Alison Wood Brooks
Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
You've put numbers on what you care about, and then you try and sort of trade on differences to expand the size of the pie and then claim the largest part of it. And as a psychologist, it made me deeply uncomfortable. Not everything is quantifiable. So much about life and about how we feel towards each other is emotional and trust and fun and love.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And I want to keep this private and just felt like we were missing a big piece.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Yeah. And missing a huge part of what it means to be the most human we can be. And we love each other and want to have fun. And it's like not about just sort of transactional. How can I get as much information out of you? How can I tell you the most amount of information? Even now, a lot of economists focus very narrowly on information exchange. Are we exchanging accurate information?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
But so much of the social world is not about information exchange at all. We're just looking to fill time. We're looking to conceal information and maintain privacy. We just don't want to feel awkward around other people. We want to have fun. We want to learn from each other. I felt like that whole bit needed more of a focus.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Dang, girl. Mid-range jump shots now.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I mean, we start learning to talk to each other when we're one, one and a half. You're a toddler. You do it every day of your life with an enormous number of people, very diverse range of conversation partners. So by the time you get to be a teenager and then an adult. It's second nature to you. It feels like you should be an expert and maybe you are an expert.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
You see other people who are seemingly amazing at it and you're like, wow. And then you feel bad if you feel like you're not.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
When you look under the hood of what's going on during conversation, it is remarkably complex. You get to this point of acceptance where you're like, of course, there's going to be moments of awkwardness. Of course, we're going to forget to say stuff that we meant to say or say things that we regret or interrupt people or have all these little collisions because it's not second nature.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And watching children learn to do it, reading or talking, opens your eyes to how this is not natural. This is not innate. It's hard to learn to read. It takes years to really get good at reading. It takes even longer to learn how to be a good conversationalist. And we get to adulthood and we're still not.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Think about how much time you spend picking out your outfit, making a reservation at the restaurant, buying your makeup, getting your hair done. And literally during all of that, you could be thinking, what are two things we could talk about once we're together? But most people don't do that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
But also, do you think people might feel like that's contrived? I know people think it's contrived. So we've asked people. There's tremendous aversion to this idea of forethought, particularly for people that you know really well. And it goes back to this assumption or this hope that it's second nature. You have this feeling that conversation should feel natural.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
The myth of naturalness. It should feel spontaneous and invented on the spot and a little bit magical that you just land on topics that are fun to talk about and there's never going to be a lull and you're going to just know where to go. And we feel that way even more with people that we know really well and love. We're like, oh, it'll just come.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Which is maybe true a little bit more when you know somebody well compared to like your work colleague that you don't like. But in all of the cases, whether you're averse or not, when you actually have people plan topics ahead of time, their conversations are measurably better.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
We actually know very little about when humans evolved the ability to have dialogue and talk to each other. Estimates vary quite widely. There are signs in the archaeological record. The fossil of jewelry is a sign that they must have learned to talk by this point because they had to pass that knowledge down across generations in order for it to be trapped in the archaeological record.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Exactly. And then they make hypotheses about, well, would they have been able to collaborate on this if they hadn't yet learned to actually talk to each other, communicate in some way?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Here's the project. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
That's how we're trying to figure out when did humans evolve this ability. Then you fast forward. The book starts in the 1700s when there were all of these monarchies in Europe whose kings and queens told people how to talk to each other. Here are the people who are allowed to talk to each other at these times and these are the topics and here are all the compliments you have to say about me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Yeah. Right. That was it. And then around the French Revolution and right after in the Enlightenment and during what was called the Age of Conversation, people started to realize, oh, we can get together and talk about what we want to talk about. And it was in these fancy salons in Paris and it was happening all over Europe.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And so the book zooms in on Immanuel Kant, who was this famous philosopher.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And he lived a very fascinating, very regimented life. Most of his life, he would get up and he would go for his walk at a specific time. He would sit down and do his work at a specific time. They called him the Koenigsberg clock. Very regimented guy. He was not wealthy until late in his life when he was finally able to afford a home of his own.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
