Speaking of Psychology - How to have great conversations, with Charles Duhigg and Michael Yeomans, PhD

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

Conversational chemistry might seem intangible, but psychologists are beginning figure out what makes some conversations work while others fall apart. Charles Duhigg, author of the upcoming book “Supercommunicators,” and conversation researcher Michael Yeomans, PhD, talk about how anyone can learn to communicate better, the best way to build rapport with someone you just met, why it’s important to think about your goals in a conversation, how to have a productive conversation about a disagreement and how technology changes conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You probably know what it feels like when a conversation just clicks. You and the person you're talking to understand each other. They're not just listening to you. They're hearing what you're saying. You leave the conversation feeling good. Maybe you sparked a new friendship or deepened an old one or figured out how to solve a problem that's been bothering you. Conversational chemistry might seem intangible,

something that just happens when the circumstances are right. But psychologists using new research tools and methods are beginning to figure out what makes some conversations work while others fall flat. And their insights can help people improve their conversation skills, strengthen their relationships, and even disagree in more productive ways. So what makes conversations click? Why are some people so much better at verbal communication than others? What role does listening play in conversation? and how can you learn to listen better? Why is it important to think about your goals in a conversation

and to consider your partner's conversation goals as well? What's the best way to build rapport with someone you just met? How can you disagree productively without having the conversation spiral into an argument? And what are the most important things you can do to improve your conversation skills? 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. I have two guests today. First is Dr. Michael Yeomens, an assistant professor of strategy and organizational behavior at Imperial College in London. Dr. Yomans has a PhD in behavioral science from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Business School. His research uses an artificial intelligence management.

method called natural language processing, to analyze conversations, to understand and improve how people communicate with one another. He's interested in how people make decisions and conversations and how we can make those decisions better. Next is Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author. His new book to be published in February 24 is called Supercommunicators, how to unlock the secret language of connection, and it's all about the science of conversation. Mr. Duhick is written for the New Yorker magazine and the New York Times, among other publications. He is also the author of two bestselling books, The Power of Habit, About Habit Formation, and smarter, faster, better about the science of productivity.

Thank you both for joining me today. Thanks for having us. Thanks, Kim. It's a pleasure to be here. We've all met people who seem to be naturally great at conversation. They can connect with anyone. Charles, in your book, you call people like the super communicators, so what are you? Why don't we start there? Who are these super communicators? And do you have any really great examples?

Yeah. Well, I think actually all of us know super communicators. And oftentimes we are super communicators ourselves. If I was to ask, I'm everyone listening to think of the person that you would call if you were having a bad day, the person you know that would make you just feel better, kind of listen to you exactly the right way. Everyone listening would have someone pop into their mind. And that person for you is a super communicator. They know how to listen. They know how to show their listening. They know how to speak in ways that it's easier for you to listen. And we all have these moments in our own lives when we when we know exactly the right thing to say to a friend to make them feel better. Or we know exactly what to say during a meeting in order to get everyone on board with our idea. It's not a magical

power is the thing. It's a set of skills that some people have learned a little bit better that recognize more, but there's skills that all of us can learn, instincts that all of us have, that if we're reminded how to use them, we can communicate with anyone. Now, Mike, you don't use that term in your work, the term super communicators, but do you come across people like this in your studies? And what are they doing that the rest of us aren't? Yeah, Kim, I think it's a great term. I come across some of my studies. And if I'm lucky, I come across a few in my life every once in a while, too. I think Charles describes it really aptly, right?

These are people who understand their conversation partner. They understand the goals they want to achieve and what their partner wants to achieve and have the skills, have the adeptness, the quickness and the sensitivity to be able to build a conversation from turn to turn over time so that it actually adds up to something much bigger than that, right? not just exchanging words, but meeting of minds. And I think Charles also makes a really good point about the nature of the relationship, right? Like so often when we are at our conversational best, it's because we're with people we understand well. We know their patterns.

