The 5-3-1 rule of social connection

My social science reading for this year (which, as usual, is most of my reading) has included two excellent books about social connection: Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends (2022) by Marisa Franco; and The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health Is the Missing Key to Living Longer, Healthier, and Happier (2024) by Kasley Killam. They're both available through Libby.

 

There is so much good information in both books about the how, what, and why of social connection, or "social health" to use Killam's term, which she defines as the aspect of well-being and overall health, which also includes physical health and mental health, that comes from connection. It's hard to know exactly how much social connection you need, and that differs from person to person anyway, but Killam came up with a useful 5–3–1 rule of thumb, based on two "evidence briefs" published in 2022 by the Canadian Alliance for Social Connection and Health.*

First, connect with five different people each week. This can include family members, friends, or coworkers, and the way you connect with them could include meeting in person, catching up over the phone or FaceTime, or some other way. This can also include "weak ties" such as (every social scientist's favorite!) the barista who serves you your morning coffee (or Saturday morning taco in my case). 

 

Second, maintain at least three close relationships in general. These are the folks in your innermost circle. Killam suggests that you might identify your close relationships by thinking about who you use as an emergency contact on forms or by opening the Messages app on your iPhone and seeing whose conversations you have pinned to the top.

 

And third, dedicate at least one hour each day to quality social interaction. Ideally, the minimum of one hour per day would be "engaging rather than rote."

Some of us are already putting into practice several of Killam's suggestions for ways to get all of this social connection in. For example, Killam suggests having a regular time to meet up with friends, which I do on Saturday mornings with my running buddies and Mom does once a week walking with her friends and once a month with her book group. Killam also suggests combining things you're already doing with social connection, which Cassie does when she calls home every Sunday morning on the way to work and Mom does when she calls friends and family members while walking around our neighborhood. As for quality social interaction, skip social media and have deeper conversations by asking more and better questions and, especially, follow-up questions, which shows you are listening to your conversation partner and curious about them. Sound familiar?

If you're looking to broaden your social circles, Franco has my favorite piece of advice, which is based on closing the "liking gap." That is a phenomenon shown in many social science studies in which people consistently underestimate how much their interaction partner will like them (before the fact) or did like them (after the interaction). The easy way to correct for this systematic bias is to assume people like you. Franco explains that "[w]hen we assume others will like us, we not only display behaviors that foreshadow our acceptance, we also become more accurate in our predictions of reality." Assuming people will like you helps you take the initiative in friendship, which someone has to do if you're going to make, and keep, friends.

 

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* See Kiffer Card, Cindy Yu, Adam Frost, Jocelle Refol, Pete Bombaci (2022) “Evidence Brief – How many friends do you need?” Canadian Alliance for Social Connection and Health; Kiffer Card, Cindy Yu, Adam Frost, Jocelle Refol, Pete Bombaci (2022) “Evidence Brief – How much social time do we need?” Canadian Alliance for Social Connection and Health.

 

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The good life, part I: date night

One of my top candidates for best read of the year is The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness (2023) by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz. The book is a summary of all the lessons that the authors have drawn from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which started in 1939. Incredibly, the lessons all boil down to one overarching principle, well summarized in this passage from the book:

[I]f we had to take all eighty-four years of the Harvard Study and boil it down to a single principle for living, one life investment that is supported by similar findings across a wide variety of other studies, it would be this: Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period. So if you’re going to make that one choice, that single decision that could best ensure your own health and happiness, science tells us that your choice should be to cultivate warm relationships. Of all kinds.

The book goes through the evidence and suggests some ways to foster your relationships "of all kinds," including intimate partnerships, family, and friendships.

 

With regard to the first category, it's easy to get into a rut, so I loved their idea to "[p]lan a weekly date night and take turns choosing what you will do (and maybe surprise your partner with a new activity if a surprise would be welcome)."* Mom and I implemented that suggestion last month, and it's been really fun planning things to do with each other. This morning, we got out for a long walk around downtown and then down Main Street to UVA and back to take in all of the Fall colors.