A sub teacher. And he would have dinner in these rowdy pubs at night. And as this fancy, very smart philosopher, he would get really annoyed. He's like, this is boring. I want to talk to smart people about my smart ideas. So finally, when he was able to get his own house, he started hosting these dinner parties, which became very well known.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
They were highly coveted invitations to Kant's house for these dinner parties. What I found so fascinating to read about and learn is that his dinner parties had all these rules of conversation. So he almost was kind of acting like this little king in his kingdom. And his rules were, we're going to talk about specific topics at the beginning.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
We're going to talk about specific topics in the middle. Then we're going to joke at the end. We're going to have food and wine that mirrors each of the phases of the meal. I want to go to this.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
So surprisingly, he didn't like debate. He didn't really like when people argued about stuff, especially about the French Revolution. He was like, this is for us to have fun and learn from each other. And it should feel delightful the whole time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Exactly. And so that was sort of the beginning of it. During the age of conversation, this idea was cropping up all over Europe. There were all these philosophers who were pontificating about what it meant to have good, sparkling conversation. It was sort of subversive because it was the first time that they weren't just doing what the king or queen told them to do.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And then the industrial revolution happened and people started mixing a lot more. We're not just talking about highfalutin philosophers getting their fancy friends together. People are going everywhere all the time. You never know who you're going to run into in all classes and all status. So we need to now figure out what are we talking about? How are we talking?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
What are the new rules of conversation?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And you're going to see them on the road as you're walking past and you're allowed to greet each other. If you say hi, what are you going to say? Can you even tell who's who anymore? Right. And I love that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Yes. So fast forward. So all of this mixing is happening. The big experiment in democracy is happening in America. All the Europeans think that Americans are no good at conversation. We're talking about ourselves all the time. We spit while they're talking. I mean, there's all kinds of stereotypes developing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Fast forward a bit more, in the mid-1900s, middle of the 20th century, game theory appears. So these are economists and game theorists like John Nash from A Beautiful Mind. Oh, sure, sure.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Yes, Morgenstern, Thomas Schelling. Now, they studied what they called coordination games. which were really simple. But at the time, they were really hot and flashy. So it would be like the game of chicken as a coordination game. Any choice two or more people are making independently that they can't talk to each other. So like in a game of chicken, you're coming towards each other.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
You both have to choose, am I going to go right or am I going to go left? But you can't talk about it. If you coordinate, you pass successfully. Motorcycles or Sea-Doos or whatever you're on. Horses with jowls. Yes, exactly. If you miscoordinate, you collide. That's a simple one. There are non-cooperative coordination games, like the Prisoner's Dilemma. Do you know the Prisoner's Dilemma?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
No, that's different. That's the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I thought you just had an electric shock just now.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Milgram, that's how I react to the name, too. Yes, Milgram did the Stanford Prison Experiment and the shocks.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
That was a different guy. I thought Milgram did shocks.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Yes, Stanford Prism. Milgram is like the shock. Milgram. Okay. Oh, yeah. I'm going to quiz you at the end.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Yeah, yeah, because it's a stimulant, right? Yeah. We cut through so many cases of Diet Coke at HBS, at Harvard, because so many of the faculty are ADHD and they're self-medicating. medicating in tiny doses. That makes sense.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Okay, sorry. So yours is separate from all of it. Forget about Zimbardo's Sanford Prison Experiment. Forget about the shock. So the Prisoner's Dilemma is a coordination game that people were thinking about.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
You imagine there's two people being questioned in separate rooms, interrogated about a crime, and they both face a choice, and they can't talk to each other about it, to either stay quiet or snitch. If they both stay quiet, they're going to go to jail, but not for very long. If they both snitch, they both go to jail for much longer.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
So it seems simple that you should stay quiet, except if you snitch and the other guy stays quiet, you walk free.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Everybody is tempted to betray. And so this is a non-cooperative coordination game because you're incentivized to not cooperate. Oh, interesting.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
That's what makes it hard. The biggest reward is to walk free.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
In theory, logically, but if you're the person, you start to get the sense of why these games are interesting to people because then you can change all kinds of stuff. Who are you imagining in the other room? What's your relationship with them? What do you know about the person? If you did this game 10 times in a row based on their prior behavior, what do you do in the last round?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
These games have been studied so much that I'm sure there are lots of cross-cultural findings about how Germans play, how everyone plays. So economists and game theorists were kind of obsessed with these coordination games. Now fast forward to now. We have whole fields that have been studying social psychology, communication, all of this stuff.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And what I realized is even though we have these whole fields that are about interpersonal interaction, not a lot of people had gone to the trouble of actually recording real people talking to real people at very large scale. The reason they hadn't is because we needed new technology to do it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
