The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - A Supercommunicator's Guide to Love and Dating

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

Some people ask searching questions and then really listen to the replies. These so-called supercommunicators make great romantic partners, so can anyone learn to be more like them?   Journalist Charles Duhigg (author of Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection) was unhappy with how he and his wife were talking, so he studied his mistakes and adopted the habits of supercommunicators. He explains to Dr Laurie Santos how we can all make small changes that will improve our dating and romantic lives. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. I once went on a riverboat cruise with my husband and some friends. As we chugged along the Connecticut River, we enjoyed some picnic food and talked and laughed together. But I was also a bit distracted by an elderly couple sitting nearby. They just seemed kind of uninterested in everything. They didn't seem to take notice of us, their fellow passengers, or the gorgeous scenery along the riverbanks.

But what was most disturbing was that they also seemed really uninterested in one another. I don't think they shared a single word the entire trip. When we finally docked, I saw the couple's daughter waiting for them on land. She seemed excited to know if they'd had fun. You see, she explained to the boat captain, this was their wedding anniversary. On the drive home, I couldn't stop thinking about that couple. Could any couple fall mute like that? Could it happen to you or me? How do we keep the

conversation going? That's the question I want to address in this next installment of our short season on happiness and love. I want to explore how couples can communicate better to build happier, healthier relationships. And so I tagged in journalist Charles Duhigg, author of a recent book entitled Super Communicators, How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. Charles is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and reporter, someone who has made an entire career using words to express complex ideas. But Charles, as it turns out, wasn't always a super communicator, particularly when it came to talking to his wife. So I got into this terrible pattern where I would

come home, my wife and I met each other in college. We've been married for almost 20 years now. And I'm supposed to be a professional communicator because I'm a journalist. And I would come home from work after a hard day, and I would start complaining about my boss or my coworkers. And my wife very reasonably would say something like, why don't you take your boss out to lunch so you can get to know each other better? Which is good advice. But instead of being able to hear her advice, I would get even more upset.

And I would say like, you know, why aren't you supporting me? You're supposed to have my side on this and be outraged on my behalf. And then she would get upset because I was acting irrational. And so this pattern, we could recognize it, but we couldn't stop it from happening. And so I went to these researchers and I said, look, tell me what's going on here. Like what's happening? And they said, well, we're glad you asked because we're living through this golden age of understanding communication in ways that we never have before because of advances in neural imaging and data collection. And they said, the biggest problem here is that most people think of a discussion as being about one thing, right? It's about where to go on vacation or what happened today. But actually, each discussion is made up of multiple different kinds of conversations.

And most of those conversations, they tend to fall in one of three big buckets. There's practical conversations, right, where we're solving a problem or coming up with a plan. There's emotional conversations where my goal is to tell you how I feel, but I don't want you to solve my problem. I want you to empathize and understand. And then there's social conversations, which are about how we relate to each other, how we relate to society and society relates to us. And they said, the key here is if you're not having the same kind of conversation at the same time, then you're not really communicating with each other. So when you came home from work and you were upset and you started complaining to your wife,

you were having an emotional conversation. And then she responded with a practical conversation. She gave you advice, but you couldn't hear that. And when you said you couldn't hear that, she couldn't hear you. And so the key here is what's known as the matching principle, that we need to have the same kind of conversation at the same moment if we really want to connect with each other. And what seems super interesting is that, you know, you were talking about how you struggled with this and I, you know, I can totally relate. But it also seems like there are people who are really good at this, right? Like there are definitely people in my life that I can call up and whichever mode I feel like I'm in, whether I'm, you know, kind of really looking for some

practical advice or just want to like, you know, kind of moan about something, they kind of instantly recognize it. And this was something that you figured out in your work too, that there's like these important individual differences there. That's right. That's right. So these are folks who are super communicators. And what's interesting is that we're all super communicators at one time or another. Some people just can do it more consistently than others. So if I was to ask you, you know, if you were having a bad day and you wanted to call someone who you know would make you feel better, like, does someone pop into your mind right away about who you would call? Yeah, it's either my good friend April or Ryan, who's my producer, who's also my very good friend. There you go.

Yeah. So for you, they are super communicators. And you are probably a super communicator back to them. You guys know how to prove to each other that you've been listening. You know how to intuit what the other person needs. Now, you're exactly right, though. There are some people who are super communicators on a more consistent basis. They're that person for everyone. Everyone loves to call them. And one person described it as, there's someone who is my best friend who everyone else thinks he's their best friend too, right? And it's interesting. And what we know about these people is that they are not like super charismatic. They

are not extroverts. They are not people who are born with this. Oftentimes exactly the opposite. There are folks who, if you ask them, they say, I had trouble making friends in high school or where my parents got divorced and I had to become the peacemaker between them. There are people who had to think just a little bit more about how communication works. And it's that thinking about it just half an inch deeper that makes us into super communicators. But it's skills that anyone can learn. They're skills that we're going to discuss on this podcast that we can teach. And if anyone learns them, anyone can connect with other people. And so let's do a deeper dive kind of neuroscientifically into what happens when super communicators are at work, when people

