98 | Olga Khazan on Living and Flourishing While Being Weird

Each of us is different, in some way or another, from every other person. But some are more different than others — and the rest of the world never stops letting them know. Societies set up “norms” that define what constitute acceptable standards of behavior, appearance, and even belief. But there will always be those who find themselves, intentionally or not, in violation of those norms — people who we might label “weird.” Olga Khazan was weird in one particular way, growing up in a Russian immigrant family in the middle of Texas. Now as an established writer, she has been exploring what it means to be weird, and the senses in which that quality can both harm you and provide you with hidden advantages.

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Olga Khazan is a staff writer for The Atlantic, covering health, gender, and science. She has previously written for the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Forbes, and other publications. Among her awards are the National Headliner Awards for Magazine Online Writing. Her new book is Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World.

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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. And today, we’re going to dive once again into the waters of psychology. Our guest is Olga Khazan, who’s written a new book called Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World. In other words, we’re talking about what it means to be weird. And we’re not defining the word weird to mean some weird thing; what we really mean in everyday life when we just say someone is weird, “That person’s normal. This one over here is a little bit weird.” So what do we mean by that? What are the conditions under which we would classify someone as weird? Why do we do that? There’s a sociology problem, not just a psychology question here. Why do societies choose to label certain people as weird, and other people to be normal? The word normal reflects on the fact that we’re obeying norms every society comes up with. It invents rules that you’re supposed to follow, and if you don’t follow those rules, or not just rules, but expectations, then you are labeled weird.

0:01:02 SC: Now, there’s questions for the person who is being weird also. There are different ways to be weird. Sometimes, it has nothing to do with things you can control, like you’re a foreigner in a strange country. Sometimes, it might be your personality or your choice of hobbies or work or whatever. There’s very clear ways, backed up by psychological studies, that show you how society punishes you for being weird, how it ostracizes you, tries to slow you down, but as Olga argues, there’s also benefits to being weird. There’s a certain kind of creativity, a kind of new perspective on the world that you can get from standing a little bit outside the norms. So this is a very fun and insightful conversation that probably everyone can relate to, because it’s not that people are weird, it’s the different parts of every individual person may have some weirdness attached to them.

0:01:51 SC: Remember, we have a Patreon that you can support Mindscape with, patreon.com/seanmcarroll. And remember also, I’m doing a video series called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. We tackle a lot of, just very informally, ideas from physics and math and philosophy and so forth that help us understand the universe that we are in. It’s a real video, it’s not just the talky-talky stuff we do here on Mindscape, which is audio-only. You can actually see me writing on a little pad, and you can see the little diagrams that I draw, and you can think, “Boy, that guy is not very good at drawing diagrams, but the ideas are kind of interesting.” So with that, let’s go.

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0:02:48 SC: Olga Khazan, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:02:50 Olga Khazan: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me on.

0:02:52 SC: So you’ve written a book about weirdness, being weird, what it means, what you can do about it. And as someone who’s written books myself, I know that this is just asking for trouble because unlike the Higgs boson or quantum gravity, weirdness is something where everyone in the world is going to have a pre-existing opinion. So what induced you to take on this crazy task?

0:03:16 OK: Yeah, yeah, so I agree that it could be everything and nothing. So what prompted this is that I had an unusual upbringing. I grew up as an immigrant, a Russian immigrant, in West Texas, and though I’m not currently “weird,” I live in DC and there’s a ton of foreigners and immigrants here. I really… That experience stayed with me and I became obsessed with this idea of difference and what it means to be different. And yeah, I just sort of really wanted to dig into the science behind conformity, non-conformity, why we dislike outsiders and what it’s like to be just completely different from everyone else around you, and how that affects your psyche. So I started reaching out to people who kind of personified that feeling.

0:04:17 SC: Yeah, obviously, there’s sort of many different dimensions along which one could qualify as weird. Probably, everyone thinks that they’re a little bit weird compared to other people. So do you have a special angle on what you mean by weird? How do you define it?

0:04:32 OK: Yeah, totally. So the way that I defined weird for the purposes of this book is someone who is different from everyone else around them in whatever context they’re in. So for the most part, this was looking for people, reaching out to people who were, say, a male in an overwhelmingly female profession, or a female in an overwhelmingly male profession. Or a liberal in an extremely conservative environment, or vice versa. And basically, reaching out to them and being like, “Hey, what’s it like to be you?” And yeah, so it’s not necessarily people who walking down the street, you’d be like, “That person, they’re weird.” It’s people who are, by the definition of what they’re doing or where they’re living, are different from other people.

0:05:27 SC: How subjective is it? If one person is weird because they’re the only male in a women-dominated job, for example, if the same person were in a male job, then suddenly, they wouldn’t be weird. So weirdness is sort of a relationship question between a person and their environment. Is that fair to say?

0:05:45 OK: Yes, totally, yeah. So you’re not going to be… Yeah, weirdness takes other people. So my favorite example of this is, so being Olga in West Texas made me super weird, my name, in particular. But Olga is actually a really, really common Russian name. So I went to Russia randomly a few years ago, and I was sitting on a train, and just randomly sitting next to me on this train was another woman with my same exact first and middle name, in Russia you use your first and middle name. So, because it’s just super duper common, I have a very common Russian name and, I don’t know, it was just so disorienting because I had always been used to explaining my name and where I’m from and what I’m doing here and all that stuff. And I was just very like, “Oh, yeah, I’m just another Olga. Here I am.” So yeah, so that’s what I mean by weird, is like obviously being an Olga in Russia was not weird.