We needed natural language processing and machine learning to help us analyze tons of transcripts at once. We just weren't ready to do it until very recently. But as we were sort of like, oh, we should do that. We should record tons of conversations and analyze them.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I also realized conversation is just like those coordination games that the game theorists were studying back in the 1950s, like Thomas Schelling. He has a famous one where he asked people, if you had to meet up with people at noon tomorrow in New York City, where would you go?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Is it a riddle or is it just a fun talking? It's just a coordination game. You can't talk about it. Oh. And everybody writes down their answer.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Let's pick L.A. Let's do it. Okay, yeah. So if you had to meet up with Monica tomorrow somewhere in L.A. at noon, think in your mind where you would go. And it's not here. It can't be here.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Monica, what's your answer? Cara.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Oh, the bar at Cara? Yeah. Or the restaurant.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
The most frequent one that people say is Grand Central Station. Everyone will be arriving there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Thomas Schelling called them focal points. It's because it's stuff that your mind goes to quickly that you think other people are going to do. Yeah, high probability.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Yeah. We're here. That's a focal point for you in your shared reality and your relationship that helps you coordinate. So what we realized about conversation is it's just like these coordination games, except every little detail. moment is like a coordination game. When you're trying to decide, what are we going to talk about next? How are we going to talk about it?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
What are they excited for me to ask? Where should we go next? Requires this level of shared reality, these focal points and this mind reading, but it's so much more than just one choice. Do you stay quiet or snitch? It's like, and now, and now, and now, and now, and you have to make those choices relentlessly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I wanted you to say that it was Britney Spears because she had that, like, amazing... I know. Remember the ad back in the day? She was so hot.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I agree. It is incredible. That's what linguists will tell you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
She was so gorge. I would love to see a resurgence. Get back in it. Britney Spears with the Diet Pepsi. She's the one bringing it back. That's what I want. Addison Rae. Addison Rae. Kind of a new gen Britney Spears, if we're being real.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Thank you. Thank you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Yes. Look at you with your memory. Holy moly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I'm turning 40 next month.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Thank you. Thank you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I am at a major inflection point in my life. You're hitting me at the right time. You're young.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I grew up in upstate New York in the Finger Lakes area. Very Rust Belt-y. Yeah. When I was growing up there, not fancy. Since I've moved away and become an adult, it's a beautiful place, and I think the world is more onto it now.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
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Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
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Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Oh! Am I the expert? Maybe. I think I might be the expert.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
That's a good point. Won't be as objective. A lived expert.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
It would be a pair like you. One person is the never-ending question asker. The other person's just answering. And every time Monica talks, she has to end by asking a follow-up question. Oh, wow. And it sounds so extreme, but the experience of it is like Scotty. The experience of it is magic. You immediately move away from small talk. You start learning so much about the other person.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
He started playing a character. You started asking questions you already knew the answer to. So part of this that matters is that you should do it as yourself.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I got these at a local store near where I live.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I love fashion. I actually talk about this with some of my mom friends. As like a fashionista gets older, you get fewer and fewer touch points with people who are actually fashionable, which is alarming because you're like, oh no, I feel myself getting out of touch.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Yes. So I have hundreds of students who are in their 20s. So I get to observe that. I have fancy colleagues who are all ages and flavors of style. I then have all my community friends, cool parents. And then there's social media. So I'm like, am I following the right influencer accounts? Am I getting the right ads?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Calculus for women deciding what to wear in different contexts they find themselves in is so complicated.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Oh, I try not to. So this is part of one of my goals. I used to go much harder when I was in my 20s. I wanted to get noticed. I wanted to be different. I wanted to be the one sort of setting the trend. As I've gotten older, I think it's more about not taking too big of a swing. I don't like that feeling.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
