Speaking of Psychology: Why “boy” culture is creating a crisis of connection, with Niobe Way, PhD

Many boys form deep friendships in childhood. But as they become teens, they report fewer close, rich friendships. Niobe Way, PhD, author of Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves and Our Culture, discusses “boy” culture; why boys are naturally as emotionally intelligent as girls; the societal pressures that lead to disconnection among boys as they grow into men; and how teaching students to listen with curiosity can help them deepen connections and friendships.

Niobe Way, PhD, is a professor of developmental psychology and director of the Science of Human Connection Lab at New York University. She is also a principal investigator of the Listening with Curiosity Project. Her work focuses on social and emotional development, how cultural ideologies shape child development and families in the U.S. and China, and on how to how to use the method of listening with curiosity to make a more caring, connected, and just world.

Kim Mills: Many boys form deep friendships in childhood, but as they become teens, something changes—they become more reluctant to open up to others and report fewer close, rich friendships. Today we’re going to talk to a psychologist who has spent decades studying boys’ friendships and emotional development about why that happens and what it means for boys and men, and for everyone else.

What do boys learn about masculinity through their childhood and teen years? How do those lessons affect their mental health and relationships as they grow up? How do the norms and ideals of boy culture affect women and girls as well? And what can parents and educators do to help us all stay emotionally connected to ourselves and each other?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Niobe Way, a professor of developmental psychology and director of the Science of Human Connection Lab at New York University. Her work focuses on how culture shapes child development, especially in boys and young men, and how to foster connection and combat loneliness. She’s the author of more than 100 academic articles and books. Her newest book is Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture. Her previous book, Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and The Crisis of Connection, was the inspiration for the Oscar-nominated movie Close. 

Dr. Way, thank you for joining me today.

Niobe Way, PhD: Oh, I’m so delighted to be here and thank you for the invitation.

Mills: In your latest book and in your research, you talk about “boy” culture. What do you mean by that term? What is “boy” culture?

Way: Well, this is an interesting thing, so boy culture—and I want to make it very clear to your listeners that “boy” is in quotations, not “boy culture,” meaning it’s a stereotype of a boy. It’s not a real boy. And the important part of this is, what I’m about to say is, it’s taught to us by real boys. So real boys tell us how we’ve stereotyped boys in a way that’s not only damaging them, but in some cases killing them. And so I want to be very dramatic about it because the results are very dramatic. And so boy culture is essentially a culture that aligns with the stereotype of a boy, that only values their hard side. So only wants autonomy, doesn’t care about connection, only wants to be stoic, doesn’t care about their own vulnerabilities, doesn’t even have the capacity to be vulnerable, doesn’t have the soft skills that so-called girls and women have. They just have their hard skills. And in fact, their soft skills, they’re sort of emotionally and relationally unintelligent compared to girls and women.

That’s all part of a stereotype of a boy that according to my almost 40 years of research with young people, and it’s been all gender identities, but the point is that the boys and young men are telling a story we’re not listening to. What we learned from them is they not only had that intelligence, they have that intelligence as much as all other humans. And the fact that we’ve stereotyped them as not being emotionally and relationally intelligent and not wanting emotionally intimate friendships is what’s damaging them, what’s leading them to suicide and homicide and mass violence. And by the way, I just want to finally end with your response, the response, you learn that not only from boys, in my research, boys and young men in my research, you learn it from the manifestos of mass shooters. So they say the exact same thing, they’re just more isolated kids, so they end up committing violence. But the point is it’s the same story and they’ve been telling this story to me since 1987 when I began to do research on social emotional development at Harvard as a grad student.

Mills: So what happens to boys’ friendships as they move from childhood to adolescence? Why do the ties seem to weaken them? And then what are the consequences for boys and young men?