are really connecting with one another. I know in your book, you talked about this form of kind of neural entrainment. What is that? And how does it show that communication is working so well? I love this. And this is something that we've all experienced, which is communication is Homo sapiens superpower, right? It is what has caused our species to succeed so well. And it's what allowed us to build families and then cultures and societies and eventually cities and countries. And the way that it evolved is that we actually developed little pleasure centers that get activated when we connect with someone else. So what's actually happening there? Well, what we know from experiments, and a lot of this comes from Talia Wheatley, who's at Dartmouth, and Uri Hassan, who's at Princeton, is that when we actually connect

with each other through communication, our bodies and our brains reflect that connection. So right now, even though we're separated by thousands of miles, if we could measure it, our eyes are probably dilating at similar rates. Our breath patterns are starting to match each other, even though we're not in the same room together. Most importantly, what's happening inside our brains is becoming similar. As I'm describing something, you're experiencing the same emotion or idea that I'm describing and vice versa. And our neural activity is beginning to look more and more similar. And the more similar it gets, the better we understand each other. That's what neural entrainment is. And when it happens, it feels wonderful. Everyone knows that experience, right? When you've had a great

conversation and you just feel like you're on cloud nine afterwards, that's actually a biochemical reaction your body is having to encourage you to try and have those conversations because they've been so successful at helping our species succeed. And so what did neuroscientists learn when they started looking at who's better at this neural entrainment? Were there some particular characteristics of people who did it better? Like, what did they figure out? Yeah, yeah.

A guy named Bo Sivers, working with Talia at Dartmouth, did this really fascinating study where he would bring strangers into a room and put them into groups and have them watch these movie clips that were totally confusing. And in fact, they were in foreign languages

and there was no subtitles and the sound was off. And then he would have them talk to each other and you would scan their brains while they were watching it and then also scan their brains afterwards. And he found that when people talk to each other, the way that they reacted to the movie clips became very similar, right? That they achieved neural entrainment in talking about the movie clips that allowed them to connect with each other. But some groups became much more entrained, much more synchronous than others. And in those groups was someone special. In those groups became much more entrained, much more synchronous than others.

And in those groups was someone special. In those groups was a super communicator. And one of the things that super communicators do is they tend to ask more questions, like 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person. But many of them are things like, huh, that's interesting. What do you think about that? Or, oh yeah, what'd you say next? Like these little questions that we don't even really register as questions, but they invite us into a conversation. They also did this thing where they would repeat back or positively reinforce what other people said. So someone would say, here's my idea. And they'd say, oh, I really liked that idea. Or they'd say, you know, it's interesting. What I hear you saying is this,

like, tell me if I'm getting this wrong. You said X and Y and Z. This is known as looping for understanding. And it's this amazing technique, particularly in conflicts. But most importantly, what super communicators did in those groups that caused everyone else to become synchronized, helped other people speak up and hear each other, is that they showed that they wanted to connect. They did things like laughed when other people laughed or got serious when other people got serious. They changed how they were communicating to match the kind of conversation that others brought up and invited them to match back in return.

So in one conversation, one of the participants brought up, they were talking about this movie clip where a kid looks like he's abandoned. And this participant says something that makes you think like probably he knows abandonment firsthand. He knows what it's like. And the conversation was really jovial up to that moment. And as soon as he says that, the super communicator says, huh, yeah, that can be really, really hard. Like, tell me what you think about that.

Like, he gets serious. He matches that solemnity. And within 45 seconds, everyone else in that group was being supportive and empathetic, was talking about the seriousness of this. That's what super communicators do. They match others, they invite them to match back, and they show they want to connect. And it's really powerful. And so this must have huge implications for the kinds of things that happen to super communicators. Like, they're so good at this. Like, do we know anything about, like, what happens in their real life, too? You won't be surprised to learn they're very popular and successful. We have data on what super communicators are like outside of the laboratory. And of course, they are the people

who are asked to run for office or given leadership roles. They're the people everyone turns to when they have a problem or they're always invited along because they just know adding them to the conversation will make everyone feel better. Because of the Harvard Adult Health Study that was done, the Harvard Adult Health Happiness Study, I guess is what they're calling it now, we know that the folks who do this who tend to have a lot of connections, they live longer than the average person. They're happier as they get older. They tend to be more successful because people just bring them opportunities. As I mentioned, communication is our superpower. And super communicators have that superpower.

It is something any of us can learn to do. And its dividends are enormous. And one of those dividends is the ability to quickly build bonds with new people. So after the break, we'll learn how adopting the habits of super communicators can help us navigate the minefield that is dating. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. Before we start swiping on a dating app, we usually set up a profile that makes us look really cool. We upload pictures of us wearing nice clothing,

living the high life, maybe even traveling to exotic locations. We try to share all our accomplishments and interesting activities. So it seems like we should want to keep that vibe going when we get to the date itself, sharing stories that make our lives look fun and adventure-filled. Well, according to Charles Duhigg, that's not what a super communicator would do. It's all about the interaction. And my guess is, and tell me if I'm getting this wrong, is that when you and your husband met each other, it's kind of like when me and my wife met each other, that we walked away from the conversations feeling special because the other person told us we were special. Not because they were special, but because they told us we were special. So give me an example from your early, like how you guys met and how you first got together.

