and it dies.

So some scientists see telomere length as a biological biological marker of aging.

And we know that under conditions of chronic stress, telomeres wear down faster.

So in this study, we had a group of chronically stressed participants.

These were parents who had children with quite severe autism spectrum disorders.

And we compared them to parents of neurotypical kids, which as a parent of neurotypical kids is still a stressful experience, but the degree of chronic stress is different.

So we had their stories at the beginning of the study, and then we had measures of their well-being and also data about their telomere length at that first time point, and then again, 18 months later.

And what we found was that among these chronically stressed parents, their stories mattered a lot.

What was interesting was that the key narrative theme in this study was not redemption.

It was a theme of integration, where we think about the extent to which participants were able to make sense of having had this challenging kid and integrating that into their own life story.

So we found that among the chronically stressed parents, stories of integration were associated not only with their self-report of lower levels of psychological stress, but also with significantly less telomere shortening over 18 months.

So as far as I know, this is the only study to show a connection between the themes in people's narratives and biological markers of stress and aging, but it suggests that there may be biological consequences of our stories, not just psychological ones.

What did the parents say in terms of the kinds of stories they told, in terms of stories that were effective or less effective?

One of the parents in the study talked about the ways in which parenting is the ultimate life test is what she said.

And she said, you know, you can read a ton about all this stuff, but ultimately you have to learn from your kid.

And for her, that taught her a lot about who she was as a person, how she was open and not open,

and how she felt like having this challenging parenting experience really helped her reshape who she was as a person and what it meant to her to not only be a parent,

but a human in relation with this other human who she loved dearly.

Now, when you hear someone tell a redemptive story and you see that they are experiencing better mental health,

there is a question that arises, which is in which direction does the arrow of causation run?

You know, are they telling redemptive stories and therefore feeling better about their lives, or are they feeling better about their lives and therefore telling redemptive stories?

At one point, you followed a group of patients as they worked with a psychotherapist and you charted both the changes they experienced while in therapy and the stories they told about their lives and also which preceded which.

What did you find, Jonathan?

Yeah, I became obsessed with that directionality question.

In that study, I enrolled a bunch of people, adults ranging from ages 18 to 92.

They were seeking individual therapy for a huge range of problems.

So there were folks with really significant psychopathology, like depression, anxiety, eating disorders, but there were also people just wanting to do some work on themselves.

There was a woman who wanted to think through her own childhood as she was about to become a parent.

There was a woman who was feeling lonely in retirement.

So before they started with their therapist, we collected their stories and we measured their well-being user standard measures.

And so then on the other side, we had nearly 600 narratives from across all these participants.

And what we found was First, people got better over the course of treatment, which is good because decades of research on psychotherapy suggest that it works.

And we found that people's stories changed in meaningful ways over the course of treatment.

And then the changes in the story actually came before changes in well-being and not the other way around.

Because it was as if people were narrating a new version of their lives and then a week or two later, their well-being would catch up with the story.

As we go through our lives, responding to ups and downs that come at us unpredictably, it can feel as if we are hostages to life events.

This is why many people see the hand of fate in the things that happen to them.

But everything looks different once we realize that we are not simply a beleaguered character in our life story, we are also the author.

When we come back, four principles to tell wiser stories about our lives.

You're listening to Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedanta.

As you listen to this conversation, do you have questions or comments about narrative psychology?

How do you tell the story of your life and how does that shape the way you see yourself?

If you're comfortable sharing your thoughts with a Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org.

Use the subject line personal stories.

All of us constantly construct stories about our lives.

Most of the time, this happens under the surface.

We are not mindful of the narrative choices we make.

Every so often, however, something happens in our lives that causes us to revisit our stories.

A marriage, a divorce, the birth of a child, the death of a close friend.

All of these take time to assimilate into the narrative of our lives.

At Olin College of Engineering, psychologist Jonathan Adler has studied what happens when events come along that challenge our pre-existing narratives.

John, I want you to tell me the story of a physician named Annie Brewster.

Can you describe what Annie's life was like when she was in her late 20s?

Annie was one of these unbelievably driven, successful students.