We know what they're looking for. We maybe share a sense of humor with them. And there's a bit of a filtering at who we end up talking to, right? We tend to seek out the people we've had good experiences with before. but I think we can learn from those situations the kinds of skills and tools that can be useful more broadly. And a lot of what the real super communicators do, the people who are good like this with everybody, is that they understand how to adapt their toolkit to the needs in the context in front of them. One thread that runs through the work that both of you do is the importance of understanding

that there are many different kinds of conversations and conversational goals. Why is it important to understand your own goals and your partner's goals in conversation? Well, in many ways, a conversation is all about the goals, right? We oftentimes enter into a conversation with a specific objective in mind, although we might not be aware of that objective ourselves. And one of the things that I've really loved about doing this research, including Mike's research and many of his colleagues, is that as we learn more about how communication works within our minds, we've learned that there are different kinds of conversations, right? And in particular, it seems like there's sort of three big buckets that we can put a lot of conversations into. There's conversations that are practical, right? I want to decide where we're going to dinner tonight or what we should do about the fact that Jimmy can't get his homework in on time.

Or I want to talk about, you know, what we should do as we get older. And that's kind of a conversation about, like, what are we really talking about? What do we want to figure out here? But then there's other types of conversations where the goal is not to come up with a plan or to use reason to figure things out. It's just to share with you how I feel. And those are emotional conversations where what we're talking about is, is how do I feel? And then another big bucket are social conversations, discussions where I am sharing who I am from an identity perspective, from a background perspective, based on my experiences, I want to learn who you are,

based on where you come from and what you believe in. And that's really a social conversation, a conversation about who are we. And what's important is that a lot of the research shows if I come into a conversation and I'm talking about emotions, if I come home from work one day and I've had a tough day and I'm telling my wife all about my boss who's a jerk and my coworkers don't appreciate me. And my wife responds with some very good practical advice. Like, why don't you take your boss to lunch and get to know him a little bit better? Even though she's trying to be supportive, even though that's very good advice, it's unlikely I'm going to hear it. We've all been in this situation where I'm having a lot. an emotional conversation and she's having a practical conversation. And as a result, we don't

connect. We don't hear each other. We both walk away a little bit frustrated. So I think one of the big things that I've carried away from reviewing this research is it's important to have the same kind of conversation at the same time. And that means understanding what your own goal is and what other people's goals are in a discussion. So, Mike, does that mean that people need to announce to each other what they want to talk about, what the purpose of the conversation is? Does that make you a better conversationalist? I think a little bit of announcing could be helpful. I also think a little bit of asking could be helpful too, right? There's many parties involved. I mean, we, I think those three categories are, it's a nice way of thinking about the different types of conversations we might

hope to achieve. And it's tricky because every conversation could be a mix of a few of them, right? And because every relationship you have is a series of conversations over time, right? So you need to be able to apply, you know, when to apply the skills at the right time. You know, I think some people don't know their own goals. You know, they'll, you know, business scholars will do these studies where people write down their objectives for like, you know, the next year at work or the next five years of their life. And you'd be surprised how often people miss common objectives, even just describing their own goals. And I think the same is true of conversation, right?

Simply listing the goals you might have before a conversation to be clear of what those are, right? maybe even thinking through some of the topics you might cover when you're talking with somebody can only hope, I think, to help you achieve those goals merely by identifying them, but also doing a bit of cognitive offloading in the sense that rather than having to do the cognitive work of trying to think what you're trying to achieve as you're trying to achieve it, by just putting a little bit of preparation in advance, then the actual conversation will flow a lot smoother. And I think the same is also true about preparing to understand your partner. Now, you don't know exactly what their goals are yet either, but you can at least have a plan to learn what

those goals are. I think Mike brings up a really important point here, which is that oftentimes a conversation that we have is not just one conversation, right? We're not just talking about emotions or just talking about social topics. We move from conversation to conversation. And what's important is that our partner is able to recognize as we're moving from topic to topic and is inviting us to join them in a certain kind of conversation. And one of the things that really strikes me is that when we are in those conversations, oftentimes we are announcing our goals. Right. If we're trained to look for it, if someone is obviously emotional, if someone is using emotional words, if someone is saying things like, this is how I feel or I was angry,

then they're announcing, like, I want to have an emotional conversation. Or if they're saying, look, we got to get down to business, we got to figure out what the budget is for next year. They're announcing that they want to have a practical conversation. And part of it is just training ourselves to listen for that. I'm wondering how you both got interested in this topic. Charles, let's start with you because your profession, as a journalist, involves a particular type of communication.

Can you be a good reporter without knowing some of the basics that you cover in your book and what Dr. Yeoman studies. Well, it's, and I'm really interested to hear Mike's take, I'm answer to this as well. One of the things that I found was happening to me was that I was really good at being an interviewer, right? I could ask questions, but an interview is not a conversation. A conversation is really when both people are participating.

