FYS: The Story of Why We Misunderstand our Relationships

3 Credits.

What if we have it all wrong about our relationships? What if we have misunderstood the fundamental mechanics of how all our different social connections work? This first-year seminar posits that relationships are not fundamentally about trust, dependability, reciprocity, having common interests, and the other usual suspects. Rather, the active ingredient of our social connections are the stories that we tell ourselves: stories about us, about others, and about the connective tissue between the two.Drawing from psychological science (social psychologists like Nicholas Epley and Eli Finkel), literature (Shakespeare), the popular press (ranging from The Daily podcast to Atlantic and New Yorker articles), and even a dash of story science (yes, it’s a real thing), the course hypothesizes that relationships, at their core, are stories. We develop these narratives by making and organizing numerous inferences about other people. But because our biases afflict our inferences, we often misread people; consequently, our relationships suffer. The latter part of the course explores how we might improve the accuracy of our inferences, thereby enhancing our relationships at the personal, group, and societal levels.