What the Humans Like Is Responsiveness

Think of a creator you’ve been a fan of for years. How have they managed to keep your attention? It isn’t just making something great once and riding that success into the sunset—it’s how great the band is in concert, it’s the thirtieth-anniversary special, it’s the way the creator gives such great interviews, it’s the emails you’ve received or the

According to the psychologist Harry Reis, what deepens individual relationships is “responsiveness”: mutual understanding, validation, and caring.

We’ve been drilling deep into social dynamics, and we finally get to that one deeply human quality that makes all this possible. It’s called empathy. The ability to feel what another human being is feeling. All this complicated social psychology does not need to be explicitly understood. For high-empathy people, all this is natural. By participatin

1. I know what makes people grow more reliably than anything else. It is: taking on a difficult project with some amount of public accountability. This can be large or small: a lecture series, a business, a blog, a house, a child, etc.


2. It’s strange, but I know that it’s common to resist positive emotions, as well as negative ones. Ask yours