0:06:51 SC: But it’s not only a mismatch between yourself and what the rest of the world expects, it’s also different things we can emphasize. Your name is kind of important, your gender, your political or religious views in different contexts. Whereas, maybe, I don’t know, hair color or height are less completely dramatic, unless you’re super weird in hair color or height. So it comes into not just how we’re different, but what the rest of the world cares about, right?

0:07:20 OK: Yeah, totally, yeah. It’s totally up to how other people perceive you. And it’s funny that you mentioned height. So yeah, hair color, you could dye your hair. But if you think about height, so one of the first people that is introduced in the book is a guy who is of short stature. He has dwarfism.

0:07:42 SC: As soon as I said that, I realized that was a bad example, because that was one of the things you talk about a lot in the book, actually. Sorry about that.

0:07:49 OK: No, no, it’s okay, but, yeah… And you would think like, “Oh, that’s not a big deal. Whatever. We have actors with dwarfism, Peter Dinklage and so forth.” But he actually had a really, really rough time breaking into medicine because of that. There was a time when you just could not become a doctor if you weren’t tall. So, I mean, that just gives you a sense of like, yeah, this stuff definitely still matters.

0:08:15 SC: Well, and the world, we take the world for granted in various ways, the world of human interaction and employment and so forth. But the world is made for non-weird people. If you’re a doctor that is too short to reach the operating table, there’s nothing about the height of the operating table that is set by the laws of nature, but it makes your life hard.

0:08:35 OK: Yeah, totally. Well, that story in particular was so strange to me because the stuff that was told to this guy, Michael Ain, it was like, “Oh, people want… ” It was all about… It wasn’t even… So he stands on a step stool to reach the operating table. It’s not like an incredible accommodation that he needs. He just stands on a stool. But the thing that people would always, like the people rejecting him from medical school, were always telling him, was like, “People want doctors in long white coats. They want authoritative-looking doctors who they can trust, and a short man is just not authoritative.” And it’s like so incredible that it’s not even that they were worried that he couldn’t hold the scalpel or whatever, they were just worried that doctors or that patients wouldn’t take him seriously because he wasn’t like what you imagined a doctor in your mind to be like.

0:09:33 SC: Yeah, I always in these interviews try to play the devil’s advocate a little bit, even when I’m on the other person’s side, so I don’t agree with this at all, but isn’t there an argument to be made for that perspective? I mean, part of the doctor’s job is to be a reassuring authority figure. Is being tall and dignified-looking arguably part of the job? Is your weirdness truly a hindrance there?

0:10:01 OK: Yeah, so that’s definitely… You see that argument a lot in workplaces. Whenever we go on a job interview, what are people looking for is a cultural fit, and that basically means someone who talks the way everyone who already works at the company talks and acts the way everyone who already works at the company acts. And it often excludes people who are either neuro-atypical, or who are just atypical or who don’t already have that inside speak hook-up that the company is looking for. So, yeah, of course, this is the big problem of the book, is that we like people to be normal. We like normalcy. Humans are a normal creature. We form tribes. We like other people who look like us, act like us. We like rule-followers and when things don’t follow the rules, it’s unnerving and disconcerting to us. And so I’m writing about what it’s like for those people who break the rules and why we should maybe rethink the fact that we like everything to be normal.

0:11:15 SC: But it’s also true that things are complicated, right? That’s another lesson of your book is that the whole thing is very complicated. And when we look at stories in novels or movies or whatever, it’s the weird little underdog that we’re rooting for, right? It’s not the perfect fit-in person that we’re rooting for. I think that we all probably like to think that we are pro-weird, but maybe we exaggerate the extent to which that’s operationally actually the case.

0:11:44 OK: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think that you’re totally right. I think most people would say, “Of course, I’m open to whatever. I don’t need normalcy in my life.” But then if you think about your real, your revealed preferences are for normalcy, right? I don’t know, I think you’re correct that we all like to think that we root for the underdog, but that we don’t actually. And I think a big part of those underdog stories is the way that the story is told, is that it puts the underdog at the center. It makes them the protagonist and tries to establish a bunch of commonalities between the underdog and the viewer. But if you look at something like Anna Karenina, she was an underdog who killed herself ’cause she didn’t fit in. So like… It’s not every underdog story that has a happy ending. [chuckle]

0:12:36 SC: That is true. Okay, maybe we can go… One of the things you do in the book is you do go into the details of some of the psychology studies that have been done about these issues, and so forth. And one of the things that hit home very powerfully is how much the idea of weirdness is set by social norm. So it’s not just that it’s the weird person in the outside world, but the outside world is a community of people working together to invent these ideas of what counts as normal and what counts as weird. Maybe you want to say something about that, or we can skip right to the example of clothes and bathing suits and nudity and so forth.

0:13:14 OK: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. Okay, so I can talk more broadly about this and then I can end on bathing suits.

0:13:21 SC: Yeah.

0:13:21 OK: How’s that? So, yeah. So what we think of as normal is determined by this concept in sociology called tightness and looseness. And basically if you think about… I don’t know how many people have seen that new Netflix show, Unorthodox, about the Hasidic Jews. That’s a very tight culture. It has a ton of rules. There’s a rule for how you dress, there is a rule for how you behave, there’s rules for how you get married, there’s rules for how you dance at the wedding. Everything is very tightly determined by rules, and those societies have established those rules ’cause they’re very worried about extinction. They’re very concerned about perpetuating their society, everyone has to work together in this very tight way in order to keep it going.