We're both, hopefully, being a little bit vulnerable with each other and reciprocating some of that vulnerability. We're both in the conversation, as opposed to one person, interrogating the other, which is what an interview is often like. And I found that this was a real drawback at work. Like I was a great reporter. But when I was made a manager at the New York Times, I just discovered I was the worst communicator on earth. Like people would come to me with problems and I would try and solve them immediately because I thought that was my job. And they would get upset because they're like quit trying to solve my problem. I just want you to understand how I feel. I was terrible

at this. And so that's when I started thinking to myself. Like, I actually, need to understand how communication works because because we all we have evolved to communicate, right? It's our species like secret superpower. And yet so often we're in conversations where we feel like we don't fully understand what the other person is trying to say and they haven't heard us. And I think that part of the barrier there is just not understanding how communication works. And so I wanted to learn more about it. And Mike, what about you? What made you focus on this professionally. I mean, I think it's an incredible topic for anyone to be studying now. You know, I really, in graduate school in Chicago, I really got excited about decision

making, right? How it is that people make choices to follow through on their best intentions. And very often that was studied in very simple domains in the sense that, you know, people say they want to retire for, say for retirement, they want to give more to charity, they want to, you know, save on energy usage. We're trying to come up with ways for people to align their behavior with those intentions. And those are relatively easy to measure. I think all the same kinds of mistakes and biases and juristics that plague our decision making in the uncertain world of finance or the uncertain world of dieting and exercise,

health more broadly maybe. I think all of those same problems are also applied to conversations. it's just hard to measure. It's hard to figure out because there's so many different kinds of goals and because the way we talk to one another is structured for humans by evolution, but not structured to be understood by computers. There was just a dart of real understanding of conversation and that kind of decision-making level.

And so these days, I think with the advent of technology that's allowing us to, for example, the technology that's recording this podcast right now, and we'll give us a transcript after we're done, The ability of tools to capture conversations, but also to enable new kinds of conversations that we never used to have, whether it's with globally distributed work teams or text messaging, you know, with our oldest friends or, you know, networking apps that allow us to connect with people. We might never interact with otherwise, you know, people in online courses, that kind of thing. The ways in which we're recording those conversations and the new conversations that are being enabled by technology means that it seems like such a natural fit for the kinds of empirical tools that psychologists are used to applying to simpler problems. So, Mike, I know that you've done a lot of research around kind of turn taking in conversations and what it sounds like when a conversation is good that people are often interrupting each other and there's callbacks to previous things and they're asking questions. So a conversation like this, if you and I were sitting in a bar with Kim and we were talking as opposed to to, we're in three different cities and we're talking over over the computer, how do you think a conversation would be different?

In person versus online. And, you know, including alcohol in the mix definitely would change the conversation too. Right, right, right. And probably some background noise and verbal or visual cues that were giving. other? Yeah. Well, and hopefully a much more wide open range of topics. I think we have a lot of time to dig in deep into one another and pass the baton a little

bit more. You know, I've certainly enjoyed getting to know you guys a little bit getting ready for this conversation, but I have so many follow-up questions. I won't bore the audience with, but. I want to ask a question about technology, because Mike, you just raised that. And, you know, we're hearing more and more that younger people. They don't use their phone, for example, for a conversation. They use it to text.

And the kids, I'm using the term loosely, but I'm an old person. So younger people don't even want to have conversations. They'd much rather interact using technology. What will that do to conversation as a skill? One question is whether it substitutes for normal face-to-face conversation that we're used to having or whether it's a compliment, right? In some ways, it could compliment, right? Like, I text my friends to figure out when we're going to meet up and then we meet up and then we can call back to things we've talked about. We can, you know, reference jokes from our meeting and engage in responsive action based on plans we've made.

All of that makes the connecting of conversations in a relationship much more powerful. But, you know, I think there's good research that others have done and probably know better showing that in some ways it's substituting for the more tangible relationships. in our lives, right? That social media is maybe not quite as social as we'd hope. So that's a tricky business. I don't know much of that research as well. Charles, do you? Well, a little bit. And I think one thing that it's important to remember is I think it's a really good question, right? Because it is such a new form of communication. I have a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old, and I don't know that they ever call their friends, but they're talking to their friends constantly. But the one caution I would offer is, you know, when telephones,

first emerged, there was a flurry of articles claiming that being able to communicate telephonically would destroy our ability to have conversations. Like all these people who don't have to go see each other in person now, they can just call across the city to talk to each other. And of course, all of us have had conversations on the phone that we feel like are as intimate and as personal as any that we've had in real, in face-to-face. In other words, we kind of learn how to use a communication medium in the best way possible. And one of the things that's happening with online right now is that we're learning how to do it, right?