She

had

done extremely well in medical school, landed a great residency, was working a million hours, but she had started to experience some tingling on one side of her body.

And she went to get it checked out.

And, you know, she was very well connected in the medical sphere and waited to see the Uber specialist who quite brusquely told her that she had multiple sclerosis.

I want to play a bit of tape here from Annie herself, talking about how she reacted to the news from her doctor.

It took me a long time to come to terms with that diagnosis, to accept it into my life.

Really, it was difficult for me because I had always thought of myself as somebody who was really strong.

My body had always worked for me, done what I wanted it to do.

And to think of myself as someone with an illness, I really had to redefine myself and get over some denial.

Jonathan, you say that Annie was engaging in an internal process of accommodation.

What do you mean by this?

And is accommodation a good thing?

So most of what we do most of the time, we call assimilation.

We go on living our lives and when new things happens, we just assimilate those experiences into the story that we've been telling, whether we do that consciously or not.

But sometimes something happens that really makes us question the story we've been telling.

And in those instances, the story itself needs to change to accommodate that new experience.

And what we call accommodative processing is a key narrative variable in supporting our well-being, but it doesn't support our well-being in exactly the way redemption does, for example.

But accommodative processing, it helps us feel like our life has meaning and we understand it, even if it doesn't always feel good.

And so Annie tells this story that once she did finally start to accommodate this experience, once she did really start to reshape her identity to include this idea of herself as having an illness, she stepped away from her very prestigious medical career.

She went down to part-time and she founded a nonprofit organization called Health Story Collaborative.

And I met Annie about a year into that process, and she was going around and collecting other people's stories and curating them.

And 10 years later, we have worked really closely together, developing programs that leverage the science of narrative in order to support storytelling in the highly fragmented and fragmenting medical ecosystem.

When we modify our life stories to accommodate new life events, those events no longer feel random and aberrational.

The less we feel buffeted by random events, the more we feel like we are in control of our own lives.

This leads to the next idea.

Jonathan has found that stories that give us a feeling that we are in charge of our own lives are linked to higher well-being.

Agency is a theme in people's stories.

We assess it along a continuum from sort of being able to direct your life and then down at the other end of the continuum, you're sort of batted around by the whims of fate.

And again, these are themes and stories.

No one is completely in control of their lives.

So it's the way you portray the main character in the story, i.e.

you.

Jonathan cites the remarkable story of a woman named Layla.

So in the last five years, I've been doing a lot of research focused on identity development among people who acquire physical disabilities.

And Layla was a participant in one of my studies.

She tells this story of having having these horrible headaches, which gradually intensified to the point where she couldn't function.

She spends time in three different hospitals in Nairobi, Kenya, where she lives, and no one can figure out what's going on.

She decides to fly to India to see a specialist, and he sends her right into surgery.

And when she wakes up, the pain is gone.

But she also can't see.

And the surgeon had been able to alleviate this, the unexplained swelling in her head that had been pressing on her optic nerves,

but the nerve was also irreparably damaged.

So for a few months, everyone held out hope that her vision might return, but Layla was actually the first one to accept that it wouldn't.

She said, I realized as soon as I started accepting it, I started becoming less frustrated and sad.

And though it was incredibly difficult and scary for her, Layla gradually threw herself into the task of becoming a blind person.

So she shifts careers, she moves to the United States to get training in computer science, where she starts working on adaptive technology for other blind and low vision people.

I want to play a clip of Layla talking about her experience.

Here she is.

I think my blindness is the best thing that ever happened to me.

Like even right now, if a doctor came here and told me they have a cure, I would not take it.

Because i think for me it

it made me understand myself and it made me like it gives me these new challenges every single day it presents me with something and through those challenges i'm able to understand myself

so that's a remarkable account jonathan uh but as i hear leila talking i feel like i've heard the same thing in the deaf community many deaf people today say you know the real problem is not with deafness I just happen to speak sign language.

I speak a different language than you do.

Now, we can all debate how and whether something should be considered a disorder, but I think the point you're trying to make here is that the stories we tell can either put us in the driver's seat or put us in the passenger seat.