0:14:09 OK: Now, on the opposite end, you have Burning Man, right? You have a totally loose society, it has no rules. Everyone bring whatever art project you want, you can do drugs, you can be naked, you can like, whatever, roll around on a four-wheeler. It’s completely anything goes. These are very loose societies that don’t… Usually these societies, you don’t see them as obsessed with perpetuating themselves. So like Burning Man is literally time-delimited. At a certain point, they just go home.

0:14:45 SC: Yeah.

0:14:46 OK: But also if you look at a real example, the Unitarian Universalists are a really good example of this. They have… Their adherence rate is basically stagnant. They’ve not really grown at all in over the course of more than a century. And part of that is that it’s not a very rule-based religion. My boyfriend’s a Unitarian Universalist and you don’t really have to do anything in that religion. You don’t have to go to church, you don’t have to like pray to God, there’s no set thing that you really do. And so people just don’t do it and it’s kind of like petered out.

0:15:25 OK: So the part of the book where I write about bathing suits is just like an illustration of how bizarre the norms of society can be where if you go to the pool or… The pool of my apartment building is two feet from the street where people are wearing clothes that cover their butts.

0:15:48 SC: Yep.

0:15:49 OK: But everyone at my pool of my apartment that is two feet away is showing off their ass and their cleavage. And it’s just completely letting it all hang out because we’ve decided that’s appropriate near water.

0:16:04 SC: ‘Cause they’re near water. Yeah.

0:16:06 OK: I don’t know, so I just thought it was a very interesting example of like… We have a ton of rules in our society that we follow, even if we don’t realize it.

0:16:13 SC: And you mentioned that bikinis typically don’t cover any more than underwear does but we’d be very embarrassed to be seen in our underwear, and yet the bikini, we actually, intentionally go out there.

0:16:24 SC: Right. Yeah, that was maybe, I don’t know, I maybe got a little too high on my own supply in that section, ’cause I was like… I’m so fascinated by the norms of swimming. But yeah, if you think about anything to do with bathing or nudity, or anything like that, that is a very… That whole space is just filled with norms.

0:16:47 SC: No, I think it’s actually a great example, because not only is it filled with norms but it’s the most arbitrary, right?

0:16:53 OK: Right.

0:16:53 SC: What you can wear. Any slight deviation from the uniform of whatever place you’re in, really, really gets noticed. And I’m sure in all sorts of ways gets enforced.

0:17:05 OK: Yeah, totally. Well, and another good example of this is like… Yeah, so most bathing suits for women, or at least for most of my childhood and teenage years were two pieces. That was the most common. You wore a little bikini bottom and a little top. But for a while I went to a evangelical youth group at a church, and they were going to take us to a water park. But their rule was that you had to wear a one-piece so that it would cover your belly button. And I don’t know, it’s just… It was such an interesting example of like, “Okay, we’re okay with all of this. You can show all of this skin but the belly button, like, please, for God’s sake cover it. It’s too sexy.” You know what I mean? I sort of get where they’re coming from, but it’s also, I don’t know. To me, that was such an interesting reminder of how many, how we try to create this, create these rules on the fly, and they’re sometimes really strange. [chuckle]

0:18:08 SC: The female belly button, at least. The male belly button apparently has no sexual connotations, I guess.

0:18:13 OK: Right. Yeah, totally, but the female one, yeah, God forbid. [chuckle]

0:18:16 SC: But this was also, I don’t know if you know, but the TV show, I Dream of Jeannie, had a rule that they were never allowed to show Barbara Eden’s navel. That was a no no. Elaborate costuming went to do that.

0:18:29 OK: Right. But the rest of her outfit is kind of sexy, right?

0:18:31 SC: Oh, yeah.

0:18:33 OK: I don’t think the navel would have… I actually didn’t know that but I don’t feel like the navel would have been that memorable.

0:18:38 SC: No, the whole point was, though, she was supposed to be kind of sexy and… But that was judged to be too far. But we should mention a little bit more about the tight and loose distinction, because I actually had Michele Gelfand on as a previous guest on the podcast.

0:18:52 OK: Oh, yeah.

0:18:53 SC: So the most devoted listeners know all about tight and loose societies, and it’s not that one is good and one is bad, right? This is part of Michele’s point, it’s not that you should be tight or you should be loose. There’s benefits and disadvantages to either and in either there’s just different standards about the extent to which you’d better be following these norms.

0:19:14 OK: Yeah, totally. And I’m so glad you brought that up. Yeah, so I should say, tightness and looseness is totally Michele’s thing. She wrote a whole book about that and if you’re interested in that, you should check it out. And I just borrowed her brain for this part of the book. But yeah, so when it comes to tightness and looseness, there are advantages to living in a tight culture. How nice to know exactly what you’re supposed to do every day, and to never have to question whether you’re on the right track or whether you’re doing the right thing.

0:19:49 OK: If you’re going back to the Hasidic example, if you’re a Hasidic Jewish woman of my age, I would probably be a stay-at-home mom, I would have six or seven kids, I would kind of do the same thing every day, I would cook for my husband, I would follow all these certain procedures. And frankly, some days when I wake up and I’m like, I don’t know if I should email my agent, or pitch a story, or do a bunch of interviews, I have a lot of existential angst, ’cause my life is very free form, I don’t have any expectations on me, basically. And it has costs and benefits. I wouldn’t want to be a Hasidic Jewish woman, but I also acknowledge that there’s a downside to living a life where there’s literally no rule book or template for you to follow.

0:20:41 SC: Well, I think that’s exactly right. And I’m probably tending towards loose myself in my preference for where I would want to live, but I really do want to stand up for the positive aspect of a tight society. Look, we have modern society, humanity has invented a whole lot of problems that didn’t use to exist about anxiety, about the world, and how to find a job and things like that. And a lot of it is associated with the looseness of our society. And the idea of being in a tight group of people, whether it’s small or large, where you know exactly what the rules are, can make your life a lot easier in a lot of ways.