No. I played a little safer, I would say. Even today, I was going to wear like a hot pink sweater. And at the last second, I was like, I'm black. Thank you. Wait, you said you were afraid to ask that?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And that's very bonding. I didn't even realize you were doing it to me. You thought this was a random conversation. I thought you were just asking me. That's so fun.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
This is something I am always working on in myself about conversation is more quickly revealing my vulnerability, my mistakes, my failures, my moments of embarrassment and shame. I'm so hungry to get it out of other people and probably too slow to share it with others.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
So that is very interesting. And we all have multiple selves. But as a twin, you get to see one of your sort of selves outside of your body. It's an amazing, lucky life. I don't know anything else, but it's really quite something.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
How do they respond that you think that's not good? They're guarded? They feel threatened?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And then I'm like, bye. You trusted me with your heart and I stomped on it. The reframe of that is that you actually gave it a chance. Nobody needs to waste their time small talking with people.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
You're a sharer.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
This is verbal kissing. This is you sharing something vulnerable.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
There are people, though, every relationship in their life is like this and they want nothing else, myself included. Yeah, same. I have a colleague at Harvard named Leslie John who's writing a book called Reveal. And it's all about this conundrum of the spectrum from full opacity where you share nothing to full transparency.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
If you could download the full contents of your brain and give it to somebody else as a gift, we're making these choices constantly of how much do we share of ourselves and what consequences come from it. Closeness.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I think about this all the time. One of the downsides of getting really good at conversation is that you don't actually have the bandwidth to be the best friend, the best boss, the best colleague to a thousand people. And it's such a first world problem.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
You're right. I'm not an expert. I don't know those answers. But you're identical. We're identical. We didn't know we were identical until high school. What? The AP biology class was like, hey, can we test you and figure it out? Oh, wow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
If you really work on this skill and people are willing to trust you and share with you and love being with you, the problem then becomes that person actually doesn't have the time and energy to fulfill that role all the time to that many people.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
It is not about boomers. Let me say that first of all. It is about humans of all ages and it's named after a boomerang. So it's when I ask you a question. So if I say to you, Monica, how was your weekend?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
How was yours? Let me tell you about my weekend. You're asking so that you can talk.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Exactly. Very specific.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Very specific. Yeah. So this is boomer asking because it's like a boomerang. You're throwing out the boomerang. You let them answer and then you bring it right back to yourself immediately.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
People do it all the time. I do it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And then you lay the results side by side. This was way before 23andMe. And they were identical. I mean, looked like the same person. Wow. My parents didn't know they were having twins until I was out. It sounds like the dark ages.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Your hand looks different? Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
It's all about the timing. So if you really want to hear about Dax's hand car experiences, and he shares with you very openly, the important thing is follow up on his thing first. So it feels like you actually care because you do. Yeah. Before we get back to your hand changing into a new hand. Luckily, he did not understand what I was talking about.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
So we study that exactly. Oh, tell me. So we randomly assign people to either start with a question, let someone answer and then tell a story or just tell the story. Just telling the story is better. Whether you're bragging, whether you're complaining or whether you're just saying something weird and neutral. Yeah. Like, oh, I think my hand morphed into a different hand.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
It's better to just share it. Which then may trigger reciprocity. That's the hope. But you don't have control over that. But you're going to get the satisfaction of sharing whatever this thing you're dying to share. And you hope that the person you're talking to is actually interested and ask about it or share about themselves. Yeah, interesting.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
That's almost a gotcha question unto itself. It's not. It's not. It's not. A gotcha question is really in the eye of the receiver. If the person feels like you're testing them.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Leading them, making them feel like you want to prove how incompetent they are, that they're a liar, expose them as a fraud. So if I were to say, Dax, you said that you were an actor. Are you acting in anything right now? Oh, yeah. Like, what the hell? You could do it for fun. If we're best friends and I want to tease you, that's a really funny way to do it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
If we're not, and that's a legitimate question, what an asshole. That's a really quick way to make someone feel really bad.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