And Layla is clearly choosing to be in the driver's seat.

That's right.

Traditional models of disability in the United States have this medical approach where disability is a problem to be solved or eradicated.

And social models models of disability or relational models really push back on that and say, disability is in the interaction between my body and the built and social environment around us.

In Layla's story, like you said, there's also this sense of agency.

Now that this is part of who I am, what am I going to do with it?

How can I take control of this and use it for things that matter to me?

You can see a theme emerging here.

As you tell the story of your life, do you see yourself as a passive subject, someone to whom things happen, or as an active protagonist, someone who is directing the course of her own life?

Now as Jonathan says, every life offers lots of evidence that allows you to draw either conclusion.

Given this, Jonathan is saying, choose narratives that put you in the driver's seat.

Most of the narratives we have discussed so far have championed the idea of the individual.

But it's also the case that no man is an island.

Yeah, so right in our conversation so far, we've been very focused on individuals, but of course, we aren't these isolated individuals.

We're all connected.

And communion is a theme that captures the quality of people's connections to others.

So in my research with people who have disabilities, there's often a lot of talk about their connections not only with family and friends and coworkers, but with the broader disability community.

So at Olin College, you help organize a yearly event called a Story Slam, at which students perform renditions of their stories, tell about the events in their lives.

And in advance of One Year Slam, you worked with a student named Antonio.

What was his story, Jonathan?

Yeah, so Antonio was really interested in thinking through what it meant to him to be a first-generation Latino student at this small engineering college.

And he described feeling isolated during his weekend on campus as a prospective student.

It wasn't the conversations about science that made him feel left out.

It really was the small talk.

So he has this great line in the story where he says, I'm definitely not fluent in cheese.

And what he means is that disconnection gets coded into even the most mundane experiences, not just the grand low points of our lives.

But as isolated as he was feeling, Antonia homed in not on his isolation, but on a moment of connection.

I think I finally found somebody who understood.

Diego was a person who had also danced at Quincy Angeras,

who had also brought lunch in a repurposed sour cream container, and applied to the same college scholarships for low-income students.

One would even think we had done all these things side by side.

So I can hear the theme of positive communion here, Jonathan.

Antonio's telling a story that says, I'm not alone.

Exactly.

In this room full of people who did not look like him, Antonio found someone who did.

And they really connected.

And he says, you know, Diego threw down this challenge.

If you think there should be more people like us here, then come and fix it.

And Antonio says, you know, I'm a competitive guy.

And the next fall, I was on a one-way bus trip to Olin College.

So, Jonathan, one final feature of a constructive story is that it generates meaning for the person who tells it.

You say we're not always able to tell a happy story about what happens to us, but we can try and tell a meaningful story.

And there are benefits to telling such stories.

Can you explain what you mean?

Yeah, so to pan back for just a second, when we think about the broad study of well-being, it tends to cluster in sort of two domains, which get their cumbersome names from Aristotle.

So on the one hand, we have what's called hedonic well-being, which means it feels good.

And on the other hand, we have a kind of well-being called eudaimonic well-being, which means it feels meaningful.

And these two domains of well-being are actually relatively uncorrelated with each other.

And if we think about our lives for a second, that makes sense, right?

We all do plenty of things that feel good, but don't feel particularly meaningful like we might binge watch tv or something um and we can all think about experiences that feel meaningful but don't feel particularly good so in my work with health story collaborative in particular we find that Feeling good is not always an option for people.

Telling redemptive stories or stories high in the theme of agency and communion, that's not always possible.

And in those situations, we're often interested in the ways in which people can really think through the hard parts of their lives and find some meaning out of that.

And even if the meaning doesn't ultimately feel good in that sort of happy sense, that meaning is still incredibly worthwhile.

I'm trying to imagine how someone who is going through a rough time might hear this episode, Jonathan.

And I worry that that person might say, you know, I've just lost my job, I've just gotten divorced, I've just lost a close family friend, and now Jonathan Adler comes along and tells me that if I'm unhappy, it's because I'm not telling the right story about my life.

How would you respond to that?