 

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*Research from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia shows that "couples who devote time specifically to one another at least once a week are markedly more likely to enjoy high-quality relationships and lower divorce rates, compared to couples who do not devote much couple time to one another." W. Bradford Wilcox & Jeffrey Dew, "The Date Night Opportunity: What Does Couple Time Tell Us About the Potential Value of Date Nights?" (2012).

 

 

 

 

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Kitchen tools, episode II

There's not much better than a finely crafted kitchen tool. The first time I saw my buddy Ed after the start of the pandemic, he gave me this little item he'd had stored away for me for a while:

 

It's basically a tiny, but very heavy, cast-iron mortar and pestle used for grinding up small quantities of herbs and spices, like peppercorns, coriander seeds, and the fennel seeds in Tofu Taco Bowls. This device works a lot better for this job because the bottom of the top piece (the metal piece on the right in the picture) is textured, so it grabs onto the spices and makes short work of them without having to hunt and peck like in a regular mortar and pestle.

My latest addition is the piece de resistance though. This Männkitchen Pepper Cannon was my Father's Day gift from the fam, led my Dylan, who rightly swears by this thing. Ed, who signed on for one of these when it was still being funded through a Kickstarter campaign, had already sent me the link not once but twice. So, I was very happy to see the fancy box the Pepper Cannon was packed in and knew immediately what it was.

It's worth heading over to the Männkitchen website to read the description for yourself, but this will give you the general idea: "The Pepper Cannon produces extravagant quantities of fresh ground pepper. Decrease the coarseness and crank less if you can’t handle the full power." Not only does this thing look a little like Darth Vader, it even talks like him!

 

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Sparking joy, episode IV

One of my latest dives into the psychological literature was Chatter, a 2021 book by Ethan Kross, a professor in the University of Michigan’s psychology department and its business school. To quote the subtitle, the book is about "the voice in our head, why it matters, and how to harness it." Throughout the book, Kross offers a variety of tools we can use to harness the voice in our head instead of letting it derail us. I've discussed some of the tools before, including getting out in nature and using "distanced self-talk," that is, talking to yourself in the second ("you") or third person ("Paul") to gain some psychological distance from your problems.

 

I'm happy to say that Kross also reports that there is a scientific basis for the joy sparkage that comes from some Marie Kondo-style decluttering. Researchers have found that ordering our surroundings creates "perceptions of control—the belief that we possess the ability to impact the world in ways we desire"—which ends up having all sorts of psychological benefits, including improved physical health and emotional well-being, better performance at work and school, and more satisfying interpersonal relationships. Wow, all that just from cleaning up your desk or getting the excess crap off the dump-zone surfaces in your house.

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The intersection of psychology and soccer

There is a classic, and brilliantly ironic, study on what sounds like a dry academic topic—situational variables on helpful behavior—called "From Jerusalem to Jericho" (Darley and Batson, 1973). The paper takes its name from the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), in which Jesus tells a legal expert (!) of a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho who is beaten by robbers and left half dead by the side of the road. The poor man is passed by two others, one of them a priest, who cross the road to avoid him, before the Samaritan finally stumbles on the man, bandages his wounds, puts him on his own donkey, and brings him to an inn to take care of him. The moral of the story is that if you "love your neighbor as yourself ..., you will live."