First date, kind of conversation. Yeah. So we met in college and I was studying intellectual history at Yale. And so I was super into like postmodernism. And I just babbled about postmodernism for like 10 minutes. And she said, she's the kindest woman on earth. She said, that's really, really interesting. I've never heard that before. And it doesn't make any sense to me,

but I'd like to learn more. Of course she was just being nice. But as a result, I felt like the smartest person on the face of the planet. Like I felt like I was, I was so special. And here's one of the things that we know. So we know about when it comes to romantic relationships, particularly at the start of romantic relationships, there are two things you can do that is more powerful than anything else. And then a third thing that's really effective. The first thing you can do is ask questions. And some questions are more powerful than others.

And these are known as deep questions. A deep question is something that asks us about our values or our beliefs or our experiences. And oftentimes a deep question doesn't appear deep, right? If we're on a first date and I say, what do you do for a living? You say, I'm a lawyer. And I say, oh, that's really interesting. Like, what made you decide to go to law school? Like, what's the best case you ever had? Those questions are asking you to tell me about your experiences, the values that brought you to law school, the beliefs that you carry into your work. And when you answer those questions, you're going to tell me something incredibly valuable about yourself. You're going to tell me something meaningful. So the first step

that we can do is teach ourselves not to ask about facts, but instead to ask essentially about feelings, about people's values and beliefs and their experiences. And there've been some really cool experiments to show the power of this. One was a study that was actually about speed dating and like what you can do in the context of speed dating. So tell me a little bit about that. Oh my gosh, I love this study.

And there's been a couple of times that they've collected this data. So what they did is they had all these speed daters come together and they kept track of which speed dates were successful and which weren't. Basically, do people say that they want to have a follow-up date? And what they found is that the number one thing that made a speed date successful is if one person asked a question within like the first 30 seconds and asked a deep question.

Then when the other person would respond, something important would happen. The asker would oftentimes answer that same question for themselves. Oh, it's interesting you became a lawyer for that reason. I became a doctor because I also love helping people, right? It was very natural to share something about themselves, to engage in emotional reciprocity or vulnerability reciprocity. And then they would inevitably do something to prove that they had been listening to what the person had said. Sometimes that was asking a follow-up question. Follow-up questions

are incredibly powerful because they show that I'm paying attention. They show that I'm curious in you. Sometimes it's what's known as looping for understanding, where I repeat back what you said in my own words and I ask if I got it right. These behaviors of proving we are listening are incredibly meaningful, particularly if we're in a stressful situation, like a fight or a first date. Part of what we're wondering in our head is like, is this person actually listening to me or are they just waiting their turn to speak? And speaking is such a cognitively intense activity. We don't notice if the person is staring into our eyes.

We don't notice that they're nodding their head. We're focused on the words coming out of our mouth. So it's what they do after we stop talking that proves to us that they've been listening to us. And that's really powerful. It's so interesting because I feel like we get this advice of like, to show that you're listening,

really look someone in the eyes or kind of nod while they're speaking. But the evidence seems to suggest that that's not really doing anything because people can't pay attention to that in the moment. What they have to pay attention to is after you're done and you've told your story, it's how people follow up. It's what they say afterwards that seems to really matter. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And that doesn't mean you shouldn't nod and you shouldn't look people in the eye because it's oftentimes encouraging to get that. But next time you're talking to like a small group of people and after you finish speaking, try and remember who was looking at you and who wasn't. And you'll have no idea, right? Because

we just don't pay attention. But that person who says, oh, that's so interesting. What I heard you say was that person we remember. And so broadly, it seems like what you're trying to do to kind of in an early conversation is to really make sure you're actually listening and learning about somebody. If you sort of set up this goal that the conversation is really for learning about the person and specifically learning not facts, but their values and their beliefs, that's the kind of thing that can get communication off the ground. That's what super communicators seem to be doing. That's exactly right. And that was an excellent looping for understanding. I totally believe you're listening to me.

But it is super interesting in that once we get in the habit of this, so once I was exposed to this idea for looping for understanding, and there's these three steps, right? Ask a question, a deep question. Repeat back what you just heard in your own words. Then, and this is really helpful in a conflict, ask if you got it right. Once we start doing that, it almost becomes habitual, like it was for you, right? To sort of repeat back what you've heard. And what it shows the other person is not only do I want to connect with you, which is what's important, but also it creates trust

and it creates a sense of intimacy. Because if you believe that I'm listening closely to you, you'll want to listen back to me. It also helps me be present in that moment because you're exactly right. If I realize the point of this conversation is to have a learning conversation, to understand you and to help you understand me, not to convince you of something, not to change your mind, not to convince you that I'm the greatest thing on earth, but just to understand you and help you understand me, then it doesn't matter if we walk away still disagreeing with each other or if we walk away and say, ah, I'm not interested in the second date. The conversation has been a success if we understand each other. And it seems like the best way to understand each other differs from what we often think. You know, these days we

hear a lot about perspective taking, you know, not just in relationships, but I think even in times of conflict and things. We have to perspective take on what the other side thinks or what the other person thinks. But the research shows that there's something better than perspective taking. Explain what this other thing is, because it seems to fit really well with the kinds of strategies we're talking about here. And this work comes from Nick Epley at the University of Chicago, who's just wonderful. And just for anyone who hasn't heard that phrase perspective taking before, there's this theory in psychology that the best way to communicate is to put yourself in someone else's shoes, right? To try and take their perspective on a problem. You know, I'm a man, but like, I'm going to try and put myself in my wife's shoes and see the world