I want to say three things to that person.

The first thing is, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry that things are so hard for you right now.

Of course, they're hard, and of course, you're not feeling good.

The second thing I want to say is, there are all kinds of ways of making meaning of these experiences.

And so we might think about exploring themes of agency or communion.

So if you lost your job, are you feeling connected to your spouse or your kids?

Or, you know, if something challenging has happened, might there be some growth that comes from it.

So we might explore those themes.

But the third thing I want to say is our personal stories exist in a broader narrative ecosystem.

And in the United States, there is an expectation that we can narrate challenging experiences in our lives with a redemptive spin.

We Americans love the theme of redemption, and we expect people to be able to do it.

And I call this the press for redemption.

And in my work with Health Story Collaborative, we often find that people

feel like they're having this double whammy experience where, you know, I'm sick and I'm not telling the right kind of story about it.

So So my cancer didn't teach me that I'm such a fighter or that people love me more than I ever would have realized if I never had cancer.

No, some people say, you know, this just sucks.

And I think in those instances, we want to.

acknowledge that and not try to convince them that it doesn't just suck.

Let them know that there's a reason they feel like they're telling the wrong kind of story because our culture puts a particular premium on a particular kind of story.

And then to help them find other kinds of narrative roots that might lead towards a sense of meaningfulness, even if they can't make you feel better.

So many of the examples we've talked about here have involved individuals, but as we've started to see, I think towards the end of this conversation, we're slowly broadening out beyond the individual, because of course these ideas are relevant outside of individual minds as well.

So societies tell themselves narratives, nations tell themselves stories all the time.

Do you think ideas of narrative psychology speak to how nations talk to themselves and perhaps how they ought to talk to themselves?

I do.

And this is really at the forefront of the field.

So my colleagues Kate McLean and Moines Syed have written really compellingly about what they call master narratives.

So these are the dominant storylines in our culture that tend to be invisible, but also ubiquitous and sort of rigid and powerful.

And we are always in a constant dialogue with the master narratives in our particular cultural contexts.

You know, families have narratives that guide the way relationships unfold.

And as you said, countries certainly do.

So, again, narratives are not all good or all bad at the individual level, and they're not all good or all bad at

the national level either.

But these national narratives are emergent from the collection of individual narratives that the members of that country tell.

So a number of years ago, Jonathan, when you were still living in Illinois, the junior senator from your state gave a memorable speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

I want to play you a clip from the speech that first put Barack Obama in the national spotlight.

I'm not talking about blind optimism here, the almost willful ignorance.

that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don't think about it, or healthcare crisis will solve itself itself if we just ignore it.

That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about something more substantial.

It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs.

The hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores.

The hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta.

The hope of a mill worker's son who dares to defy the odds.

The hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him too.

Hope.

Hope in the face of difficulty.

Hope in the face of uncertainty.

The audacity of hope.

In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation.

A belief in things not seen.

A belief that there are better days ahead.

I'm wondering, Jonathan, as someone who has studied narrative psychology for a number of years, how do you hear that speech?

So then Senator Obama was tapping into the American master narrative of redemption, right?

Each of those images includes this shift from negative to positive.

And like all political speeches, this was a strategic communication with very particular aims focused on stirring the public to support this speaker's preferred candidates and issues.

So appealing to entrenched master narratives is a very strategic thing to do.

And many, many politicians adopt redemptive themes in their speeches.

And obviously there are many wonderful aspects of that storyline.

And as we've discussed, problematic ones too.

But we see evidence of leaders serving as narrators in chief.

They shape our narrative ecology as they model storytelling for us.

We started this conversation, Jonathan, by talking about ways in which you came to understand the life events in your own life and to tell stories about those life events in a way that was more positive than negative.

I'm wondering, after all these years of studying narrative psychology, do you do this on a regular basis now?

What are the stories you tell yourself today in terms of where you are and where your life is and where you want your life to go?

So it's not that I am consciously going through my daily experiences and editing them into the kinds of storylines that I have learned are likely to support my well-being.