In the study, the wonderfully inventive psychologists John Darley and Dan Batson asked students at the Princeton Theological Seminary to prepare a talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan. The students were then instructed to walk through an alleyway to another building to give the talk. But Darley and Batson planted a confederate to act as a "slumped victim" in the alley between the two buildings. The situational variable they introduced was the amount of time the students had to travel from one building to the other to give the speech. Some of the students were told they had plenty of time before the talk was to begin, while others were told they'd "better get moving" because they were already late. When the students walked by the slumped victim, he made a real show of it, coughing twice and groaning in obvious discomfort. In the low-hurry condition, 63% of the students stopped to help the victim, while only 10% of high-hurry participants stopped. The irony is delicious: only 1 in 10 seminary students gave assistance because they were in too much of a hurry to deliver a talk on how to "inherit eternal life" (Luke 10:25) by helping someone in need.*

 

Thirty years later, the study was replicated, with a new twist, by Mark Levine and other researchers, but this time using Manchester United fans rather than seminary students. In the ManU study, some of the participants filled out questionnaires "in which their identity as Manchester United fans has been made salient." Other participants were asked not about ManU specifically but their love of soccer generally. All of the participants were then told to walk to another building to watch a video. Each of the participants sees a "choreographed accident" in which a confederate jogging by "falls over and shouts out in pain." In this study, the second variable is not time, but the victim's attire: some of the victims are wearing a ManU jersey, while others are wearing the jersey of ManU's hated rival Liverpool FC. In the first condition, where the participants were primed on their ManU "tribalism," over 90% of the participants stopped to help the jogger wearing a ManU jersey, while only 30% stopped if the jogger had on a Liverpool jersey. In the second condition, where the participants were primed to think of themselves as football fans generally, the participants stopped to help the joggers in almost equal numbers. Interestingly, in the second condition, ManU fans only helped about 20% of injured joggers who were wearing plain shirts, leading the researchers to conclude that "shared category membership is important for helping others." And, from my perspective, both studies help show what devious SOBs research psychologists can be, and how much more fun their jobs must be than mine.

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*I've read about the Good Samaritan study a number of times. People always comment on the very statistically significant difference between the high- and low-hurry conditions. But I've never seen anyone talk about the also troubling fact that even in the low-hurry condition more than a third of the seminary students, who knew the theological and spiritual significance of the parable of the Good Samaritan even without having just prepared a talk about it, didn't stop to help.

 

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The request hour, episode VII

Upon urging Dylan to try the Celery Salad with Almonds, Dates, and Parmesan (which I told him is "one of my favorite dishes ever"), I was surprised to discover that Dylan "loves" celery. Dylan told me that he sometimes ups the celery ratio in the mirepoix because he likes the flavor to come through. Dylan also said that he likes celery in tuna salad, which reminded him to put in a request for an easy tuna salad recipe. You know I love a good request!

Coincidentally, I had just discovered Alison Roman's A Newletter through a New Yorker article about Substack ("Is Substack the Media Future We Want?"). The author described Roman's newsletter as containing "recipes and breezy, bossy, self-deprecating anecdotes," which sounded entertaining so I started exploring. It's $5 per month for full access, but many of the issues are available for free, including the first one, which had this recipe for a good-looking tuna salad.

 

What is ... the only thing Nureyev and Joe Schultz had in common?

During Mom and Cassie's legendary trip to the DMV, I clued Mom in to the lifelong bit of knowledge I first learned from Joe Schultz, manager of the now-defunct Seattle Pilots baseball franchise, via one of my all-time favorite books, Ball Four by Jim Bouton. That little tidbit is that, if you're going to be uttering them both anyway, it is much more effective and pleasurable to use "shit" and "fuck" as one word, in all of their possible combinations, than it is to keep them separate. This was recently confirmed for me while reading Alex Trebek's The Answer Is ... Reflections on My Life (2020).

 

One of the anecdotes Trebek recounted in the book (which is very entertaining and a must-read for Jeopardy! fans) concerned a time when he was in the wings with the young ballerinas of the Canadian Ballet (which Trebek introduced while he was working for the Canadian Broadcasting Company long before becoming the Jeopardy! host), with which the famous Soviet ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev was performing. Trebek and the ballerinas were studying Nureyev carefully, "all of us marveling at his grace and athleticism as he pirouetted effortlessly around the stage." But then, when Nureyev got closer to Trebek and the ballerinas, they could hear him muttering, with each spin, loud enough for them but not the audience to hear, "Fuck shit! Fuck shit! Fuck shit! Fuck shit!" They were all shocked by it,* but it just makes me sad. Imagine going your whole life saying "Fuck shit!" over and over and over again, thereby denying yourself the deep satisfaction of using a single blended word and, more importantly, switching effortlessly between "fuckshit" and "shitfuck." I guess Nureyev wasn't a baseball fan.