No, I'm reading you as you're asking me this to embarrass me, to exploit me, to make me look bad. But it's a gotcha question. The same question lobbed from someone who doesn't actually know the answer and really cares about you. Yeah, just wants to know. It's great. The importance is like sort of caring intention.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Of course. In the same way that you do if you're hanging out with your sibling or your very close friend and they do something, there's always a vicarious embarrassment. But this is amplified even more because it's a reflection of you. You're watching yourself do an embarrassing thing as it unfolds live. And you have this normal sibling thing where you're like, stop.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Can I give you guys a compliment?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Which is a levity move. Oh, she's doing it. Really, I think the reason that this podcast and you guys are so great is because you're so good at balancing gravity and levity. It's almost the whole mission of the conversations you have is you want to have stuff you take seriously and you take learning seriously. You take issues and topics seriously. And all the way along, you want it to be fun.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
You accomplished the mission. I agree that that's the mission. Do you disagree that that's the mission?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Oh, let's assess why.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
So we've done research on the relationship between humor and power. Even one joke or one moment where you make other people laugh in a conversation means you're much more likely to be voted as the leader of the group. So I think often when we think of levity or humor, We have a tendency to think of it as like this bonus, this extra sparkly thing that might happen sometimes. And that's nice.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
When you actually study the psychology of humor and levity in conversation and its relationship with status and power, the core determinant of the status hierarchy. So I think your sense of I'm doing this to reclaim power and control is legitimate.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And it's this little micro moment of power because you're like, I know I'm going to say this thing and I'm pretty sure you're going to laugh. Just even that power over somebody to evoke that emotional response in that moment is tremendous. And it signals something about you that you have the competence, the wherewithal, the dominance to make that happen again in the future.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And people read that as a very core competency.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
A lot of funny people do this, this recovery thing. I'm here all night. That was the joke. Right. Right. The recovery of like, well, at least I tried. So in this same research where we're studying humor and power, what we found is even when jokes totally flop, people don't laugh. They think they're inappropriate. They don't think they're funny.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
You still get a boost in how people perceive your confidence because you are at least confident enough to try. Yeah. And even that is admirable.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Moment to moment, when people are talking to each other, when they're walking through the world, what are kind people thinking about and what are they saying to other people? I was, as a psychologist, so curious to try and figure that out. And I think we've come up with some pretty concrete answers of what people who are prioritizing other people's needs more frequently than others.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
These are kind people. And they do some predictable things during conversation. More respectful language that makes people feel worthy and seen and known and understood.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Using people's names is a good start. I think you're worthy of even knowing who you are. Just as a starting place. Think of how many conversations you've had where you didn't know someone's name. It's a very uneasy feeling. Because you can't give them that respect. How can I show you that I care about you and respect you if I don't even know your name? That's a weird feeling.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Let's slap on name tags, guys. Right. Just as a start, that's such a basic thing. But every little linguistic choice you make is an opportunity to show respect or not. Positive language is more respectful than negative. It shows people that you like being with them. Literally things like, great, good, awesome, cool, love that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
As opposed to negative language that's like, no, uh-uh, hmm, that sucks. That makes you feel like you're not enjoying being with me. And then making people feel like they're worthy of your time and attention, which then ties into listening. So when we think about listening, there's decades of work on active listening, which is mostly nonverbal cue, like nodding, smiling, leaning forward.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Two things. You're sort of watching a version of yourself interact in the world. So that's a passive version of feedback where you're seeing how the world reacts to this version of you. But then you're also directly talking to each other in the way that very close siblings do. And you feel even more empowered to be sort of brutal to each other, right? Yeah. Ew, gross. Don't do that. Relentless.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And our more recent research on listening, what we find is great conversationalists use their words to show people that they've heard them. Those can't be faked. So if you're sitting on Zoom, you can be like smiling and nodding, but you're off to the side making a grocery list or texting your friends.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
What you can't fake are things like follow-up questions, callbacks, which is your ding, ding, ding, I think. Yeah. Right? Love a ding, ding, ding. Can't fake a ding, ding, ding if you didn't hear it the first time. Yep. Paraphrasing what other people have said, repeating back to them what they've said. Am I understanding you right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
There's another piece of kindness that we haven't talked about yet, which is receptiveness to opposing viewpoints. So when you confront a moment of difficulty... where you really disagree, many of these same skills, the listening with your words and validating people, that's when it becomes especially important and especially hard to do. Imagine you hate people who had affairs.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And in that moment, you're friends with them having an affair. I hate half the world. And in that moment, what a good conversationalist would do would be, I hear that you're saying you had an affair. It makes so much sense that you're feeling upset about that. Let's consider for a second why this is a bad decision.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