But when difficult things happen in particular, I think I do pause and I remember that there are different kinds of well-being and that the way I make sense of those experiences will

lead me to different kinds of well-being.

But I think for a lot of people, just the awareness that you are not only the main character in your story, but also the narrator and that the way you choose to tell the story of your life really matters, that can be an empowering insight.

Jonathan Adler is a psychologist at Olin College.

Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Oh, it's been an incredible pleasure.

Thank you for inviting me.

Do you have follow-up questions or ideas that you'd like to share after listening to this episode?

How do you tell the story of your life and how does that shape the way you see yourself?

If you're comfortable sharing your thoughts with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org.

Use the subject line personal stories.

That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org.

You're listening to Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedanta.

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I'm Jerry.

And I'm Jerry's Heart.

Today's topic: Repatha Evalokimab.

Heart, why'd you pick this one?

Well, Jerry, for people who have had a heart attack, like us, diet and exercise might not be enough to lower the risk of another one.

Okay.

To help know if we're at risk, we should be getting our LDLC, our bad cholesterol, checked and talking to our doctor.

I'm listening.

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Hmm, guess it's time to ask about Repatha.

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This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedanta.

Think about the last time you entered a negotiation.

Perhaps you were asking your boss for a raise or trying to get your child to do their chores.

What was your strategy as you headed into the discussion?

Often, our focus is on what we want to get out of the interaction.

Any planning we do is focused on how to put our best case forward.

But behavioral scientist Max Bazeman offers a different approach.

He's at Harvard Business School and author of the book, Negotiation, The Game Has Changed.

Max says, instead of focusing on our goals, we should focus on our blind spots.

We recently talked with Max on Hidden Brain.

Those episodes are titled Relationships 2.0, Become a Better Negotiator, and for our Hidden Brain Plus subscribers, Relationships 2.0, Win-Win.

Today, as part of our ongoing series, Your Questions Answered, we asked Max to come back on the show to answer your questions about negotiation.

Max Baserman, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

I'm delighted to be back, and I look forward to hearing the questions that are in the minds of your listeners.

So Max, it's understandable that we're often immersed in our own perspectives during a negotiation.

But in doing so, you say that we can become biased in our own perspectives, biased by our own needs.

How so, Max?

So once we know what role we're in, what side we're playing,

what our interests are, our ability to be objective largely disappears.

So if we have,

let's say, a plaintiff and a defendant in a lawsuit, and we ask them to reveal to us what they think

that the case is worth.

Plaintiffs naturally think that the case is worth more than the defendants.

It's not just that they're making that claim to convince the jury or the judge, but they actually come to believe that.

And similarly, lots of salespeople think that what they're selling is worth more than what the buyer thinks that they're buying.

So you have this kind of bias to see the world in the way that would favor your side.

So at one level, of course, when we want something very badly, it makes sense that we spend a lot of time thinking about what we want.

Why does this make us less effective as negotiators?

Because negotiation is not one person decision-making.

If you were the dictator and you could make the decision, it wouldn't be a negotiation.

The fact that you need to work with another person or many other people requires that you take their perspective to imagine what the world looks like from their side so that you aren't putting things on the table that they're never going to accept under any circumstance.

One of the key limitations that we find in negotiation is that people don't do a good enough job of thinking about the decisions of the other party.

So you say that when two parties are negotiating, overconfidence can form a major obstacle to reaching an agreement.

Is that connected to what you were just telling me about defendants and prosecutors in sort of courtroom settings?

Absolutely.

So we see the world from our own perspective.

We have a biased view of what a fair price would be.

And we're overconfident that if we simply hold out for our position, that the other side will eventually fold.

And too many deals are missed because we have parties on both sides holding out for something that's tilted in their favor and not finding that viable price in the middle that both sides could, in fact, live with.

So, why in the world do we spend so much money on attorneys to go through expensive court procedures to end up with a deal that we could have reached on our own without all those expenses?

So, anytime that we've incurred these expenses for the opportunity to have this fight with the other side, we're ending up with a deal that's worse than what we could have had had the two parties used reasonable negotiation procedures and reached a deal more efficiently.