from her perspective. The truth of the matter is, and study after study shows us, I can't do that. I have no idea what it's like to be a woman in today's world, right? And if I think I do, I'm kind of fooling myself. But what I can do instead is this thing called perspective getting, which is when I ask you what it's like to be you. When I say, and I can say this to Laurie, like, you know, my wife is an academic and you're a woman in science. I'm just wondering, like, what's it like? Like, what are the challenges that you face that I might not understand about being a woman at a university? What are the challenges of being a mom, of, you know, being someone who

has outside interests? Instead of trying to assume that I can stand in your shoes, let me just ask you what it's like to be in your shoes. This is where if I can repeat it back, it becomes really powerful. It's not only to show you that I'm listening, it's to force myself to listen. Because the truth of the matter is, sometimes even if we want to listen, we just get in our own way, right? We start coming up with counter arguments in our head. We start thinking about what we should say next so that we seem smart. But if my assignment is, I need to listen closely enough that I can repeat back what you just said, I'll actually listen closely enough.

And that kind of close listening also contributes to the second thing that I think could be so powerful about perspective getting, which is it increases people's trust, right? There's a kind of emotional contagion and an emotional bond that happens. Can you explain what some of the research shows why that's so powerful? admitting that they killed someone. It can be something as small as saying, you know, I became a doctor because I like helping people. I might not care about your judgment, but I'm giving you an opportunity to judge me. You could be like, look, money matters more than whether you should help people, right? Offering you an opportunity to judge me, even if I don't care about it, feels vulnerable. And there's this thing that happens of emotional contagion, which is

vulnerability is the loudest form of communication. If I say something vulnerable, you will listen really, really closely to what I'm saying. And then if you say something vulnerable in return, if you share something about yourself, I will listen really closely. And that emotional contagion, once it occurs, makes us feel more trusting and liking of each other. It's hardwired into our brains. We almost can't even overcome it. I'm sure everyone has had this experience where it's someone you really dislike, you disagree with them, and then they say something so real and honest

and you just find yourself sympathizing with them or liking them a little bit more. That's because we can't fight this emotional contagion. And so we should use it to help us bond with other people and connect with them. Explain this sort of fast friends experiment. I think this is something that's even entered the public consciousness. People have heard about these 36 questions. So talk about what the science really shows and how increasing vulnerability can be powerful for

like maybe even romantic connection. Oh, I love this study. So these two researchers who were married, Elaine and Arthur Aron, went and they did this experiment. They wanted to try and figure out if they could make strangers into friends. So they would bring all these strangers into a room, just pairs of them, you know, one by one, sit down with someone else you don't know. And they gave them this list of 36 questions to ask and answer right back and forth. And it would usually take about 45 or 50 minutes. And this is all pre-internet. And then people would just go their separate ways. So then seven weeks later, they tracked down everyone that had come into that room and they asked them, did you ever talk to that person again? And they found that 70% of the

people who had participated went and they found the other person so that they could go out to beers with them or go see a movie together because they felt so close to them. And this is back when it was hard to find other people, right? You had to go. Some people would go through the phone book and call everyone with a similar name until they found the right one. They would wander up and down dorms looking for the person that they had talked to. Because after 45 minutes of asking and answering these questions, they felt really close.

In fact, more than one couple ended up getting married who met each other through this experiment. Now, what's special about those questions? Each of those questions was in its own way a deep question that asked people to reveal something about themselves. And then, because they had to go back and forth answering them, the other person could reciprocate that vulnerability. So some of them were simple, like if you were having a dinner party and you could invite anyone from history, who would you invite? Well, that tells you who I admire, right? It tells you a little bit about my beliefs. Some of them were really deep, like describe the last time you cried in front of another person. When I do that, I'm obviously exposing something really meaningful about myself.

And if I expose that, and then you answer the same question and you expose something about yourself, we are going to feel closer to each other, even if we have nothing in common. If you do that in speed date, you're definitely going to get another date. But the key is that we have to respond to those emotional moments well. That's exactly right. And this is something you've also talked about in your book. And some of the great science on this came from a domain that I didn't expect. You know, when I was reading your Super Communicators book, I was expecting to see all these cool social science studies.

But I didn't think I'd be hearing about scientific work that came out of NASA on super communication. But it's actually something that folks at NASA are pretty worried about, how to do this emotional connection right. So tell me a little bit about that. So it's interesting. So starting in the 1980s, NASA realized that they're going to start having these longer space missions, right? People going into space for six months to a year. And it became a real problem because they figured if you're stuck in a tin can, like surrounded by vacuum for a year, six months with five other people, you really have to have good emotional intelligence. You really have to be able to connect with other people. The problem was that when they interview astronaut candidates, like these men and women, they are at the top of their game. They know the right answer to every question. They know how to expose a vulnerability. So it seems admirable. They can fake in emotional intelligence better than anyone else. And so they couldn't, NASA couldn't figure out who actually has emotional intelligence and who,

who's faking it really well until they were up in space. And the ones who were faking it ended up being huge problems. So there was this one guy who was a psychologist there, and this was really bothering him. And so he spent a lot of time listening to recordings of old interviews. And he noticed the people who went on to be really good astronauts, really good at emotional intelligence, they laughed differently than everyone else. They would laugh with the same kind of energy and at the same intensity as him, regardless of what that intensity and energy was. So he changes how he says his interviews. He starts coming in,

and he's carrying up a stack of papers, and he accidentally drops them as soon as he walks in, which is actually on purpose. And he's wearing this garish yellow tie. And he says, my kid made me wear this tie today. And now I drop my papers. I just, I look like a total clown. And then he would laugh really, really uproariously. And then he would pay attention to see if the astronaut candidate laughed back with the same energy and intensity, or if they just politely chuckled. And it's not just laughter, right? These are known as non-linguistic expressions. Later in the interview, he'd often tell a story about someone who had died in his family. And he would pay close attention to see, did the candidate try and comfort me? Or did they kind of just step back and say,