So before you go on to disagree with them, you have to do that hard work of validating them. And almost everyone skips over that. Totally.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Nobody's doing it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I love watching that show. Actually, one of the tactics most helpful on that show, they have these really lovely coaches who come in before their dates and they have them brainstorm topics. Ahead of time. And I'm like, yeah, everybody needs to be doing that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
In all different vectors. In all different directions.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I think to some people, it's not obvious how much more difficult groups are than dyads, than one-on-one, because it feels like you're doing the same task. You're talking, you're listening, you're with other people. It's clear that it's harder to coordinate, but I don't think we've realized how much harder, even here. This whole time, I'm toggling my eye gaze between both of you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
We are still that way. She lives a mile down the road from me. She does. She also has three kids, two boys and a little girl.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Monica's so patient. She's such a good listener. And we're all doing this calculus that's quite a bit different than if it were just me and Monica or just me and Dax together. As soon as a third person pulls up a chair, everything changes. Someone can sit there, be part of the conversation and never talk. That's different than one-on-one where you have to go back and forth.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And so I think people don't realize that as group size grows, the coordination challenges of all conversations grow exponentially. Every person in the group has a unique shared reality, a unique relationship. What's boring to Dax might be really exciting to me and Monica. So all of those little micro decisions get even more fraught.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And one of the things that we have to navigate is status differences. As people get thrown into the mix, every group has an inherent status hierarchy. So the status hierarchy is determined by all kinds of things. Sometimes it's a formal hierarchy, like at an organization, there's a boss or on an army battalion, there's a leader.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Sometimes it's age, sometimes it's level of wealth, sometimes it's expertise, but it's other things, gender, it's race. It's all of these things that our minds are doing this calculation of who has the most power here, who has the most liking and respect, who's the most influential. And we do this internal sort of ranking in a group. And it affects all the ways that people behave.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
We tend to look at people who have high status when they're speaking. They speak more. So you look at them. But also when they're not speaking, we look to see their emotional reactions because they determine the norms. Like, are they surprised by this? Are they pissed about this? Should I be pissed about this? Which makes lower status group members feel invisible.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
She's not a professor. She's a cool twin. She runs a nonprofit. It's amazing. It's called Prime Coalition.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
You're literally not looking at them as much. They feel less welcome to contribute. The revelation that we've sort of realized by studying conversations at the topic level, as you move from one thing to another, the status hierarchy shifts from one topic to the next. Oh, interesting. We start talking about fashion. Yeah. All of a sudden, I am not going to be looking at Dax as much.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I'm going to be deferring to Monica, who's super cool. Yeah, I forgot to give you my guess. In a little bit.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
But if we switch to a new topic on which I have the most expertise, things are going to change. Imagine there's five other people here who have all different expertise and levels of status. So it's shifting dynamically as we move from one topic to the next. It's not like you go to a work meeting and the boss guy is always top dog.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Imagine you land on a topic where all of a sudden low woman on the totem pole has all the value to add. She better feel safe and included enough and welcome to speak when you get to that topic.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
It's like a self-toast.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
You can. It's how our brains are built.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Eradication is not the right goal. The goal instead, the sort of reframe is when you are in that high status position, what can you do to lift other people up? When you're in the low status role and you're marginalized, what can you possibly do to cope with a very difficult position that you're in?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
It sucks. You have a narrower range of things that you're allowed to say that will be seen as appropriate or as a value add. So then you're less likely to speak. And if you never speak, you're not actually bringing value. Nobody ever gets to know you and what you can do. It's this crazy double buy. Our job is to try and learn as much as we can about each other, regardless of status.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
But you can't eradicate it. It's what we're built to do. And status striving, right? We all want to ascend and maintain.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
She's super smart. Yeah, she's the dad when you've never seen anyone who looks as pretty as her.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Yeah, food and safety and attraction and reproduction.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Exactly. It's like a weird self-toast. Yeah. But honestly, I admire her so much. She's done really amazing things.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
When you say that people's reactions are sometimes not what you expect, in what direction are the reactions surprising or have been surprising?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Can I tell you who I talked to about this?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