Many listeners might be listening to this and saying, you know, when I'm going into have a difficult negotiation, whether that's buying a car or asking for a raise or, you know, discussing something that is unpleasant with a partner or a spouse, I often feel underconfident, not overconfident.

Can underconfidence also undermine us?

And how do we strike a balance between overconfidence and underconfidence?

It's a great question.

So my excellent colleague at the High School at Berkeley, Don Moore, I think of as the world's expert on appropriate confidence.

And he wrote a book called Perfectly Confident.

What Don finds is that when people are in domains where they lack competence,

they are even less confident than they should be.

But when people are in domains where they feel confident, they're even more confident than their skills and abilities should lead them to be.

So given that that's the case, and given that sometimes we have to be negotiating in areas that might not be areas of competence, how do we solve this problem?

So sometimes we don't need to.

If you're in a flea market and you're buying a souvenir for $15 and you make a mistake, no big problem.

And I would say get on with life and don't worry about it.

If it's an important part of your work setting and you don't have the expertise, perhaps you need to buy it or borrow it from someone else in your firm or from an outside advisor.

So we need to understand when we

know too little and we need to make up for our lack of personal expertise by relying on the expertise of someone else who we can trust.

I'd like you to talk about another bias that affects us when we're negotiating.

This one is called anchoring.

Can you explain what anchoring is?

Sure.

50 years ago, Kahneman and and Tversky, well-known psychologists who created the field of behavioral economics in many ways, did an experiment where they basically asked people

what percent of the

countries in the United Nations were from Africa.

And they said, wait, before you give me your estimate, let's get an estimate from a roulette wheel.

And the roulette wheel either stops at 65 or 10.

And people are asked, is the number higher or lower

than 10 or 65?

And people who see 65 say lower, and they reduce the 65 to 45 on average.

The people who see 10 come all the way up to 24.

And while both parties rejected these unreasonable anchors, You get a dramatic difference based on did I start high and come down or start low and come up?

And the same is true in negotiations.

If you're selling, you're much better off starting with a high price and coming down to something

viable but favorable to you within the zone of possible agreement.

If you're buying just the opposite, better to start with a low number and come up into the zone of possible agreement.

So as a negotiator, anchoring can be very, very effective.

On the other hand, you want to anchor with a number that's reasonable enough to get their attention.

If they're not paying attention to you, then that's not very helpful.

So if you look at a house

that's on the market for $499,000 and you read anchors have a dramatic influence, you might offer them $100,000,

but they're simply going to ignore you.

That's not going to anchor the discussion.

But it might be the case that if you've done your homework,

that you can anchor, you can respond with $460,000 rather than $470,000

and anchor them at a lower number and that

that could tilt tilt you in a favorable direction in terms of what the ultimate price will be.

So the general advice is to identify what is a viable range of agreements and then anchor near your preferred end of that zone.

So let's get to listener questions now, Max.

This first one comes from a listener named Rose.

I'm just wondering about what negotiation looks like in certain cultures and how much that should play into it.

So I'm from the Midwest where negotiation is kind of looked on pretty negatively.

It's accepted for things like buying a car, but in general, if you were to haggle with someone, it's not considered the most socially acceptable thing.

I'm just wondering outside of the Midwest, if there's other places like this, how much that should come into our minds as we start to negotiate with people?

Or do I just need to get over my my Nebraska niceness to get a better deal?

So Max, there are clearly cultures in which haggling is more the norm than others.

When you're living in a haggling averse culture like Rose is, how should she proceed?

Well, first of all, I love Rose's question.

And I love the fact that after talking about cultures, she focuses on Nebraska.

So a lot of other listeners, when they hear a culture, they might have been thinking China or Japan.

and i think rose highlights that we have different cultures in different parts of the us

we have different cultures in different industries so it's important to understand the world that you're in so my first advice to rose is

sounds like life is fine in nebraska for her and she should be perfectly comfortable not negotiating in situations that don't call for negotiation on the other hand if she moves to a place where negotiation is the norm, she needs to adapt to that.

Or if she takes a job in a career where

the prices aren't fixed and haggling is normal, she needs to adapt to that.