Way: Kim, I love your questions. Thank you. They’re really getting into, you clearly read my book and it’s beautiful to be asked these questions. So this is what happens, and I report this in Deep Secrets, my previous book that was written about 13 years ago. What happens is, and boys, again, everything I say I learned from listening to boys and young men. So it’s not my theory, it’s my finding, but it’s directly from the mouths of boys. What happens is I’m a developmental psychologist and for all the listeners, they know exactly what that is, which is unusual for my audience, which is I follow the same kids over time. So I follow—our teams have been following young people from the ages of 11, 12 to when following them all throughout to 18 and 19, so early, middle and late adolescence. And what we hear, that’s the developmental work, and I say this to all you wonderful APA members that get it, it’s the developmental work that tells the story about the impact of boy culture.

And I’ll tell you why. Because at 11, 12 and 13 boys are talking like all other humans. They’re talking like girls, but it’s not really like girls. It’s just like a human. They talk about their desire for friendships. They talk about their desire for connection. They say things, If I wasn’t—if they have close friendships, they say, If I didn’t have him, I would feel all alone. I’d want to kill myself. They link it directly to mental health, their friendships directly to mental health. They reveal their, and this gives me the chills every time I talk about it’s so beautiful, they reveal their relational intelligence, the capacity to look at the human world and understand that underneath anger is always hurt feelings. They say that directly, I may be pissed at you, but it’s really that I feel like you dissed me and it hurts my feelings.

They get it. They have this extraordinary relational intelligence of getting the human world and the contradictions and the way we fake emotions and all those kinds of things to try to, and they don’t understand why we would ask them to do anything else but be a human. And then as they get older and the pressure to up, and this is the critical thing for psychologists, not only to man up, but to mature, Kim, to become a grownup, we ask them to basically take their soft skills, their soft so-called soft needs. It’s not a gender identity, it’s a human need, but we gender it as feminine and soft. We tell them to go underground with that. In fact, those skills are not really important and they’re not really something that we value. And I can tell you why I know that is because we value cognitive intelligence. We don’t value emotional intelligence and relational intelligence the same way.

So boys get these messages about manhood and maturity to focus on separation rather than connection, autonomy and independence over interdependence. Boys are getting that—of course, everybody’s getting that, but boys are getting it profoundly because it’s also linked to masculinity. And then they start to disconnect. This is now answering your question. They start to disconnect from what they want and what they need, which is their friendships. So they start to go under, you literally hear it in their language. It’s incredible. Their language that was soft and beautiful and emotional in early to middle adolescence starts to sound like a stereotypic guy. It doesn’t matter. I don’t care. It’s okay. It’s all good. It’s all good. I don’t need friends. Or the more tender boys that are willing to still be tender, they’ll say things like, I struggle to hold onto my friendships.

It’s sad because I used to have these friendships. I no longer have them. And then some of them, this is what’s the most amazing, they name boy culture. They say things like, it might be nice to be a girl, then I wouldn’t have to be emotionless. I mean, they name it. Or they say, I’m grown up now. I’ve matured enough. I don’t need to share my feelings. I mean, Kim, I mean it’s not what I want to communicate to our listeners, especially the APA community. This is not a theory that I’m coming up with about boy culture and boys. This is told directly from the mouths of babes. You know what I mean? They’re saying it directly, that growing up in a culture that only values my hard side and doesn’t value my soft side, my soft capacities actually causes me to feel terrible about myself and oftentimes feel terrible about others.

And so the idea is we need our heart and soft, I’m going to say the really obvious thing. We think and feel. We’ve gendered thinking as masculine and feeling as feminine. That’s our first mistake. And psychologists really have to hear, this is the best audience of my work in the world. They have to hear it that we think and feel. We want autonomy and connection. We’ve had that in developmental theory for ages. But the point is Bowlby had that, right? Bowlby was talking about that back in the day about a connection and autonomy as mutually they work together. But in pop culture and the way we raise our children, we tend to only emphasize the hard side, especially with our boys and young men. So the idea is growing up in a culture, taught to us by boys, growing up into a boy culture where boy is a stereotype, literally harms boys.