I'm going to give him his space to have this emotional moment. I don't want to get too deeply involved. What they were looking for is the people who matched him. Now, some people might laugh loudly and they might laugh quietly. It didn't matter what kind of laugh they had. It didn't matter how they comforted people. What mattered was when he displayed an emotion, did they try and match that emotion, show that they were hearing it, engage with it, and create space for him to discuss that emotion? When we try and prove that we are listening, this is what super communicators do. When we show that we want to connect, which is what laughter is, then we start to actually connect. And it makes all the difference.

And the work seemed to show that there were two particular ways that it worked well when emotions were matched, right? So tell me about those kind of two moments of matching. I like this in particular because it seemed like the mood and the intensity were ones that like telemarketers use too. So that's why. Yeah. Yeah. So the two ways that we need to match other people and the two ways that we oftentimes pick up on other people's emotional signals are through mood and intensity. So if somebody is negative and they're high energy, they're probably angry. But if they're negative and low energy, then they're probably sad. And the difference between interacting with someone who's angry and someone who's sad is very significant, right? We want to treat them differently. So our brains have become designed

to pick up on these two things, on mood, either positive or negative, and on energy or intensity, which is either low energy or high energy. And so we notice this almost immediately when we see other people. When you're walking down the street or you walk into a coffee shop and you see someone who is positive and high energy, then there's part of you that says, okay, this person is like really, like they're enthusiastic. Like it's all right. You're like, I'm going to go over and I'm going to talk to my friend and we're going to have a great time. If they're positive and low energy, you think, oh, they're in sort of a contemplative state of mind. They're calm and they're relaxed. And so when we are trying to match with someone, it's key to try and pay attention to that mood

and that energy and sort of align with it. And in fact, the TV show, The Big Bang Theory, the most popular sitcom in history, was actually a big flop until they figured out that if they had the actors match each other's mood and match each other's energy intensity, then they could show the audience that they were connecting with each other. And when you think about it, take laughter. that they were connecting with each other. And when you think about it, take laughter. So we know from studies that about 70% of the time when we laugh, it is not in reaction to anything funny. I laugh because I show you I want to connect with you. You laugh back to show me you want to connect with me.

But imagine for a minute that we're talking to each other and I laugh like that and you go, I know that we're not connecting with each other and I laugh like that. And you go, yeah, I know that we're not connecting with each other, right? I know because your intensity is very different from mine that we're not actually on the same wavelength, that you don't necessarily want to be on the same wavelength. And that's really powerful. And what's so cool is that so many of these kind of communication strategies are really ones that are just like built into us as primates, right? In theory, this is the sort of real basis of how we've been connecting, you know, for thousands and thousands of years. But in the dating world, these days, we're connecting over media that look

really different than the normal in-person communication that we've used forever. Like these days in the dating world, people are connecting over apps or over a text message thread. And so talk about where communication can go awry and how we might be able to become super communicators when we're first meeting people in these new kind of domains that maybe our whole super communication system wasn't really built for very well. No, you're exactly right.

When I met my wife, we were in college together and that seemed like the most natural way to meet your spouse, right? Like you get to spend a lot of time with them. You know people in common. And now if I was suddenly single and having to use apps, I would be disastrous at this. I would have no idea what I'm doing. But what's interesting is I would learn. One of my favorite examples of this is that if you go back to when telephones first became popular, there were all these articles that came out that said, no one's ever going to be able to have a real conversation on the phone, right?

It's going to be useful for sending over grocery lists or stock orders. But if you can't see the person, you can't really connect with them. And what's really interesting is they were right at first. There were all these studies where they would transcribe phone conversations. And they were stilted and weird and awkward because people didn't know how to use that channel of communication. and awkward because people didn't know how to use that channel of communication. Now, by the time you and I were in middle school, of course, we could have conversations for like seven hours a night. They were like the best conversations of our life on the telephone. And it's because people tend to learn how to use different channels. And what they learn is

different channels require different approaches. So you and I can see each other right now because we're on Zoom. But if we turned off our cameras, odds are we would both, even without realizing it, we would both start enunciating our words a little bit more. We would start making the emotion in our voices a little bit stronger because we know that the other person can't see us. So we know that we need to do that. Now, the problem is, as you pointed out, is we've been online for like 20, 25 years now, right? It's like a millisecond in evolutionary time.