And

in my book, Negotiation in the Game Has Changed, one of the points that I make is that we're now negotiating with more and more people who are different from ourselves, who come from different cultures, and we want to understand what the norms look like.

Rose might also find it intriguing to know that I was in December, I was hiking up to Machu Picchu.

And

the guide on the trip said, and by the way, in a lot of emerging economies, it's normal to haggle with people overprice.

He said, don't do that.

People in Peru are used to offering you a fair price and you should take it or leave it rather than to haggle.

turns out that Cusco and Machu Picchu may have a lot in common with Nebraska that wouldn't have been apparent on the surface.

On the other hand, there there are times when negotiating matters a whole lot.

30 years ago, Linda Babcock, excellent colleague at Carnegie Mellon, basically found out that women were less likely to haggle.

And as a result, their starting salaries were too low and that that created enormous pay differences across their career.

Laura Cray, now at Berkeley, suggests that that's no longer true.

So we need to understand the culture and the time and the place and what's appropriate appropriate and take that into consideration as we develop our own strategy.

You know, this makes me think that when you are negotiating with someone, you might be negotiating over something

you're actually exchanging.

So, you know, you're selling me a car, I'm trying to buy a car.

So at one level, the negotiation is about something that is tangible, something that's material.

But as we're negotiating with each other, the act of negotiation itself, you know, carries psychological meaning.

And so if I come in and I basically lowball you to an extent in terms of what you want for the car, you know, you're offering a used car for $6,000 and I offer you $100,

you know, you're not just going to see that as a low anchor.

You might not even dismiss me.

You might be offended by what it is that I'm doing.

And it makes me realize that negotiations are not just about the thing being negotiated.

They're also about how we see ourselves, our self-worth, how we believe the other person sees us.

It's tied up with all of these psychological issues.

issues.

Absolutely.

So Shankar, let's assume that we're acquaintances, which we are, but we've never had dinner together.

And so let's assume that I'm the one selling the car for $6,000.

And I think, you know,

I'm happy with $5,500.

And since you're my acquaintance, you know, I'd probably even be okay selling it to you for $5,000 and taking a little bit less than what I think the market could bear.

But when you open with that $100 offer or even a $3,000 offer, offer, I think, wait a second, I was dealing with you as if our relationship matters.

Your unreasonable offer suggests this is a very different world.

Right.

So not only do we get a breakdown in the negotiation, but I don't like you as well because of the way you handled that particular situation.

So we got another comment from a listener named Roxanna.

And Roxanna heard the story you shared about getting sucked into a negotiation over a taxi while you and your wife were in Thailand.

In the incident that you mentioned, two taxi drivers quoted your charge that was higher than you wanted to pay, but the difference in both cases was less than a dollar.

Roxanna shared her own story of witnessing an American tourist haggling over 25 cents when buying a handmade blouse from an indigenous woman in Mexico.

And her point was that context matters.

When people from wealthy countries visit less wealthy ones, there is a big economic power imbalance.

Should we consider that when we're negotiating, Max?

Absolutely.

If you'll recall in the taxi story, I knew that my students were going to quiz me the next day on what did I pay for the taxi.

But my spouse in that story, who was standing on the street, not in the taxi because of my frugalness, would very much be on Roxanna's side of that story.

So I think that we should often consider the nature of the relationship, the nature of the transaction, how important the money is to us when we decide

whether and how aggressively we should negotiate.

So despite the fact that I may be on the wrong side of Roxanna's argument, I'm going to side with her in terms of the general point she's making.

Yeah, because I think sometimes, you know, I think this happened to you in Thailand.

You sort of get caught up in the moment in sort of the excitement of the negotiation or even just a sense of fairness where you feel like you're being taken advantage of.

And I think the point that she is making here, which is an important one, is that maybe sometimes it's okay to be taken advantage of.

Yeah, or I would say reframe it as to there's better uses of your time than haggling with somebody over a small amount of money who needs some money more than you.

Our guest is behavioral scientist Max Beseman, joining us to answer listener questions about his work on negotiation.