And then what I say in my new book, Rebels, it actually harms all of us because now you get girls, and I have to say this, girls are emphasizing manning up too, and we’re in fact finding in our data in China and as well as patterns in the United States that girls are starting to man up more than boys. Meaning they got the message that if they emphasize their kick-ass self, their desire for independence and their determination to speak out, which they should have that determination. But if they only value their hard side, they get their foot in the door, people take them seriously. And so the idea is that boy culture is hurting everybody. It’s just hurting boys in a particular way because it’s linked to manhood and not just maturity, but for girls and young women and non-gender binary, I want to talk about them too. Non-gender binary kids are just as impacted because it’s an entire culture that privileges one side of our humanity over the other when we need both sides of our humanity to be fully human. So it’s impacting all of us.

Mills: As you said, you’ve been looking at this for a long time now. I came up during the feminist movement in the seventies and we felt like we were trying to give men more options. Isn’t that really happening? I mean, we actually were trying to give men more space to be emotional. We’re expecting more of them. Isn’t that sinking in?

Way: So in some ways it’s interesting. I have a complicated response to that. I actually always base my answers on data, so I always have to reflect the data. So in some ways, yes, so I’ll tell you why, where the data is. We are definitely—even this conversation, these conversations about men’s friendships, boys’ friendships, the importance of friendships. Division 51, is that the division for men, men and masculinity? Yeah. Division 51 actually created friendship as a protective factor based on my work in part by my work certainly. But I think I’m the only one at this point that’s looked at longitudinal studies of friendships among boys. But the point is that policy has been changed. We’re starting to recognize that friendships matter for everybody, for boys and young men. So we’re definitely doing policy changes. Movies are being made, Oscar-nominated movies are being made.

I mean, basically we are starting to recognize that friendships matter, not just for girls and women, but for everybody, including boys and men. So that’s a good change. What’s not changed because we’re not seeing the waters in which we swim, and I’m saying is getting worse actually, is that we’re privileging our hard sides over our soft sides. We’re still linking, somehow, soft skills with femininity and our stereotypes about femininity, you’ll find this interesting, is actually getting more stereotypic in a sort of 1950s, my mother’s generation. So when I asked my NYU students—this is in the book, in Rebels—to tell me about masculinity and femininity, my jaw dropped because their definitions of masculinity were like being responsible, being intelligent, being stoic, being a good person. And then the definitions of femininity. I mean, there was a couple good things in there about being kind, but basically it was about being superficial, being sort of catty.

I mean basically the number of adjectives that were negative on femininity were much more than the number of negative adjectives with masculinity. And I looked at my students, it’s about 40, 50 students, men and women, mostly women in this particular class. And I said, What is going on with you? I said, You guys sound like my mother’s generation of femininity. And you know what I mean? Sort of making femininity weak and masculinity strong. And not only strong physically but strong mentally. I mean, it’s like, What is going on with you? And I think what’s happening in our disconnected society that doesn’t see itself, it doesn’t see that we’re privileging the hard over the soft. We actually think soft skills are feminine. We actually think thinking is masculine. I mean, we actually even think it’s biological that men are inherently smarter and women are inherently more emotionally attuned—that basically we’re just getting worse because as the gender divides exacerbate and we’re so angry at each other, we just hunker down into our gender stereotypes.

And we think that kids that are identifying with they, which is interesting because they’re a very radical group of kids because rejecting the whole gender binary, we’re thinking the problem is the gender pronoun rather than the definitions of masculinity and femininity. And to me, that’s a lifting up of the voices of kids who have rejected the gender binary. So I’m lifting up their voices, but I’m attacking the people who still identify with he and she that basically have reified, reified the most negative stereotypes with those identities.