0:21:21 OK: Yeah, I think that’s such a good point. I do think that a lot of the angst that I hear and I used to, I don’t know, I occasionally mentor younger journalists coming up in the world, and I just hear this refrain of, “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to get started, I don’t know what I should be focusing on.” And it’s not like they don’t know… They literally want me to tell them, it’s almost like they do want me to tell them what to do. There are so many ways to make a good life for yourself now, these days, and that’s awesome, like who wouldn’t want that? There are so many paths available, but it’s almost like this paralysis of choice of like, “Well, which one should I do, which one will make me happiest? Which one is the best?” And I think that can be really disorienting.

0:22:14 SC: I remember the first time I shopped for a condo, and I had a wonderful, wonderful real estate agent, who showed me all these places, and he was very good at picking out the good aspects of a certain place and noticing the potential pitfalls. And then I would say, “Well, what do you think? Should I get it? And he’s like, “No, I’m not going to give any guidance about that.” And it was so frustrating, I wanted to be told. ‘Cause I had never done this before, it’s a huge choice.

0:22:36 OK: I know, yeah, yeah, we’re starting to think about house buying, and that’s going to be a whole other paralysis of choice.

0:22:44 SC: Well, and so, before I forget, I do want to have one silly sounding question. You mentioned Burning Man as a loose society, paradigmatically loose, ’cause you can be naked, and do drugs, and do art, but isn’t everyone at Burning Mano naked and doing drugs and doing art? If I walked around Burning Man in a three-piece suit, wouldn’t people look at me like I was weird?

0:23:08 OK: Right, right, right. If you really want to do a crazy art project at Burning Man, do you just wear a t-shirt and jeans and like?

0:23:14 SC: Yeah.

0:23:16 OK: Yeah, I mean, oh, that reminds me of like… Do you remember normcore, that style of dress?

0:23:23 SC: Oh, yeah, I’d like to think that I was before that even became popular, that I was really perfecting that.

0:23:30 OK: I think that’s so awesome, because people are like, “What’s the craziest thing I could wear? I know, a sweatshirt and jeans and sneakers.” And it’s like you’ve come full circle, crazy is normal anyway, but that’s a good example of what you’re saying. And a few sociologists told me that, as people in especially loose cultures look for more and more original things to do, or more weird or crazy ideas, you kind of converge on the same thing. So you see this with the Apple revolution, where first Apple was all about breaking free and not being 1984, and being an innovator, and now it’s like who doesn’t have a freaking MacBook, which is great, they’re great MacBooks. But you’re not being different by using a MacBook…

0:24:23 SC: No, that’s right.

0:24:24 OK: You’re just like everyone else. [chuckle]

0:24:26 SC: And you dived briefly into the physiology of this, you talk about how there is a gene that helps control your dopamine receptors, D4. And it’s not that it makes you… If I understood what you’re saying correctly, it’s not that it makes you act one way or the other, but it just affects how much you follow whatever the norms are, whatever the society around you is telling you to do.

0:24:52 OK: Yeah, I still think that most of this, most of what determines whether you’re a norm-breaker or not is going to be based on how you’re raised, and your own personal kind of biology in your childhood home and also where you grow up. But there is sort of this early research that suggests that how much we uphold norms is related to the variation we have on one gene called the dopamine, D4 receptor gene. And it basically just influences how much we endorse the values of our culture.

0:25:31 OK: So European Americans who carried this gene might become more individualistic and sort of pull yourself up by your own boot straps, kind of traditionally American norm. But a Asian who carried a variation of this gene might become more interdependent, which is a more like Asian value of more communitarian. So it doesn’t necessarily make you one way or the other, it just kind of makes you uphold whatever the values are of your environment more. But that’s just one, obviously one study, there are so many, it’s not like if you have this gene you’re destined to be a rule follower.

0:26:09 SC: No, no, we don’t want to be too reductive about the genes, that’s definitely a bad thing. But it does point to the fact that weirdness, even though the fact that you’re weird is subjective, in the sense that it is a relationship between you and the culture around you, whether or not you become weird might have something to do with your genetics, right?

0:26:31 OK: Yeah, totally. And there’s also some research that people with autism or borderline personality disorder actually have a hard time of interacting normally with society because they have trouble reading a social situation and fitting themselves into the norms of that environment. So there are all sorts of other mental health conditions and personality traits and things like that, that can interact with this and influence how willing to be weird you are.

0:27:08 SC: Yeah, and it is a fascinating thing that this… So I’m just being very obvious, so let me try to be a little bit more substantive. There’s the individual and where they come from, either through nature or nurture. And then there’s the society and how it treats weirdness, right? There are reasons from evolution and from biology why a society would want its members to be more or less rule following. Another podcast I did was with Nicholas Christakis who talked about mild in-group bias as one of the important socialization factors that makes a society work.

0:27:48 OK: Yeah, totally. So this is an area of debate, I should say. But yeah, so there is this idea that some anthropologists have that in our ancestral past, we did have this in-group bias, that we had kind of networks of alliances and we wanted… We liked people who were more like us than people who were different from us. And so, I used this example of the [0:28:16] ____, it’s too complicated to get into here. But essentially, that we sort of had this little clan that we stuck to, and we liked everyone to act the same way in this clan, and that’s sort of how we survive and thrive.