 

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* More shocking to me for some reason was "Revelation #1" on page 4 of The Answer Is ...: "Alex Trebek swears."

 

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Redundancy

Mom and I have enjoyed our empty nest for all of eight days since the pandemic hit in March, which was the total amount of time that JMU was able to hold onto Brad once school started in the fall. After Brad and Cass left the house for a few weeks, the first meal I made was a new tuna pasta (the fourth), with a new microwave chocolate mug cake (the fourth) for dessert. You are now undoubtedly thinking, what's with the old man, does he really need four recipes for tuna pasta and four recipes for microwave chocolate mug cake (not to mention the 4.5 recipes for banana bread)?

 

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Minionship

Poor Brad and Cass. Neither of them has come up with an internship for the summer, so Mom is now threatening to make them do a "minionship" with her instead. As in, Brad and Cass would be Mama Gru's minions at her beck and call while they're home from school next summer. If that's not enough to get you out looking for a summer job, nothing is.



(Did you catch the reference to tighty-whities in the trailer?)

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Foodie calls

I'm sure you've all heard of a booty call, but have you ever heard of a foodie call? That's when a woman* pretends to be interested in a guy to take advantage of the traditional idea that a man should pay for a woman's meal on the first date. A 2017 New York Post article ("Beware of 'foodie call' dates who are just in it for a free meal") reported that a whopping 44% of the young women surveyed had "swiped right on a date 'because why not; it’s a free meal'—even if they weren't attracted to the" guy. A larger and more scientific inquiry published in June 2019 in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science ("Foodie Calls: When Women Date Men for a Free Meal (Rather Than a Relationship)") found that about a third of the women studied had engaged in a foodie call. But of the women who had done so, they averaged between 5 and 6 foodie calls each, with one woman—the Babe Ruth of foodie calls—having gone on no less than 55 such dates! I wonder if she ever has to go to the grocery at all? You'd think word would get around in the dating community.

In order to justify someone funding the study, and including the results in a scientific journal on personality science, the researchers also measured where the participants fell on the so-called "dark triad" of personality traits: Machiavellianism (being more likely to manipulate and deceive); psychopathy (lacking remorse); and narcissism (everyone knows what this means since 2016). Not surprisingly, more Machiavellian women were more likely to go on foodie calls. There was no correlation with psychopathy or narcissism.

The not-so-obvious lesson I draw from this study is to do what you love. Imagine how much funner my life would have been if instead of being a boring contract lawyer (yawn), I'd have put my psychology degree to better use and gotten someone to pay me for studying interesting things like foodie calls. Where do I sign up for that job?

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*I say woman here not to be a chauvinistic asshole, but because the phenomenon has been reported on and studied almost exclusively when it's a man paying for a woman's dinner.

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Greatest Hits, volume III

Brad's birthday always reminds me of the anniversary of starting UaKS, since the very first episode was Brad's request for Uncle Clint's Mac & Cheese for his birthday dinner. After three years of doing this, I decided it was ridiculous to have a blog called "Use a Kitchen Scale" and not have a page where it was convenient to look up the weights of some of the most common baking and cooking ingredients. So there it is up there ↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑ in the cross-column between "Equipment" and "Ingredients." I still have some things to fill in, but it's getting there.

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As is now traditional, here is the list of some of my favorite episodes from the past year of UaKS:

• Life lessons from my children
• Mr. Drive By: the dud parent strikes again
• The past tense of shit
• Comic interlude: Mom goes wild
• The dud avatar
• Holy @#$%ing shit!
• Hairless from the waist up
• One of a kind
• The empty nest
• The marriage test
• 200th episode extravanza

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This is something none of you may ever make, but it's incredibly easy and Mom and I have been enjoying it for about 30 years. It goes great with the Rice Pilaf.