And so the final thing I want to say, Kim, my critique as a feminist, because I too am a feminist—I was raised as a feminist, I had a feminist mother—is that I’m not critiquing masculinity. My book is not about critiquing masculinity because basically the hard and the soft—our desire, our capacity to be strong and stoic and competitive, and even to defend our children with violence, I mean defend them is a positive thing, right? Our capacity to fight back when we need to fight back, that’s a positive thing. What I’m critiquing is a culture that only values that capacity and not the capacity, Kim, to be sensitive to your feelings and to actually care about what you think and feel and to actually want to connect and be curious, interpersonally curious about your experiences. We don’t even study that in psychology. We don’t even think interpersonal curiosity is a thing. I mean, it’s incredible, but it’s at the root of all human connection, and that’s how disconnected boy culture is, because we value intellectual curiosity over interpersonal.

And we’re now about to do the very first study of the development of interpersonal curiosity in the field of psychology, Kim, and think what that means, the very skill that you need to connect to other people, the feminine skill—it’s not feminine, but it’s been feminized—it’s a human skill. Developmental psychologists haven’t even taken it seriously. So to me, it really is a cultural problem that we’re not seeing, and we’ve gotten worse in that respect.

Mills: What we’re seeing is that boys are struggling and they’re falling behind girls in some very concrete ways in school and the workforce, life milestones. So why is that happening and how is that tied to boy culture?

Way: It’s a very simple story. It all comes down to boy culture, which is if you only privilege the hard over the soft, that means you only privilege the hard professions and the hard disciplines. And we already know that the hard sciences over the soft sciences, STEM fields and business fields over everything else, but certainly over nursing, teaching, psychology, I mean all you name it, and not neuroscience in psychology, but the soft form of psychology, clinical applied psychology. So the idea is that we have a hard over soft in everything, everything, everything. Not just our human thinking and feeling, but in our professions and in our disciplines. And if you have a world in which going into the soft professions, teaching, et cetera, being interested in poetry and humanities, I’m going to say something that sounds ridiculous, but this is how unintelligent we’ve become as a culture. If we think that’s a girly thing to want to be a teacher or to want to be a nurse or to want to write poetry, I mean, think about the history of our world that we think it’s a girly thing to want to write poetry.

If we think it’s linked to a gender identity that’s going to not only be damaging to girls and women, it’s going to be damaging to boys and men. And college becomes less interesting. And I’m going to put aside, college is also obscenely expensive. So for all working class boys and young men, or even middle class boys and young men who can’t afford college and then see if I’m not even going to do a major that allows me to make money, why would I even go to college? So I’m going to put that aside for a second because that’s obviously going on too. Why would I go to college if I’m not interested in STEM and going into business, but it’s not going to help me make money, so I might as well just start making money now?

But even if we take the rich kids, the reality is that going to college, your assortment of what you can do that will make you successful and that will allow you to have actually a decent salary, is now limited to the STEM fields and business. And how I can prove, my point is that we have lots of programs to get girls and women into STEM fields. We have nothing to get boys and men into the soft professions, into nursing, into teaching, social work. I mean, we have nothing to encourage them, especially men of color of course, to do these professions that we are desperately in need of. So it explains the college thing.

It explains why men are having a harder time finding work because why would you go into teaching if you get paid $10 an hour? I mean, obviously I’m exaggerating, but the point is, we not only don’t value these professions, we don’t pay them a living wage. So why would you go into them if you’re not getting paid a living wage? Women still figure it out. But in part because they oftentimes have the help from their parents, if they’re upper class, they have help from their parents or they can have help from a partner. I mean, the gender dynamics just play out in that so that it becomes more of the responsibility for the man to bring in the big bucks so that the woman can do something that doesn’t make very much money. And we still have that gender dynamic. So that really explains it.