Like we've been talking to each other face to face for two millennia. And we've been talking on telephones for over 100 years. But when it comes to like sending someone an emoji and like trying to figure out all the hidden meanings that I don't know exist about it, that's a relatively new phenomena. But we will learn and we are learning how to do it. And I think what's important is that at the beginning stages, and there's a lot of really interesting research around this, around how, why people come into conflict online and why they don't. And I think the general policy is, if you over-emphasize what you know you're supposed to do, like if you over-emphasize being polite, if you over-emphasize stating your intention, if you avoid things that are really subtle, like, like, you know, some type of wry comment that you can hear the irony in your mind, but your recipient, reads it on the screen and doesn't understand that you're trying to make a joke. If we fall back

on the basic principles of communication, we tend to do better online. And over time, our kids will learn how to do this better than we do, the same way that we learned how to use telephones better than our great-great grandparents did. Well, let me change gears for a minute and talk about meeting someone for the first time, whether that's a co-worker or a date. I mean, what's the best way to build rapport and connection right out of the gate. There's a lot of great research on this. I'll tell you a little bit about some work I had done, one of my very first papers on conversations,

which is studying the kinds of questions you might ask somebody when you get to know them. You know, very often, we started thinking about questions because I think very often the strategy we take and we're trying to meet somebody is to impress them, to give them a lot of interesting statements about ourselves or about, you know, the most recent news or the context around us. But very often when people have on their mind when they're meeting you is not just,

is this person interesting, but are they interested in me? Right. Are they demonstrating that they care about what I'm saying, that they want to hear more? And so we started looking at the questions people ask when they first meet each other. This is both some sort of friendly settings, but we even actually looked at a a data set of speed dates that was collected by some researchers at Stanford, very high stakes first impression setting. And what we saw is that even though people ask a lot of questions, there's only some types of questions that really help build rapport in those initial

interactions. And specifically, those are follow-up questions. So questions that appreciate what a person said and then dig deeper to help them build more. It's nice because it demonstrates is listening, right? So by asking a follow-up question, I'm asking a question that I only could have asked if I had been listening to what you just said, right? So it's proof, right? I can sit here and nod and make eye contact and give you little back channels while I'm waiting for my turn to say something, right? Now, that's not real proof of grounded listening, but if I can ask questions that show that I'm following the story, that I'm dying to know what's coming next, that that's the really great way to get people to like you more because they feel like you're interested in them.

It's also nice because it keeps the conversation going. It just gives them one more thing to say on a topic that they've already sort of revealed a preference for talking about. And so I try and get in the habit of asking as many follow-up questions as I can. And I think you'd be surprised when you meet somebody, especially if they're a little nervous, if they're worried about how they're coming across. You know, you could ask a lot of follow-up questions before they ask you a question in return. And so you'll learn a lot, but then also they'll also get the side benefit of having them like you more. It's worth mentioning because I think Mike's points are so smart and so great that like if you just ask follow-up questions, people love to answer questions about themselves, right?

Nobody ever says, you know, you're just too interested in me. But one of the things that I've carried into sort of new encounters is some work from Nicholas Epley. there's actually a whole chapter about Nick Epley in my book. And Mike obviously worked with him for a long time. And one of the things Nick said to me was he said, his goal is to ask a deep question as quickly as possible. And a deep question is basically something that asks someone else to talk about their values or their beliefs or their experiences, to expose a little bit of who they are. And when Nick told me this, I was like, deep question, that sounds really hard to do, like, you know, off the bat. That sounds very intimate.

And Nick was like, no, no, it's actually just about like, you know, if you ask someone like, where do you work? And your next question is, do you love that job? Or did you always want to do that from when you were a kid? If instead of asking someone where they live, you say, you know, what's the best thing about your neighborhood? Or instead of asking them where they went to high school, what did you learn most in high school? Those are deep questions. They don't seem overly intimate or personal. but they're inviting the other person to talk about their experiences or their values or their beliefs.