It's like a millisecond, right? There's no evolution that's happened in our brain around digital communication. And so as a result, we haven't learned how to use these different channels differently. And sometimes, because it's so fast, and we're not thinking hard, and we just are busy, we assume that sending a text is like sending an email, is like making a phone call. We don't think about the different rules that different forms of communication require. And so as a result, I send you a brusque email that you think seems really like just a short email that you think is brusque. Because I'm thinking if I

told you this in person, you would understand it's not brusque. I'm just busy. Or I say something sarcastic because I can hear the sarcasm in my own head. And you could hear it if we were on the phone. But when I type it, you don't realize it's sarcastic. You think that I'm being a jerk. And so a huge part of digital communication is just taking a second and saying, what are the different rules for this form of communication? Because texting is different from Snapchatting, is different from emailing. And what I noticed, I have kids, a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old, they do this automatically now. There are things that they do on texting that is completely different from what they would do on email, which is completely different from

how they talk to each other on Snap, which is completely different from how they talk to me at home. They're learning these different channels and the rules for these channels. And those of us who are a little bit older, we sometimes have to remind ourselves. And so what are some of the specific things we can remind ourselves? Because I feel like this comes up all the time,

both in my marriage and my relationships, but also just in friendships and with work colleagues and so on. What are some of the really specific strategies? So we know that when you go online, basically everything that seems polite should be done a lot more. There was a really interesting study that looked at Wikipedia editors who would like get in these fights with each other. And they found that if just one person started saying please and thank you, it lowered the

temperature of the conversation by like 50%. Everyone else would suddenly become more polite and more understanding. One first thing is that you're more polite, like overemphasize the polite. It's never going to come across as obsequious. It's just going to come across as understanding and comforting. And then the second thing you do is read back what you've written, not with the words playing in your head, but actually looking at what's been said. So a really important thing that happens is I mentioned, we tend to rely on vocal tone enormously when we're talking to each other, right? You can tell if it's a joke or I'm serious based on the tone of my voice, but we can't do that in written text.

And so sometimes just taking a moment to reread the thing without letting the voice in your head read it for you will tell you what you're about to send is going to come off sounding so different from what you intend. Really, the tips are basically just to kind of overdo it a little bit. And that's especially true for online dating. It's certainly not bad dating advice to make a point of being considerate and kind. But after the honeymoon is over, a lot of us stop being so careful around our partners.

Charles says that's not what we should do if we want to act more like a super communicator. More on that when the Happiness Lab gets back from the break. We often talk to dozens of people in the course of an ordinary day. We might order coffee, or buy a train ticket, or ask our neighbor to trim back their hedge. We have simple interactions and trickier ones. But if you think of a time when your own communication went awry, my guess is that it probably happened not with some stranger, but with someone who is near and dear to you.

It was this realization that pushed author Charles Duhigg to investigate the habits of so-called super communicators. He hoped that he, too, could learn to interact better with the people whose feelings mattered to him the most. I was working at the New York Times and they made me a manager. And when they made me a manager, I was like, oh, man, I'm going to kill this. I'm going to be so good at this. Like I've had lots of managers and I got an MBA from Harvard and I was okay at the logistics and the strategy part. And it was terrible at communicating. Like people would come to me with problems and I'd try and solve their problems rather than listen. They would come to me and say, this is really important to me. And I would downplay it and try and help them by showing them that it's not that important instead of actually listening to them saying it's important. And so one night I went home and I sat down and I wrote a list of all the times in the last year that I could remember being bad at communicating, like miscommunicating. It was

shockingly long, particularly for someone who's a journalist who's supposed to be a professional communicator. And a lot of them were with my wife and my kids. And this happens again and again and again, where the people that we love the most are often the ones we communicate with the least and the worst because they're around all the time, right? Because there's so many opportunities, we don't feel like we have to seize them. And so that's why I started writing Supercommunicators, is I really wanted to learn how to get better at this myself. And it turns out that oftentimes the people we have conflict with in our life are the people who are most important to us. We fight with our partners. And learning how to navigate through those is really, really important, because that's what makes a relationship long-term successful. And so one of the things you talk about in the

book is that the first step to kind of doing conflict better is to recognize what the real goal is of conflict. And it's often not what we think, which is like, I want to win. You know, I want to show my husband that he was wrong about the dishwasher or something like that. What's the real goal of conflict if we're trying to kind of act more like a super communicator. The real goal of conflict is to understand what the other person is telling you and to help them understand you, right? There's oftentimes this thing that's known as the quiet negotiation

at the start of a conversation. And the quiet negotiation sort of has two goals. The first is to figure out what we're going to be talking about. And the second is to figure out the rules for talking to each other, right? Is this a formal conversation or a casual one? Can we interrupt each other?

Or do we need to wait our turn? There are no right rules, but what's important is that we're on the same page about what the rules are. And the way to do this, honestly, particularly when we're in conflict with someone, is most frequently simply to ask them. So when I come home now and I'm upset, my wife will often say to me, look, do you want me to help you solve this problem or do you want me just to listen to you because you need to get this off your chest? In schools, they often teach teachers when a student

comes up with something that's really bothering them or something meaningful to ask, do you want me to hear you? Do you want me to help you? Or do you want me to hug you do you want me to help you or do you want me to hug you which of course are the three kinds of conversations right the the practical the social and the emotional it also means that when we go to a conflict conversation we ourselves probably need to know what our goal is and and this is something you saw in your research that like figuring that out ahead of time seems to actually be really helpful too oh Oh, enormously helpful. There's work done by a woman named Alison Wood Brooks at Harvard Business School where they asked students before having a conversation with a stranger, simply to write down three topics that they might discuss. And simple stuff. It took 10 seconds,

like the movie we saw last night and the game this weekend. And they found that doing that, people would write it down, they'd stick it in their pocket. Those topics almost never came up during the conversation, but people felt so much less anxious because they knew what they could talk about. And doing that had forced them to think about what they wanted to talk about. This is, I think, kind of the goal, is that, again, this doesn't take much time. It takes like 10 seconds. If we know what we want out of a conversation before we open our mouth, then we're in a position where we can communicate that to the other people. And when we do, it invites them to communicate with us what they want.