And I want to say one final thing that I didn’t say. One other thing that’s about a boy culture, and this is an important point. I always forget this, and it’s a critical point, is not only a hierarchy of human qualities, it’s a hierarchy of humans where we’re all trying to get on top. And so if you have a hierarchy of humans where some people are considered more valuable than other humans, so men over women, rich over poor, white people over people of color. I mean, if you have that kind of society where we’re all trying to get on top, that’s part of boy culture, right? Because it’s a deeply immature hierarchy, by the way. And so I’m alluding to the immaturity of it that we think some humans are more worthy of care than others that’s going to cause damage because the Trump supporters, this—Kim, the Trump supporters, felt like they were being put on the bottom of a hierarchy that their needs didn’t matter.

And Trump said, Hey, you matter. You matter. He’s not doing it. But I’m just saying his rhetoric was you matter. And so to me it’s like we have to disrupt the hierarchy, and that’s what boys and young men teach us is that it’s not some one group’s fault. It’s our whole culture that’s creating a culture that says it might be nice to be a girl. Then I wouldn’t have to be emotionless. And that it’s not only valuing feminists do this too, I’ll blame my own group. We try to flip the hierarchy and put ourselves on top and other people on bottom. That may feel good at the moment. It’s not going to solve the long-term problem. It’s not going to solve the violence because nobody wants to be on the bottom of a hierarchy of humans. And when they have access to weapons, as I always tell my students, unfortunately, they might try to kill you. Nobody wants to be put on the bottom. And we learned that from mass shooters by the way, Kim.

Mills: Now you’ve spent a lot of time and effort studying boys and men of color and those from working class backgrounds. Why focus on those groups?

Way: It’s because they tell a story. Psychologists know this, and sociologists definitely know this. Oftentimes the people that are not in the center of power tell the most insightful things. And I learned that early in the day when I was a doctoral student in human development at Harvard and I was working in public schools in Boston, that oftentimes the stories you would get, even Deep Secerts, that was written off based off in part my studies in Boston, they tell a story that’s more truth telling because they see themselves. It’s like white rich men sometimes have a hard time seeing themselves because they’re the norm so that they don’t see their own privilege, they don’t see the way they’ve been damaged by boy culture too, by the way. They don’t see it. But when you talk to boys and young men on the fringe, what I call on the fringe of power by race, by social class, by all sorts of divisions we have, they’re much more willing to speak truth to power.

They see it, they see it, they feel it because they live it. It might be nice to be a girl then I wouldn’t have to be emotionless. We may now get that among white privileged boys because it’s been so part of the culture. But usually I don’t think I would’ve gotten that data back in the late eighties, early nineties where boys had been so clear about the privileging of the hard over soft, but also the hierarchy of humanness, of course, because they’ve been put on the bottom. And so they’re basically aware of what keeps them in the outside world, of the white world and the rich world sort of not having access to the top. So the idea is that to me, the working class young people and the kids of color, and I want to say this to all psychologists, they oftentimes tell us the story that mainstream psychology has not told because we’ve been focused too much – even now, even though I know we’ve diversified in the last two decades, even now, we still heavily focus our developmental research on kids in privileged communities, in various kinds of American privileged communities. Sometimes it’s racially diverse, but the point of it’s socioeconomically middle and upper class.

So the idea is when we limit it, it’s not just that we’re missing voices in the field, we’re missing, and this is a big thing, Kim, we’re missing insights about human development that are necessary. The only way we’re going to have new insights in the history, in our understanding of ourselves is by listening to people that are not ourselves. I mean, my father said I want to end with the response with one more insight from my father, actually. He said—when I was 18, I was interested in American adolescence. I’ve always been interested in American adolescence. He said, Niobe, if you’re interested in American adolescence, go live in China. His point was you can’t see yourself if you only see yourself. You have to see something, someone, not something. You have to see people who are different from you to see yourself. And psychologists, I’m going to critique the field of psychology in some ways, especially research psychology, especially developmental psychology, is that we have assumed that if we can see ourselves, that makes us a better researcher. But we do that sort of matching thing. But the reality is we fail to understand that we will see ourselves even not just them, we won’t see kids of color more, if we’re white, we’ll actually see ourselves more by listening to kids of color. We’ll understand human development and in fact of what it means to be me by listening to kids who aren’t me and who don’t have the same background. And so to me, it’s an important point in psychology.