And in doing so, they become a little bit vulnerable. They expose themselves. And if you reciprocate that vulnerability, if you show them that you are listening and you ask follow-up questions, as Mike pointed out, if you share a little bit about yourself, it's almost impossible not to feel close to that person. So you're mentioning that certain kinds of questions that work better than others to draw people out and to build that. rapport. I imagine that you're familiar with the work of Arthur Arons, who was on this podcast some time ago, and he developed a series of questions that were intended to basically help people fall in love and stay in love. Have you looked at those questions and why do they work the way that he says they work? Oh, yeah. Actually, that chapter about Nick Epley is also the

story of the Fast Friends Protocol and the 36 questions. And Arthur and his wife, they developed that together. And what's really interesting is I talked to a bunch of the grad students who worked with them on developing that. And we think of these 36 questions as like being set in stone, right? But the origin of those questions is actually like almost by happenstance. There was, what they would do, there was this game that was really popular in the 1980s among like college students and stoners named the ungame. Some of you might be familiar with this. And it's basically a bunch of random questions. So they would take these questions and they would, they would experiment with them in, in the, in the fast friends protocol. And they would go to bars and they would just dream up,

dream up questions. And for anyone who's not a familiar, what the experiment was that the errands conducted was they would bring strangers together. They would give them a list of questions to ask each other, one at a time, and answer. And then people would leave. And these were strangers. And then seven weeks later, they would look to see if anyone who had participated in this had tracked down their partner to try and just have a beer with them. And they found that over 50% of the people who had done these questions, and this is pre-internet, right? They had to like work hard to track down these folks. Over 50% of the people went and found their partner and sort of made, because they felt such a connection with them after asking and answering these questions.

And it became known as a Fast Friends Protocol. I'm sure everyone listening has heard of this, has probably used it. But the reason it works, and my Mike, I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether you think this is right. The reason why Arthur told me it works is because of this reciprocal vulnerability. Because I ask you a question that asks you to be a little bit vulnerable. You answer it. And then I respond by answering that same question myself. And that escalating vulnerability, that reciprocation, it just makes us feel close to each other, even if we have nothing in common. We feel close. Yeah, the reciprocal self-disclosure is a really powerful part of that paradigm. I think a little bit is what Nick was talking about, too, in the sense that you sort of ease into the topics that are surprisingly deep. It's an interesting paradigm, too, right? There's a lot of sort of quietly staring into each other eyes. And there's a bit of a structure that kind of gives you the permission to be vulnerable that might be a little trickier in a natural setting, right?

Like it's a wonder why we don't feel as comfortable sharing our vulnerabilities with people without having an experimenter poking us in the shoulder with a conductor's wand. But I think we all have something to learn from that study for sure. And I think Mike raises a really good point here, which is the structure is really important. Because some of the questions are things like, when's the last time you cried in front of another person? or there's some question about people's mothers, right? Which is not an overwhelmingly positive question. And I think if you're on a first date at a bar and you turn to someone and you say, you know, tell me, when's the last time you cried in front of another person?

Probably that person is not going to take you out on a second date or go on a second day with you, right? Like some of these questions, but it feels fine when we're in a laboratory. But I think the point there is that, as Mike mentions, and I think that plays off of a lot of his research, is that is that we can kind of create structures within our conversations, right? Sometimes announcing our goal at the beginning of a conversation is creating a structure or just saying like, you know, I wanted to get together for drinks with you because I just wanted to get to know you better. Like, tell me about who you are. Oftentimes what we're doing is we're creating structures that make certain kind of statements easier to accomplish, a question. And then a follow-up question

is often a structuring mechanism. And the more that we sort of think about that, or at least lean into it because it's an instinct for almost all of us, the more I think we make it easier for ourselves and others to respond. Related to that, though, let me ask you if you are about to embark on a difficult conversation and you let somebody know, I'm talking to you, I need to talk to you right now because I'm really angry,

does that set everything off on a bad path? because now the other person gets defensive. So what should you do as the angry person? What should you do as the person who is maybe the recipient of the anger to keep it from devolving into just a mess? I'm trying to think if it's a harder conversation if one person is angry or if both people are angry. They both pose their own difficulties. I don't know that talking at the peak of your anger is always the best idea. But certainly there's a lot of difficult conversations we have that are all around some kind of disagreement, right? Whether it's a different disagreement about beliefs or values or preferences,

we're constantly engaging with people we disagree with, right? In any group of folks, right, whether we're at work, whether we're managing a household or getting along with our neighbors, right? We're sort of intimately tied with folks who would just by, it was impossible for us to agree with them 100% of the time. So we need to be able to build trust in spite of that disagreement. And I think a tricky thing in a lot of these situations is I think it comes back to goals. So often when we talk to people we disagree with, we're so focused on persuasion, right?