Another study that I love was done at this investment bank. This was like a place where people screamed at each other all day long. And they told everyone before each meeting for a week, write down one sentence about what you want to accomplish in this meeting and the mood you hope to establish. So people would write down like, you know, I want to choose a budget together, but I want everyone to be on board and be happy with the results. And then people would like, again, stick the cards with the sentence on it into their pocket. They would walk into the meeting. Most people wouldn't say what was on their card, but because they knew and they knew that everyone else in that room also knew what they wanted,

they would just tell each other. And the incidence of conflict went down 80% during that week. Yeah. So this act of just like knowing what you want ahead of time, even if it doesn't come to that, is really powerful. Another suggestion you had in your book, which I loved, which is to like acknowledge that like the discussion might be awkward,

like that there's conflict and obstacles might come up. You know, talk about why that can be so helpful. And this is particularly true in conversations that, for instance, have to do with identity. Like if we're talking about race or we're talking about gender, something that we're scared about talking about. But it can also just be true for any tough conversation we're going to have. Like in relationships, you know. In

relationships, exactly. If I need to bring something up like about the dishes and I know that like you're probably going to not like hearing this. Oftentimes, one of the things that stops us from having that conversation is that we're worried about how awkward it's going to be. But of course, the truth of the matter is it's going to be awkward. So if we start the dialogue by acknowledging, look, this is going to be an awkward conversation. I'm going to say some of the wrong things. Also, I'm going to make some mistakes. Like I'm going to say some things in ways that I don't mean to say them. So I'm going to ask for your apology in advance because I'm going to screw this up. And it's okay if you screw it up. It's okay if you have a tough time. Simply acknowledging that awkwardness is enormously powerful in helping us

move beyond it or recognizing that the awkwardness is actually part of the conversation. It's one of the reasons we're having it. Then you also mentioned these obstacles, right? That oftentimes in a conversation, these obstacles pop up and they create anxiety themselves because I said the wrong thing, or it's clear that I just said something that offended you, or you're getting defensive, or I'm getting defensive. These obstacles are oftentimes easy to anticipate if we think about them, but we usually don't, right? We just sort of jump into a conversation. I've got something to tell you about the dishes, rather than sitting down and

just thinking for 10 seconds, like, when I bring this up, is he going to get defensive? When he gets defensive, what am I going to do? So anticipating the obstacle and coming up with a plan for what to do when you encounter it is enormously powerful. The plan is usually obvious. You know exactly what to do. But in the moment of panic, when you hit that obstacle without having thought about it at all, you overreact. But if you just take 10 seconds and say, and you can actually announce the obstacles, you can say, look, I'm going to bring this thing up. And in addition to it being awkward, I'm going to work really hard not to be defensive myself. If I'm getting defensive, please let me know.

The thing about tough conversations and conversations in conflict is there is no magic bullet to make them easy. So just embrace that they're going to be challenging. And once you acknowledge those challenges, oftentimes the challenges become less scary and they actually become opportunities for us to connect and understand each other. So me and my wife, this happened like 10 years ago, we went on this vacation without our kids to Florida

and we were staying at this spa. And like, this is supposed to be relaxing, right? I managed to screw it up completely by bringing up money and like, like whether we're spending too much money or whether it's not going well. And like, and like, like whether we're spending too much money or whether it's not going well. And like, and like, she got really like upset. And then I got super upset and we were like screaming at each other in the hallway of the spa. Like, this is like the worst possible way to spend a relaxing vacation. And so when I look back on that, I think to myself, like how different would it have been if I had said to Liz, like, you know what? I think to myself, how different would it have been if I had said to Liz, you know what? I think we're spending too much money.

We need to talk about that. And she said, okay, here's the things that I need to spend on. And I think we need to spend this much on food. And we need to spend this much on school. If instead of just responding and being like, no, no, no, no, you're wrong, which is what I did. If I had said, okay, what I hear you saying is, there are some things that are priorities for you that might not be priorities for me,

but that we have to listen to each other's priorities. And for you, being able to buy organic food is a real priority, even if it isn't for me. Am I getting that right? Then what she probably would have said is either, yeah, yeah, I think you're hearing me. Or she would have said, no, it's not actually the organic food. It's that I feel like you're trying to control how I spend. You're trying to control the money. And that's the beauty of why this is looping for understanding. You need the loop to come back to. You need the loop. So when she says, no, no, no, you got it a little bit, but let me tell you the other part of this. Then I just loop again and I say, okay, what I hear you saying is, part of this, then I just loop again and I say, okay, what I hear you saying is, and we do this again and again and again until we all agree that we understand each other. And the reason why this