The studies of kids of color and from working class families are not just studies of kids of color and working class families. They are studies of humans and what it means to be human and what’s getting in the way of our capacity to be human. And I want us to shift that in the field so that we understand that including women, as Carol Gilligan said decades ago, is not just about women, it’s about being human. She came out with a book called In a Human Voice because the idea is the relational voice is not a women’s voice, it’s a human voice, and we tend to take the non-mainstream and make their voices distinct to them and not see relevance to us. But that’s the big mistake in the field I would argue.

Mills: A moment ago, you mentioned going to China and you’ve done that. You’ve done some research in China. Are you finding that similar to what you’re seeing in the US, are there cultural differences that are really salient or are men and boys having the same issues in that culture as well?

Way: First of all, my father was a China scholar, so I’ve been going to China since 1985. He lived there for eight years in the eighties. I’ve learned a lot. He’s passed now. But I’ve learned a lot about the history of China. I know China like the back of my hand at this point, having raised by a father who was inculcating that he was a literature professor and art specialist, but he was always saying basically the Europeans ripped off most of what China contributed and claimed it to be European. So that’s how I was raised. You know what I mean with the sense of this culture that’s never been given the credit was actually at the basis of the enlightenment for Europe.

Anyway, so in that spending so much time in China, and then I began a study with Hiro Yoshikawa and others, and Chen, two developmental psychologists. We started in 2006. It’s a study of 1200 families, both adolescent cohort and a baby cohort, and we’re about to do the 20 year follow-up of both samples. So we even went into the hospitals in 2006 and we actually interviewed parents and observed babies when they were born and they’re now 20 years old. And with adolescents, we’ve been doing repeated follow-ups and we finally got a grant, external grant. We’ve been funding it ourselves in all sorts of ways, 1200 families looking at the social economic context and how it shapes child development. And so we’re about to do this 20 year follow-up. So to get to your question, so we have about 800 adolescents we’ve been following, and then we have about 500 families of babies that we’ve been following and who are now young adults. So what we find in our data is this is something that’s very depressing for me, especially because I know China from the eighties, which gives me some good insight.

Basically China from the 1980s when I lived there in 1985 to when I lived there in 2007, because I ended up going there for a long time, to just collect the data with a huge team we work with a huge team, is that China has become more American. I mean, just American culture is dominant. In 1987, I’ll give you an example, men held hands. It wasn’t a sexual thing, it was just a human thing that you would saw men holding hands all the time, hugging each other, being very physically, even kissing each other. I mean, basically friends, they were friends. And when I went back in 2007 and lived there with my little kids, you never saw that. That had been identified as gay behavior. So you never saw that, right? You never saw that. And so the idea is you start to see now masculinity in China traditionally was about being learned in the traditional sense, knowing poetry, knowing literature, knowing philosophy, being strong.

Of course that’s always been a part of masculinity everywhere in the world, but in China it was really about knowing the world, knowing art, being basically an educated person was part of masculinity. And then starting in about, this is now my opinion, having lived there, starting in about 2000 when the American culture came in, sports culture came in, basketball, they had Yao Ming who was playing basketball. It started to come in and you literally saw the infiltration of American masculinity into China. You also saw it. I’ll tell you another example in communism, communism as a theory, believes that men and women hold up half the sky. They believe in gender equality theoretically. I’m not saying there was gender equality, God forbid, but I’m just saying theoretically, theoretically that was the, gender equality was the theory of communism. And so when we would interview parents in 2006, they always talked about boys and girls are the same, that they have the same needs.