Like, this person is wrong. They have a bad view of the world. So I just need to correct their view of the world and then everything will be good again. But like, you know, the hit rate on persuasion attempts these days is vanishingly small, right? If anything, the two people end up further away than they started, right? But the thing is, if you disagree with somebody about something and you talked about it and you haven't come to a resolution, you know, in our negotiations class, we teach that means one of three things, right? Either you're wrong or the other person is wrong or both of you are wrong. And so there's a very different set of conversational skills that come into play when we disagree with people, right?

If we focus on trust building and understanding, right, that's something that both people can achieve together, right? Even if I don't convince you that your opinion on, you know, Middle East politics or climate change or, you know, where we should go on vacation next holiday, even if I can't win you over, I can still give you the gift of listening to what you have to say. I can express some intellectual humility myself by hedging statements by using tools to identify subjective language, right? So I believe this. I think that, you know, I understand where you're coming from. I can seek points of agreement, right, rather than focusing on the narrow things where we disagree. So there's a lot of errors of omission that we make when we disagree with people, right? Things we should say more of. And there's also errors of commission, right? We contradict people too much. We minimize their beliefs by using words like just and only. We try and explain things to them as if, you know, we're a teacher talking to a student rather than two people of equal. status, trying to manage a disagreement between one another. And so, you know, my colleagues and I have worked a lot on this sort of suite of conversational tools. We like to call conversational receptiveness, which is active engagement with people you disagree with.

And what's interesting is that we show that this really builds trust in a lot of settings. So we've looked at this in, you know, telemedicine, we've looked at this in online classes, We've looked at discussions among Wikipedia editors and local government officials, all kinds of folks who are intimately engaged with folks they disagree with as part of a productive enterprise. And in all these cases, people who use these most more receptive language, which honestly doesn't sound much different from the sort of rule of thumb you kind of get from the literature on couples counseling in the 1960s. We build trust in these relationships, the same way these couples do when they're having arguments. But what's interesting is that the persuasion actually comes as a result of that trust. So rather than trading off persuasion against trust, right? We express a little humility and we think maybe we're giving into the other side.

In fact, that makes us more trustworthy and thus more persuasive. A colleague of mine has a great analogy of trying to enter a castle, like a medieval castle with a giant moat and a drawbridge. right, to get in to see the king, you have to get them to lower the drawbridge, right? They don't lower the drawbridge, you're not getting in. So there's no point to begin with. And so in our research, we've shown that those extra tools, right, making really, really sure that the other person understands that you've listened to them before you launch into your statement about your side. I think that's a really good point. Yeah.

And to build on that, you know, and the work that Mike has done with collaborators, including Allison Woodbrook, at HBS, you know, one of the things that comes across so strongly in that literature and other experiments is that oftentimes we think about conversation as starting when I open my mouth. But in many ways, as we had discussed before, it's the work we do before we open our mouth. And equally importantly, the work we do after someone else has spoken to show them that we've listened to them. And one of my favorite ways of thinking about this is this technique called looping for understanding that many people listening who teach negotiations probably know, which is it's very, very simple.

When you're in a conversation, particularly around conflict, and someone has said something, the best way to disarm the conversation, to prove to them that you are listening is you ask them a question about what they just said. You repeat back in your own words what you heard them say. and then you ask them if you got it right. And of course, we've all learned this when we were like in fourth grade, right? Like this is listening 101. And yet, and yet if you think about the last conversation all of us had when we were in conflict with someone, we probably didn't do a lot of looping for understanding.

But if you're in that situation and someone comes up and they say, what I heard, like, let me ask you one thing about your opinion. What I heard you say is this. And they genuinely try and in their own words, restate what you're saying. restate what you're what you're the argument you're trying to make and then say and before we proceed can I just ask you did I get that right am I understanding you at that point it's pretty hard to see the other person as the enemy because they have shown you they have proved to you that they want to understand you that doesn't mean they agree with you it doesn't mean they expect you to agree with them but at least you know you're being heard and once you have that trust that conversational receptiveness

then it's much more likely that you're going to find places where you do agree with each other alongside the places where you don't. And that sounds like a tactic that people could employ if they're trying to become better conversationalists. Are there other tips that either of you might offer to our listeners who maybe recognize or maybe they don't recognize that they're bad conversationalists, but would still like to be good? We talked a little bit about follow-up questions already, and I think that's a really generative and lasting approach.