Shrimp Scampi

Adapted from The New York Times 60-Minute Gourmet (1979) by Pierre Franey

1 pound large (at least 21–25) shrimp, peeled and deveined
¼ cup (53 grams) extra-virgin olive oil
2 medium cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley leaves
1 tablespoon fine bread crumbs, freshly ground if possible (gluten-free bread is fine)
¼ teaspoon dried oregano
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
⅛ teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
a few grinds of black pepper

    1. Place a rack on the top rung of the oven, about 3 to 4 inches from the broiler element. Heat the broiler to high.
    2. Rinse the shrimp, drain well, and pat dry with paper towels. Place the shrimp in a medium bowl. Add the rest of the ingredients, and toss well to coat evenly.
    3. Scrape the shrimp into a baking pan just large enough to fit them in a single layer. (You can line the pan with foil if you like.) Broil until cooked through but not rubbery, about 5 to 6 minutes. Serve promptly with Rice Pilaf. Serves 2 (recipe can be doubled).

Making amends

After all the grief I've given Cassie recently for telling me I have a bald spot (allegedly), I had my own lapse this week when I ran over her foot with my car. My bad for sure, but if you're old enough to have a bald spot (allegedly), you're old enough not to realize when someone is still getting their bassoon out of your car. Fortunately, Cassie wasn't hurt at all, and now I know to put my car in park when I'm dropping Brad and Cass off at school in the morning.

So I may not be making much broccoli pasta any more, but Cassie did get one of her favorite meals as a goodwill gesture.

Salmon with Hoisin Barbecue Glaze

Adapted from The Cook's Illustrated Cookbook (2011)

Time: ~30 minutes

Glaze
35 grams (2 tablespoons) ketchup
30 grams (2 tablespoons) hoisin sauce
30 grams (2 tablespoons) rice vinegar
25 grams (2 tablespoons) light brown sugar
17 grams (1 tablespoon) tamari or soy sauce
13 grams (1 tablespoon) toasted sesame oil
10 grams (2 teaspoons) chili-garlic sauce such as Huy Fong (substitute sriracha or sambal oelek)
1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger

Salmon
1 teaspoon light brown sugar
½ teaspoon kosher salt
¼ teaspoon cornstarch
1½ to 2 pounds salmon, cut into 4 fillets of about the same size
freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon oil

    1. For the glaze: Weigh or measure the ingredients into a small saucepan (which you hopefully own a cover for). Whisk everything together, then place the pan over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer until thickened, about 3 minutes. Remove from the heat, cover, and set aside until step 4.
    2. For the salmon: Heat the oven to 300 degrees. Combine the brown sugar, kosher salt, and cornstarch in a ramekin or small bowl. Pat the salmon dry with paper towels and remove any pin bones. Place the salmon flesh side up. Grind some pepper over the top, then sprinkle the brown sugar mixture evenly over the top. You may not use it all. Rub the mixture gently into the flesh.
    3. Heat the oil in a 12-inch ovensafe nonstick skillet over medium-high heat until shimmering. Place the salmon in the skillet flesh side down, and cook until well browned, about 2 minutes. Use kitchen tongs to flip the salmon over, then cook it on the skin side for another minute.
    4. Remove the skillet from the heat and spoon or pour the glaze evenly over the salmon. Place the skillet in the oven and bake until the salmon is just set and still translucent in the very center, about 7 to 10 minutes depending on the thickness of the fillets. You can take a peek using a paring knife. The flesh should be firm, not flimsy, but it should not flake apart—that's overdone and the fish will be rubbery. You can also check doneness with an instant-read thermometer if you have one. The middle of the thickest part of a fillet should register 125 degrees when the salmon is done. Serve immediately with white or brown rice, which is tasty with some of the glaze spooned over it. Serves 4.