0:28:30 OK: Other anthropologists are not so sure about that. So by studying modern-day hunter-gatherers, they found that our alliances are often a little bit more loosey-goosey than that when we’re off in our natural state, that we would travel around and trade with people who live hundreds of miles away. You might live with one clan for a while and then switch over to another clan. There’s all these interesting reports from the 19th century of Aborigines in Australia who would find a beach whale, and then have a big party for all the other Aborigines, and be like, “Come, share our whale and have sex with us.” And like, let’s have a diet… [chuckle]

0:29:18 SC: We could have a party back there.

0:29:20 OK: Yeah, let’s have a big party. So that doesn’t seem like very stringent or obsessed with our own group or with other people who act like us. So that is like, it’s like a little bit unclear. What I will say, though, is that there’s a general agreement that when society became more xenophobic is right around when farming developed. Farming settled everyone down. There weren’t as many whale parties. There was more like plowing and tending fields and being more judicious about your resources, and what was yours and what was someone else’s. And you start have the development of social hierarchies. Some people had more, some people had less. The climate changed. You started to get money, and religion, and things like that. So it’s actually interesting that warfare has increased since that all started happening. So we think of farming and the development of civilization as being a good thing, but it’s actually, we didn’t really fight that many wars until we started having property to fight over.

0:30:36 SC: Did you ever think that this is what you would be talking about? If you imagined yourself 10 years ago, you’d be thinking about the origin of farming and what it meant for people getting along with each other? [chuckle]

0:30:46 OK: Yeah, yeah. I don’t know. I thought it was important in this book to go back and look at at the origins of why we dislike weirdos, since that was one of the questions that I was trying to answer.

0:31:03 SC: Yeah.

0:31:04 OK: I wanted to explore that.

0:31:06 SC: And it’s a pretty traumatic idea that you’re exploring here that because we tend to think that the way that we act in the world and sort of socially get along right now is more or less a law of nature. It couldn’t have been any other way. But you’re suggesting that even the simple fact that we have strong affinities for people in our group and tend to react negatively to people outside our group wasn’t necessarily always like that. It could have been different and there was some transition that was technologically driven 10,000 years ago that might have started it all off.

0:31:39 OK: Yeah, that’s the premise that a lot of these anthropologists have is that, essentially, when we started protecting our own land and our own property, that is when we started being really wary of other people coming and taking our stuff. If you look back at the beached whale example, you’re not going to have so many people flock to your beached whale that it becomes impossible to feed them all and you have to drive some of them away. There’s going to be plenty of resources to go around.

0:32:14 SC: Yeah.

0:32:15 OK: And you see that today, too, where in a lot of places, especially, in part of the book I write about, the rustbelt towns who attracted a lot of immigrants. And I think, that you see some of that scarcity mindset in some of those areas where the people there felt like the jobs are drying up, the kind of, the composition of the town is changing. I’m seeing a lot more people from Spanish-speaking countries and I’m made really uncomfortable by that. If there was plenty to go around for everyone and everything was a free-flowing, never-ending supply of whatever everyone wanted, be it jobs or security or positive good vibes about the future, I feel like people would be a lot more open to those outsiders.

0:33:09 SC: Well, and it feeds back into the tightness versus looseness distinction, right? When things are going tough, when resources are scarce, societies tend to tighten up.

0:33:18 OK: Yeah, exactly, yeah. So, that’s one are the findings from Michele Gelfand is that when you… The kinds of emotions that bring forward a leader like Trump or any of these sort of populist kind of leaders are feelings like I’m not going to have enough for my own kind. I need everything to be super conformist and super homogenous for a while because I am really concerned about the future and I’m worried about my own kind getting enough stuff.

0:33:52 SC: Yeah, okay. So if we take this, a bunch of ideas here about what the idea of weirdness is, where it comes from, why it exists, the other major feature of your book is sort of talking about what is it good for and bad for, right? There are both positive and negative aspects of being weird. I was fascinated by the study that you mentioned, which apparently is famous, though I’d never heard of it, but the psychology department that decided to ostracize one of their members randomly from week to week, even though they knew it was happening? [chuckle]

0:34:25 OK: Yes. No, I totally… Yeah, I don’t know if it’s that famous. I just came across it in my research and thought it was a really poignant example.

0:34:33 SC: Makes me feel better.

0:34:33 OK: But this is the study of… So we think about like, so one thing I often hear is like, “Well, who cares about ostracism,” right? After high school, no one really cares about who gets invited to the prom or not and who is left out, but it actually still plays a really big part in our adult lives. I think people just don’t really talk about it that much. These professors decided to each ostracize one in their group on a given day. So they would pick a day and be like, this is your day for being ostracized. And so they were all in on it. So you would think that they wouldn’t be that upset by the ostracism, so they would decide not to talk to that professor that day or just to totally ignore them, but even though they knew that it was happening, even though they were all in on it, they actually still were really distressed by what was happening.

0:35:28 OK: They wrote that they felt like a ghost on the floor. They were really desperate for human interaction and it just speaks to how troubling ostracism can be for us, even if we know that it’s happening and even if we are aware that it’s just part of an experiment. So think about how distressing it would be if you didn’t know why it was happening and it wasn’t part of an experiment. [chuckle]

0:35:55 SC: Maybe this is worth digging into a little bit more. I think probably that psychology study is an especially vivid example, but probably most people are on board with the idea that being ostracized makes you feel bad. How close is the connection with being weird and being ostracized? There’s sort of different levels of weirdness, I suppose?