I will say that we have some other research on questions that might not go as well, which are, there's a technique that, I don't know if any of you ever talk to my dad, you might know, we call it boomer asking. And the idea is that if you want to talk about a topic, you ask somebody else about it first so that you can then jump in. in and give your opinion. It has an intuitive appeal, right? Like, I really, really want to tell this person about my great vacation that I went on last weekend. But I should probably include them and ask them about what their vacation was before I launched into my things, right?

It seems like it's being responsive, but people catch on to this pretty quickly, right? They can see the insincerity if we haven't done a lot of work to actually listen to what they have to say. And so we actually find that when you're when you want to talk about something great, it's better to just brag than to do the boomer ask and ask before bragging. It's also true for complaining too, right? So if you had a miserable day yesterday, it's probably just better to go in and talk about that and turn this into an emotional conversation rather than pretend you cared about what the other person did yesterday. So even complaining is better if it's explicit rather than channel through the boomer ask.

And so there's a lot of very tricky rules. It's hard to have one particular piece of advice for all conversations, depending on what you want, depending what the other person has in mind when you get to know them. There could be all kinds of tools. Charles, what comes in mind for you? Yeah. So my book Super Communicators is basically, it's a bunch of stories about people who, interesting communication challenges.

but then a lot of tips about how we actually, how we learn these skills, right? How we use them. And some, in addition to what Mike mentioned, I think some other ones are, for instance, you know,

Mike had mentioned that marriage counseling in the 1960s when there was really this revolution in the 60s and 70s. And one of the big ideas that came out of that was a lot of couples have trouble communicating with each other when they're trying to control each other. And sometimes we don't understand

that we're trying to control each other. we say things like, you know, if we're in a fight, like, I'm going to give this five minutes, or if you say that one more time, I'm going to walk out of this room. And that's an attempt to control the other person. And it tends to be toxic. Online, that often happens, right? Again, without intending to try and control each other, we signal that we want to control each other by saying, you know, you've analyzed this problem all wrong or I'm not going to sit here

and listen to that. And I think that the more we think about giving up control in a conversation, letting it flow naturally, the better that conversation is likely going to be. Another tip that we can use, and we haven't really talked about non-linguistic communication, right? When we send messages with our bodies or with our sighs or our laughs, simply drawing our attention to those signals can really help a conversation. And in fact, there's a story in the book about in the 1980s, NASA had this one psychologist who was trying to figure out how to recruit more astronauts that had emotional intelligence. And the problem for him is that astronaut candidates, particularly elite astronaut candidates, they're really good at answering questions, right? They practice for every question. And they're really good at faking emotional intelligence because they know that they're supposed to exhibit it.

And so this guy was trying to figure out, how do I like, how do I actually figure out who like can connect with other people and who can't? Because if I was, if we're sending them into space for six months at a time, that connecting ability is really important. And what he discovered by listening to old recordings of interviews is that if he paid attention to how the candidates laughed, it gave him a clue as to their emotional IQ. In particular, he started going into interviews and he would laugh very boisterously. And he would pay attention to whether the astronaut can't. would laugh back at the basic same energy and same mood level. And then he would laugh quietly and see how the astronaut responded to that. And it wasn't just laughter.

He would also, he would mention that he had a sister who passed away, which was actually not true. He never had a sister. But he would mention this in these interviews to see whether the candidate would try and comfort him and ask questions, whether they would share about a loss from their own life. It put differently, one of the things that he was doing was he was just training himself to pay attention to the non-linguistic clues that we give each other. And sometimes it's just as simple as that, just reminding ourselves like,

pay attention to where the person's eyes are, pay attention to whether they seem to be laughing with me or not. These are just little things, little ways to remind ourselves, much like looping for understanding, right? They're just little mnemonics almost to remind us what we already know about communication. And it can feel overwhelming. But it doesn't have to be. they're all little things that if we just become more, more habitualized around doing them,

suddenly we start having much better conversations. Yeah, Charles, that's such a fascinating story. And it hits on, I think, another really foundational principle of social interaction, which is mimicry, right? A really good predictor of how someone's going to behave is how they're being treated. We're just hopelessly entrained to one another's behavior, right? And you see mimicry in so many different dimensions of human interaction, right? One person looks at something.