is so powerful is, and a lot of this draws on the work of Sheila Heen and her colleagues at the Harvard Negotiation Project. Whenever we go into a tough conversation, whenever we go into a conflict, everyone involved has a story inside their head about why we're here. And the only thing that's certain is our stories are different, right? They might be similar, but they're not the same. And I'm operating from my story. I'm saying like, the reason we're talking about this is that you're spending too much money and you don't appreciate how hard it is for me to go earn that money. And from Liz's perspective, it's I'm taking care of the kids and also I earn my own money. And I don't understand why you keep insisting that like you should have any say in how I spend when I'm not trying to control how you spend. We both have a story inside our head. And as long as

we're operating from that story, it's really hard for us to hear each other. But when we start looping for understanding, what we're doing is really saying, here's the story that I hear you telling me. Am I getting that story right? And oftentimes it is a looping. Oftentimes they have to say, no, you didn't get it exactly right. Let me help you understand. And once we understand the other person's story, that's when we can really hear what they want to say. And we know how to say our own piece so that they can hear it. So I'm guessing that knowing how to do this well has meant that there's like not more like spa blowups and fights. But has this really changed your life? Oh my gosh. It is like magic. It has transformed, not just with Liz and not just with my kids, but like with everyone. Because the thing is, all of these skills, looping for

understanding, asking deep questions, all of those are things that become instinctual once you start thinking about them. They become habits. And what you discover is that like all these problems that I used to create for myself have just disappeared. And it's not like Liz and I agree with each other more. It's not like we're suddenly on the same page about everything. But as long as we're actually communicating about it and we understand our goal is to understand each other, not to win, then we end up feeling like we're both in control. And this control is really important. Because when we are in conflict with someone, when we're fighting with our partner, when we're having a tough time, when we're negotiating the start of

a relationship, we have this instinct for control. It's very human. And so it's very natural to try and control the thing that's right in front of you, the other person, right? If I can just get you to listen to me, you'll agree with me. If I can just get you to see things from my perspective, or when you say, I'm really upset about X, if I can just convince you, like, you shouldn't be upset. That's not a big deal. Like, you're making too much of it, right? If I can control the importance you place on things, it feels like that will work. But of course, it never does. All it does is create more conflict. So instead, if we can find things to control together, control the environment, for instance, like if we're having a fight at 2 a.m. to decide we're going to wait until we're both

well-rested in the morning to talk about this, if we can control ourselves by saying, look, I'm going to take a couple of minutes just to calm down before I answer, if we can control the fight itself and say, instead of arguing about where we spend Thanksgiving and it becomes a conversation about your mother and how she hates me and we spend too much money and you don't earn enough. If we just say, look, we're just talking about Thanksgiving. We're going to keep it to Thanksgiving. Then we're controlling things together. In marriages, I know that you had talked to the Gottmans. There's this line that I love from one of John Gottman's studies, which is that the key to success in a marriage is symmetry.

And what he means is not necessarily we agree with each other. It's that we match each other. That when you get serious, I get serious. When you go light, I go light. And part of that is saying, I'm going to share control with you. We're going to control this together. So we've covered tons of ground in this conversation so far, but just as a final thought, like why should we really copy what super communicators are doing when it comes to relationships and just kind of generally? So I mentioned before this Harvard study, this Harvard study of adult happiness, and it's the largest and longest latitudinal study that we have. They followed around thousands of people trying to figure out what determines future longevity and health and happiness. And the only real thing that they found that seems to be predictive is people who have deep

and meaningful relationships when they are 45 will be healthier and happier and more successful when they're 65. And of course, there's nothing special about 45, right? If you can make it to 45 and you have some deep relationships, it means you've been building them for a while. You probably also had them when you were 25 or 35. And so the lesson to take from that is it doesn't matter how many relationships you have. It matters how deep and important they are. And a huge part of that is just having conversations with them, right? But when it comes to romantic relationships, I think the lesson here is it can get really discouraging, right? Like I have lots of friends who are on the apps and they go on date after date after date. Half

the dates are terrible. And then the other half, they like them, but then they ghost each other. And like, it can be brutal out there. But the thing is that it's, it's worth persisting in. It's worth spending that energy to find the right person. Because when we connect with someone, when we find someone that we can have conversations with, even if we don't end up marrying them, if they just become a friend, that is the thing that gives our life meaning year by year by year. And the people who at 45 have deep, meaningful relationships

and therefore at 65 are happier and healthier, they are the people who spent time and energy and put up with the disappointment of trying to find someone when they were younger. It's worth investing in. It's hard, but it works out in the end and it pays off. If Charles has helped to convince you that you need to invest more in your intimate relationships,

then be sure to check out his book, Super Communicators, How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection. But we haven't finished with the topic of love and happiness just yet. In our next and final episode of this special season, we'll challenge some of the love rules we get from fairy tale romances, movie rom-coms, and Instagram influencers. We'll even ask if it's about time that we settled for a good enough lover. You know, we don't need 100%. We don't need our partners to be perfect. We need them to be there

for us most of the time. We need a relationship that's good enough. That doesn't mean an unhealthy relationship. It doesn't mean an abusive relationship. It just means a relationship that's mostly satisfying. So don't miss the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.