And even though they privileged boys over girls, certainly at that time they always talked about boys and girls being the same. When we interviewed the same age, but different parents 10 years later in our baby sample, they were—the whole dialogue, Kim, is about the differences between boys and girls and boys aren’t as socially, emotionally competent as girls. And I mean all the gender stereotypes that we have in the United States were being repeated. Kim, it was stunning to hear. They were repeating our stereotypes. And the reason why the longitudal data is so stunning is I didn’t hear that in the parents in 2006 of adolescents. I heard it in the parents of adolescents in 2016 where they sounded American. They literally sounded American in their gender stereotypes.

And so now you’re getting schools in China, I mean, stunning, that’s trying to prevent boys from acting like girls. So being so soft. And you’re getting entire schools that have curriculum to enhance masculinity in an American sense of what masculinity means, meaning playing sports, being fit, being built, and basically valuing math and science and business. I mean, it’s like, oh my God. And to see that change in the culture is really what the impetus with writing Rebels With a Cause, my latest book, because I realized I have literally witnessed the change because I happened to have a father living in China in the eighties, and then I went back to China to live there for a while and I could literally see the change. And then we saw in our data, in our 20-year data. So I would say yes, the answer now, the answer to your question is absolutely, we see the same patterns because it stems from we have given a gender identity to thinking and feeling, and that is our first mistake.

If you make thinking masculine and feeling feminine, a visitor from another planet, Kim, would look at us and say, what’s wrong with you people? What’s wrong with you people? How can you thrive? I mean, I’m sounding a little silly at the moment, but I’m just getting the profundity of it that your boys and young men are saying, don’t give a gender identity. They’re thinking and feeling. It’s a human thing. It’s not a gender identity. To want friendships is not a gender identity, right? To want emotionally intimate connections. Relationships do not have a gender identity. It’s a human need and a human capacity. And think about all the history of friendships we have in the Western tradition, Aristotle. I mean, we have a whole history of male friendships that we valued right in the history of the Western world, same in the Eastern world. You have the whole history of male friendships being valued, and somehow in the 20th century we began to give it a gender identity, which is just fascinating to me.

Mills: Let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about possible solutions because in your recent work, you have been looking at ways to help people stay more connected with each other, including what you call listening with curiosity. So what does that mean and why is it important?

Way: What we tried to do about 10 years ago with my colleague Joseph Nelson, who’s now a full professor at Swarthmore, he was a former student of mine a long time ago, we decided to do the method that I had been interviewing in, and Joseph and I had been teaching in, we were teaching the method of listening with curiosity—we didn’t call it that at the time—with doctoral students to do their dissertations. And I’ve been teaching it since 1995 and he’s been teaching it with me for the past 10 years or so. And we would get in that class with doctoral students, when we teach this method of listening as to do an interview project for your dissertation presentation, we would get the feedback like, Dr. Way, you realize that it’s not just a research method. It totally changes your relationships when you learn the method.

And I was sort of passing it off as like, Okay, okay, that’s interesting, but I wasn’t really thinking about it. And then the boys, the Deep Secrets book came out and people said, how did you get boys to talk like that? You know what I mean? So many of the quotes are so gorgeous. And they said, how did you get boys to talk like that? And I was like, it wasn’t a secret potion. It was really a method that I learned in part from Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown at Harvard when I was a doctoral student. And it was really a way of listening with curiosity to what they were saying rather than just basically going through an interview protocol or just affirming my stereotypes by—for example, I’ll give example because I’m speaking to a psychologist, for example, not following up on the questions where they reveal a kind of vulnerability with their friends. What we would do as psychologists is we wouldn’t follow up with that if we were interviewing them, think that we wouldn’t even hear the story because looking for the way we think boys relate to each other, which is just through sports and whatever it is. So we wouldn’t even follow up with that question.