We look at the same thing. We mimic each other in body posture. We mimic each other in gestures and facial expressions and motion and tone of voice. And certainly in the words we use too. And that can be a really powerful tool, right? That is unconscious cues in mimicry that signal that someone is on the same wavelength as us, that there's a bit of a shared reality, right? That we're enjoying the same things about the situation or, you know,

miscerating about the same things about the situation, right? That we're seeing things in the same way. Yeah. But I think this is a powerful tool. You know, I think in our work on disagreement, we're focusing a lot on the role of mimicry. And I think, you know, we're always, we're very often focused on how we can get other people to treat us with more respect, right? How we can encourage others to demonstrate receptiveness to us.

And we found that one of the most powerful ways to encourage receptiveness in others is to be receptive yourself. Yeah. That it improves other people's view of us and also all of our counterparts. And we can actually create these microcultures of respect and trust simply by making that choice ourselves. It's not sort of a one-to-one relationship, but the more we can express it ourselves, the more that people sort of unconsciously pick up on that tone and will reflect it back to us.

And so even if it feels a little unnatural at first, once that cycle of respect starts revving up, it starts to feel real and hopefully can create a little more of a safe space that maybe didn't feel possible when you get started. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And it kind of raises this thing that we haven't talked about yet, but which, of course, underlies all of this, which is the reason why mimicry is so important and so powerful is because in many ways, mimicry is the point of communication, right? We haven't talked about neural entrainment and the work from Ari Hassan and Taliawee

looking at how our bodies become similar when we're in a when we're in conversation with each other. Our eyes sometimes start dilating at the same rate. We start breathing in similar ways. But most importantly, our brains become more similar. And that's kind of the goal of communication, right? Is if I'm feeling a certain emotion and I, through my words, can inspire you to feel that same emotion, then we have some level of understanding. We're communing with each other. And this mimicry is part of communication. It's in some ways the point of communication is for us to align our thoughts and our emotions and our beliefs at least enough to understand what each other is saying and to transmit an idea or a feeling. And I think that's really, really powerful.

And if we're focused on that as a goal, then mimicry doesn't become sort of this slavish devotion to someone else's to imitating someone else. It rather becomes the path to actually achieving communion. So I want to ask one question to wrap up here, and I'll ask you both. Has your work in this area changed the way that you talk with people and what lessons have you put into practice in your own life? And for you, Charles, did you become a better manager? I did. I did. And actually, I mean, I will say it has revolutionized how I communicate.

I mean, not just with people at work, but also, you know, with my wife, with my kids. I mean, it's just taught me to think so much more deeply about how I'm communicating. And that can sound like a burden, right? Like it makes every conversation kind of this mental struggle. But actually what I found is that it makes communication much easier. Like, I actually get to think less because I know that I should ask a follow-up question. Or I know that I should reciprocate vulnerability when someone is vulnerable with me. You know, one of the first things that like often happens when I'm talking to my wife,

And there's a shorthand we use for this that I think has become popular in schools, which is when we start talking to each other, we say, so do you want me to hear you? Do you want me to help you? Or do you want me to hug you? Right? And this is basically back to the beginning of our conversation. This is asking them what their goal is. Do you want me to solve? Is this a practical conversation? You want me to help you solve it? Or do you want me just to hear your emotions, which is, you know, an emotional listening conversation? Or do you want me to hug you? to sort of a social conversation to show you that we are still together. And simply asking that question has like, and I ask it all the time now. I drive people crazy with it. But like, it's this magical thing that all of a sudden people say like, oh, I want you to hear me. And then I know what my job is and they know what their job is. And things go so much more smoothly. Mike, what about you?

That's a really good one. I mean, I think it's so funny with science. I do think we're making a lot of progress. but sometimes the more you study a subject, the less you feel like you know about it. And for me, you know, I do a lot of follow-up questions. I do a lot of conversational receptiveness. I think my disagreements are more productive, although you'd have to ask my colleagues in Imperial College about that.

You know, it's more the deep humility, right? I plan to be surprised and I plan to learn from people because it's just so much more complicated than you can anticipate going forward. I always feel like there's so much more to learn than I could ever get out of one conversation. I've learned a lot with the two of you today, more than planned even. Yeah, me too.

Well, I want to thank you both for joining me today. I think it was a great conversation. Me too. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. It's been a pleasure. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you like what you've heard, leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Wynerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condyenne. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.