0:36:14 OK: Yeah, totally. So not everyone is going to… Obviously, some types of difference in our society are more pronounced and more looks down upon than others. So you think about the history of prejudice and obviously that was a lot more extreme than what the female NASCAR driver that I followed was experiencing, which is just like some low level of sexism, occasionally. So there’s differences and degrees. So I’m not trying to say everyone who’s different experiences it the exact same way. But you do find that the whole reason why people feel ostracized or looked down on or discriminated against is because these humans are a group that really values normalcy and consistency and rule-following, and when people break those perceived rules, it’s really troubling and we find it really distressing and we tend to kind of push away those people who violate our rules.

0:37:22 SC: There is sort of… There are layers, I guess, of weirdness. I was trying to think in my mind being a transgender person is one kind of way you could be weird which would lead to certain reactions from other people, being really into role-playing games or something like that. It’s a different way of being weird or just being super introverted as being weird. Is there… Are there studies of commonalities in the way that these groups get ostracized and how they cope with them or is it just you should think of it as a case-by-case basis?

0:37:55 OK: Yeah, so there’s definitely studies. The studies tend to be of particular groups of people. So I’m trying to think in my book, it was… Like there are studies of gay and lesbian and bisexual people, for example. So there’s a study finding that gay, lesbian and bisexual people who experience homophobic language get more headaches and chronic diseases, and they are in worse overall health. And there are studies of trans-people and how the lack of access to trans… To a gender-affirming bathroom affects trans-people’s mental health. So the studies that tend to be done are not like, “Hey, let’s take everyone who’s different and study them.”

0:38:47 OK: They tend to be on sub groups of people. But what I’m talking about when I talk about these broader emotions of feeling pain or ostracism, I’m talking about clinical studies where they bring in people regardless of who they are and ostracize some of them and make them feel bad and then, it’s not looking at like, “Oh, were you a female engineer before you came into the lab?” You know what I mean? They aren’t necessarily trying to find people who are different to start with.

0:39:20 SC: So the studies artificially ostracize people and then see what the effects are.

0:39:24 OK: Yeah, and sometimes the effects are good. So one of the studies that I talk about in the book is one where they ostracize someone in the group and they found that it actually led them to be more creative and to really boost their creativity. But again, that was an artificial form of ostracism. The people who ran that study brought in the volunteers and then they were like, “You four are not picked to work with the group. You go away.” And that actually caused them to be more creative. But it wasn’t like, they didn’t ostracize the four trans people. They just ostracized four random people, if that makes sense. So you can artificially create this situation, but if you think about it, that’s the feeling that a lot of people who are visibly different in some way or noticeably different in some way deal with every day.

0:40:15 SC: Well, right, it brings up the question of what are the coping strategies? You have a wonderful discussion in your book about there’s a coping strategy which is to sort of find your own people, to find people with whom you’re not weird, but there’s a different coping strategy, which is to sort of flaunt your weirdness in a different way.

0:40:33 OK: Yeah. So there’s different ways to approach this and not all of them are going to work for every single person. So getting support is the most obvious way and that’s a way that a lot of people dealt with it is they basically got a group to rally around them, whether it was their family or friends. But some other people would just get really comfortable being uncomfortable. So one woman that I interviewed, Asma, who’s this Muslim woman who grew up in a small southern town, she would sort of just be really proud to be different, even though she was different from all the Evangelical Christians she grew up around. She had this motto that was like, “Everywhere I am is a good time.” So if she wasn’t drinking or if she wasn’t participating in Christmas parades or whatever else, she was still confident in how different she was, which I thought was kind of cool. It definitely takes a lot of gusto to be that way.

0:41:38 SC: Well, yeah, I was going to say just like it’s easy to understand that groups tend to look warily at outsiders, I think that our first reaction is that it’s hard being thought of as weird all the time, at being different. At the very least it sounds exhausting kind of psychically.

0:42:00 OK: Yeah, and that’s really, I did a Reddit IAMA yesterday. And that’s really what came through is that a lot of folks, actually, I did not, so the book is not out yet, so that people have not read it, but a lot of people, a lot of trans people did write in and say, “I feel different at work. I’m worried about my career, how my career will be affected by being trans. Do you have any advice for trans people?” So I do think that even though we’ve grown more accepting as a society, thankfully, a lot of folks still have to deal with the distress of like, “How will my difference, my visible difference, affect me? How will people see me differently once they realize that I’m not exactly like them?”

0:42:54 SC: Yeah, and I presume that there’s different personality types that deal better with this automatically. But the example you mentioned of the woman who enjoys being weird in different situations, probably again, we all feel that way a little bit. We don’t want to be exactly cookie cutter like everybody else, but it is just a path of lesser resistance to fit in with the wider group.

0:43:17 OK: Right, exactly, yeah. I think there was one thing I mentioned in my book is there’s this optimal level of weirdness. So most people like to be not 100% with the in-crowd, but also not so different that it’s bizarre. So if you think about indie music, it’s a really good example of this. Indie music is not that indie. It’s like I think the most popular genre of music. But people really like it because it feels indie or it feels like you’re not part of the mainstream rock which has completely got away and you’re not part of experimental electronica that is totally non-melodic. And the same with, like I think the largest group of voters are independents, which is another good example of this, where people are like, “I’m not part of this group or that group. I’m part of this other group that is itself a group.” So most of us like to be somewhere in the middle there between totally weird and totally in with a group.

0:44:22 SC: I mean, I guess that’s true. I was thinking about how exhausting and tiring it must be to not fit in, but at the same time people really do like to feel that they’re not just following the group. I did a podcast with Ezra Klein on political polarization and he brings up the interesting fact that like you say, a huge number of Americans on a survey will say they are independents. They do not belong to any political party, but when you ask how they actually vote, they are not swing voters. There’s only a tiny fraction of these people that do not reliably vote either Republican or Democrat. They just be like being members of that independent group.