But so the idea is that the method is really about listening with curiosity to what they’re saying, to understand how they see themselves, not how we stereotype them to be. Then in about 2015, Joseph and I had this big insight together, why are we just teaching it to doctoral students? Why aren’t we teaching it to young people so they can actually have the relationships that they want? So we went into this boys school in the Lower East Side. We started to teach it to seventh graders, 12-year-olds, and we were blown away because guess what, Kim? They were better at it than the doctoral students. Because it’s connected to your natural curiosity. And we stamped the curiosity out of our students. So they basically, by the time they’re doctoral students, they have no more curiosity, and they’re only about, what’s a good question rather than what’s a real question?

So we had the doctoral students interview the seventh graders as part of the lesson, and the first time we taught it to seventh graders, and the doctoral students were stunned. They said, the seventh graders are so much better than we are. And I said, and that was our big insight, that basically this curiosity that we’re born with, our five-year-old curiosity is our secret sauce, Kim, to human connection because it’s about actually listening with wonder and curiosity about what not only, and remember, this leads back to the other theme, not only what you experience and how you define love and all the things that we care about, trust and relationships and friendships, but it helps me understand by listening to you, Kim, how I define that.

Because ultimately as you talk about what you mean by a close friendship, I begin to understand what I mean because I’m comparing my response to your response. So sometimes there’ll be similarities, but sometimes there’ll be differences. That’s clarifying for me as I listen. So I’m not saying at the point of listening with curiosity just to learn about yourself, but I’m saying to recognize that you learn about yourself through listening to somebody else, and we are such a disconnected culture that we think connection is just talking about ourselves, not we don’t form connection through talking about ourselves. So we’re all talking about ourselves thinking it’s going to form, and of course it doesn’t, and any five-year-old would say, why would that form connection to just share your story? We have to actually be curious in each other’s stories.

So the Listening with Curiosity project, we’ve done it, I’ll do this very quickly. We’ve done it for about eight years now. We got funded by Spencer Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, who basically invested in it and said, build a curriculum around it for schools. We built a 26-lesson curriculum. We’ve been doing it in schools. We have great impact, we’ve been publishing on it. You can find our work just by looking at my name. And we find that fostering curiosity is linked to all sorts of social emotional skills as wellbeing, as well as academic engagement, as well as a sense of a common humanity. It improves a sense of connectedness to others who are different from you. So interpersonal curiosity, we’re now creating a whole institute called the Social Health Institute that’s going to be training people in the framework and method around, we want to get it. It’s a virtual institute around the world. We have so many educators and parents and kids who want to be trained in the method and the framework.

So we’re building that. And the final thing I want to say is we’re building a center for youth and connection by design technology because determined to introduce the concept of connection by design. Technology, technology is not the problem. I want to tell you all parents that are listening. It’s the way we’ve designed technology that’s so toxic, so that friendship becomes how many likes I get or whether I have influencers or followers. We can create a technology that actually fosters our natural interpersonal curiosity that actually is what we’re calling connection by design technology that fosters human-to-human connection. We can even use AI to foster human-to-human connection if we want to. And we’re building it with an app we’re building now called Agapi that we’ve been working with teenagers for the last year every week to co-design it. We’re coming out with an MVP of the app in August that basically nurtures friendships and bridges divides by using my practices of listening with curiosity, and we gamify it so it becomes fun and engaging and kids get listening points and all sorts of things, but it’s a fun thing to do. But kids have—teenagers have helped us create it, so made sure it stays fun, but the point is we need to create a prosocial culture, and there’s lots of ways of doing it in your homes, in your schools, through technology. We just need to recognize that the problem, Kim, is an antisocial culture, and thus the solution is a pro-social culture. If we’re social by nature, which we are, then our antisocial culture, it’s a culture nature clash, and the solution is to create a pro-social culture so that aligns better with our social nature.

Mills: Well, Dr. Way, this has been really interesting. I think your work is quite important, and I’m going to stay tuned to see what comes next. Thank you for joining me.

Way: Yeah, thank you so much.

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman.

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.