0:44:58 OK: Oh, totally, yeah. That’s so intoxicating to feel like we’re special snowflakes and we’re different in some way, even though we all kind of end up doing the same thing.

0:45:07 SC: So what do you think, is there advice to be given about what are good coping strategies if you find yourself in a slightly weird group? Should you move to a place where there are more people like you or does the ability of online communities help people find like-minded folks to hang around with and assure themselves that they’re not completely crazy?

0:45:31 OK: Yeah, so I do talk about some people who moved from California to McKinney so that they could be around like-minded conservatives. McKinney, Texas, sorry. And I thought that was a really interesting and extreme example of if you really get sick of being an oddball, you can always just go join your tribe wherever they are. But for the most part, one strategy that I really liked, that I thought was kind of a low-stakes kind of way to try this out is called idiosyncrasy credits, and it’s this idea that you can introduce weird ideas and strange kind of thoughts and concepts. You just have to kind of establish your normalcy first, you have to kind of prove that you can fit in first.

0:46:22 OK: So the way to do this is like, let’s say you start at a new job and you really want to introduce a crazy idea for an event, right, and the firm is really buttoned up and you don’t think that they’ll buy it. So one way to do it is just to like kind of go to your first, I don’t know, 10-20 meetings and be totally on board with everything, totally a yes man, conform as best you can with the low-stakes stuff. And then for your big kind of ask, the one that really matters, that’s where you can break out your non-conformity and be super… Bring out your weird idea and make your big unusual ask and people will already feel like, well, he’s so part of the group, he’s so in line with what we already want and he’s one of us, so why shouldn’t we consider this idea, because it’s being put forward by someone who we consider one of us, and like a great cultural fit, as they say in the workplace. So that’s one way if you really have just one big thing that you want to get across is just to play the part a little bit beforehand.

0:47:38 SC: Yeah, I really like this, actually, because as much as words like conformity and the establishment and so forth have a negative connotation, norms do serve a purpose. There are reasons why societies and social groups act in certain ways conventionally and not in others, and weirdness and non-conformity is also important, but this sort of mixed strategy, as a poker player would call it, of showing that you know what the rules are and understand them and respect them, but also occasionally want to break them sounds like a healthy way of going through the situation.

0:48:16 OK: Right. And I think this actually reminds me of something, my friend Derek Thompson wrote a book as well and one of his big findings was like people like things that are sort of the same as everything else, except slightly different. [chuckle] So it’s like a similar principle here, where you want to be hitting 90% of what everyone else is doing, but you want that 10% to be like your special flare that you bring to a situation. So that might be a good way to think about it, especially in places that really, where it really matters, like work.

0:48:50 SC: Yeah, I’m sure that there’s a physics way of thinking about this in terms of power laws and occasional deviations from standard expectations, but we won’t try to do that right now. Good, so there’s the job of the weird people for their own good, to survive and flourish and get through life. I guess we didn’t go into the online possibilities, like are you a fan of not just moving from one place to another, but finding your like-minded spiritual brethren online?

0:49:22 OK: Yeah, I really don’t do that. I don’t spend a lot of time online with other people, I don’t know why that is, I just really prefer, if I’m going to hang out with people, I prefer to do it in person, but I think a lot of people really do get a lot of solace from that and really enjoy online communities and online gaming and things like that. I just personally can’t speak to that, because I don’t do it, but obviously, that’s a huge community. At that point, though, I would question like, like whether you really feel different, because you obviously are then part of a big community, and some people that community is bigger for them than what’s going on in their real life. So I would say that’s great, that’s a great way of community building, but I would say that person probably is not struggling with some of the situations that I’m bringing up in my book.

0:50:23 SC: Yeah, okay, so then the flip side of this is, this is the individual who’s a little bit weird, learning coping strategies, either finding like-minded souls or deploying their weirdness at strategic moments. The other side is the community making use of weirdness. Like you already mentioned creativity as something that might come out of being a little bit weird, maybe say more about how those two things are related.

0:50:50 OK: Yeah, there’s a pretty vast body of scientific research showing that as you add dissenting voices to a group, they actually, the group makes better decisions. There was a famous Solomon Asch study or variations on the Solomon Asch study that showed this, that essentially in order to make a good decision you need people who don’t all agree perfectly, because if you’re all agreeing perfectly, you’re too pointed in the direction where you have this inescapable momentum and that’s how you get things like Enron or whatever the other famous examples of groupthink are where you have people who are just getting carried away with drinking their own Kool-aid, but if you… You need those dissenting voices to kind of like, you need the cooling saucer of [chuckle] the weirdo there to get everyone to consider other possibilities because otherwise, it’s just way too groupthinky.

0:51:54 OK: And so yeah, so societally, this is like a huge call for including diverse voices and diverse viewpoints in anything where there’s a broad consensus being formed, definitely the media, but also other situations, like policy-making, or business decision-making. It’s hugely important to have diverse perspectives in that situation, just because you want people to kind of be that kind of crucible of friction with you so that you can make the best decision possible.

0:52:26 SC: Well, it’s certainly applicable to academia, I know, where in an area like theoretical physics, sometimes there’s not a lot of data that you can rely on and it’s just a bunch of people and their ideas, and everyone probably would agree that it’s good to have some outside the box ideas in the mix, but then, when you’re an actual department trying to hire somebody, are you going to hire the one outside the box person who is maybe going to revolutionize everything, but probably not going to to do anything at all, or you going to hire a person who’s working in the mainstream and likely to give some solid contributions. And the answer is, almost always you’re going to go for the person likely to give some solid contributions. It’s just too much of a risk to get out there, and we end up being a little bit stodgier than we should be because of that.

0:53:15 OK: Yeah, I think, yeah, I have heard that. I’m not an academic, but I’ve heard that complaint about academia before. You also have, to speak from my own wheelhouse, in the media, a lot of these big… When people do say that the media is too alarmist or that there’s some big press thing that the press blows out of proportion, a lot of that happens because people are taking a cue from each other, and no one’s taking a second to be like, “Wait a minute, how much do we really know here? And are there other possibilities we could be thinking about?” Because people don’t want to be considered weird, right?

0:53:56 OK: So, a good example of this is crack babies. The media in the 1980s did a bunch of reporting about the future crack babies of America and how they’re basically going to be mentally challenged and they’re not going to be able to keep up with society and we’ve completely doomed these babies to be crack adults for life. And I’m not saying that crack is fine, [chuckle] but I’m saying that those… That didn’t actually happen. Those kids… Like, the level of cognitive disability was much, much lower than was predicted, and the idea that this whole generation of especially inner city African-Americans was somehow doomed to be like vegetables was totally wrong. And I think that that’s because it bounced from the New York Times, Time Magazine, to news linked to this and that, and people just didn’t take time to put the brakes on it, and that you see that happen a lot.

0:54:56 SC: Yeah, yeah, and maybe a little bit of a dissenting voices… It’s interesting, because it appears in many different contexts. You’re talking about the psychology and the sociology of being a weird person in a group, but then there’s just the political science of having dissenting voices in the free market of ideas and stuff like that, and it goes to the same place. Are there benefits to being weird besides creativity? Can we give the sales pitch for why you should be proud of your weirdness a little bit?

0:55:30 OK: Yeah, so the other big advantage that I really zero in on in the book is this tendency to really know and stick to your core principles, really, really, truthfully. To be really sure of what you want in life and what you’re doing, and be more confident than most people are in that way. And I know that sounds a little vague, but to give you an idea, some of the people that I was most impressed by were the people who were online dating back when that was considered really strange and a good way to get axe murdered. [chuckle] And the way they talked about it, or they were like, “It didn’t matter what people said. I just loved this person. I thought what we were doing was cool, I was comfortable with it, I was happy to be this kind of weirdo who was reading over my emails back before there was email.”

0:56:27 OK: It really… So, and obviously… And they’re still married, those couples, and they have this wonderful origin story that is so unique and so cute. And of course, not everything you do is going to be like that, but I just thought it was a good example of how, if you really believe in something, even if everyone thinks it’s weird, it often helps you find your moral compass and stick to it, if you’re really committed to that decision.

0:56:58 SC: I think that makes sense. And that’s a really good point as we wrap up here, because exactly because there’s so much social pressure on you when you are deviating from the norm, when you sort of sit back and think, “Okay, should I be like this anyway despite the fact that there’s social pressure on me?” really does, in principle, I think it could help you figure out what’s so important, and what’s maybe not so important.

0:57:20 OK: Yeah, exactly, yeah. It helps you kinda separate the wheat from the chaff, of you are your own inner man.

0:57:27 SC: And it goes back to what you said about the idiosyncrasy credits that you have. If you maybe want to be weird in a hundred different dimensions, but maybe it’s worth sitting down and thinking about where is it worth it. What things… Should I just go along with the flow because it’s just not worth the struggle, and what are the others where I’m really going to fight for my difference here?

0:57:49 SC: Yeah, totally. Yeah. This is why I recommend people just dress really boringly at the office, ’cause you want to save your chips for the fights with your boss about more important stuff. [chuckle]

0:57:58 SC: I’m on your side there. So, the last thing I just wanted to ask, you start the book with your own experience of weirdness. You grew up an immigrant in a conservative Texas town and so forth. Has this study that you’ve done of all these different ways of being weird and so forth, has this changed how you think about your own variety of weirdness? Which was kind of mostly external, it was things you were born into, not things you chose.

0:58:23 OK: Yeah, totally. Yeah, I guess… So, I started to rethink whether… I started to rethink whether I was really that different from people in my hometown, like that maybe this feeling that I’ve had my whole life is not… Was more internal than I… More, at least, internally perpetuated, than externally perpetuated. I started to rethink whether people were really… Whether my parents and I were really as harshly looked down upon and judged as I feared that we were. Yeah, that’s kind of the main thing that I started to rethink. Yeah, this is my own, my own weirdness, I guess. [chuckle]

0:59:06 SC: No, actually, I think that’s a fascinating thing that I didn’t even think to talk about. We were taking weirdness for granted as a thing, but not only is it subjective what counts as weird, but a little bit of judgment goes into thinking whether or not we actually are weird, or maybe we perceive ourselves as either weird or not weird in a way very different from what the society we’re in is judging us to be.

0:59:30 OK: Yeah, totally. Your self-perception is a huge part of things. And as someone… I have a lot of social anxiety, which I think causes me to maybe overstate the negatives when it comes to how different I am from people. And so I tried to correct for that toward the end of the book. [chuckle]

0:59:48 SC: Yeah, well, I think it’s a good… I recommend the book absolutely to listeners out here. It’s a good way of trying to tune ourselves to be just the right amount of weird, which is a good goal, but a tough thing to achieve.

1:00:01 OK: Yes, yeah.

1:00:03 SC: Okay. Olga Khazan, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

1:00:06 OK: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me on. It was fun.

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