You hang out with Orna. Orna Goralnik from Couples Therapy. So this chapter on apologies opens with this story from Couples Therapy, one of the couples on the show. Which one? Tashira and Drew. They're from, I think, season one or two. They're amazing. She got pregnant and they started living together. They were in a really rocky place. Yes. I think it was in the pandemic phase of the show-ish.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Yes. And they didn't sleep in the same room, which is fine for those of you who don't go sleep. It's fine. But they were in a really rocky place. I thought that they were not going to end up together. And then you follow them through their therapy. And by the end, one of the things that they got so good at is apologizing to each other. They're not snipping at each other anymore.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
They're not like chewing on their resentments. And so I talked to Orna about it, what she thinks of apologies broadly and in the context of this couple in particular. And she was like, here's what apologies do. Two things. One, they show someone that you understand them, that you understand that there was harm to you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And maybe it was at your hands, maybe it wasn't, but it shows that you understand them. and that you are taking some responsibility, that you care that they've been harmed and that you want to be part of the solution. So that if you can show those two things, that you understand someone and you're taking accountability, if you can do that without apologizing, you don't have to apologize.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
However, apologies are the best shortcut that we have to do those two things in a sincere and really meaningful way. I really think they're the most powerful thing we have in our conversational toolkit.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I said the same thing in the book. I wrote a little story about my oldest, Kevin. It was honestly the most rewarding moment I think ever as a parent.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Oh, it's a doozy. He was a heck of a toddler. He was like a biter hitter. Okay. He used to headbutt. He has all these big ideas and he was a late talker. He was so frustrated. He couldn't express them.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
The whole existence, my whole existence anyway, is every moment you're making these choices of who am I going to be? How are we similar? How are we going to differentiate? When are we going to cooperate and work together and collaborate? When are we going to compete? She's going to play the flute. I'm going to play the oboe. But we're both going to be in the orchestra. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Yeah. So dumb. Yeah. So he was having a tantrum and I picked him up and he flung his head back and he broke my nose. You can see it's like a little crooked. It's okay. I know I still look great. You look crooked. It's fine.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
He had to be maybe three at the time. It was so enraging for all the reasons. I still hadn't taught him to be the kind of person who wouldn't hurt someone like that. He also was three, so he didn't really care. A hard mothering phase. Fast forward, he's now nine turning 10. Maybe he was around when he was seven. He was reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And the main character, Greg Heffley, we were reading together and Greg Heffley apologized to Rowley, which is his best friend, which was rare. He's kind of usually like a jerk to his best friend. And Kevin paused. And in that moment turned to me and he was like, mom, remember when I broke your nose when I was like a toddler? And I say, yeah. It wasn't great.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Thank you for the reminder. As I was staring back at me in the mirror every day, he looked in my eyes and he goes, I'm so sorry. Oh, it was so beautiful. I couldn't believe that occurred to him.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I think it is more powerful because it's harder to do, harder to say.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
You're right. You are doing an action by apologizing that is harder and more vulnerable to do. It is the action of love rather than just saying it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
They're also saying in that moment, I'm saying this to you because I want to have a relationship with you in the future. Because I want you to see me as the kind of person that deserves being in a relationship with. And I want to be with you. And my standards for us are high. Let's get back there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
But this is the crux of kindness always is figuring out what other people need. Do they need to hear the apology? Most of the time the answer is yes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
And every once in a while, if you're apologizing like nine times for the same thing, you're going to start just reminding the person of the thing that happened that wasn't good. There is a tipping point where it becomes too much. Or you just start feeling like, well, that means nothing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
She's a three-point shooter. Vice versa. I got that Brooks mid-range.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
There's a single study of live conversation that shows that refusing to apologize or neglecting to apologize is better than apologizing. But the sort of tipping point is when your partner doesn't feel like it's sincere. Right. You're not doing it well. You're saying like, I'm so sorry you feel that way. There's a lot of ways to give a bad apology.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
So you need to apologize frequently, but do it well.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Don't just promise to change. Actually change.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Blowing sobriety or blowing relational.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Because it's part of the healthy suite of skills that is going to help you do the right thing to begin with. Yeah. If you're able to anticipate it's going to be super hard for me to stonewall for a while, take space, come back, apologize, give them time, then they forgive me, then we move on. That process can be circumvented by not yelling in the first place.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
But we're human. We're all going to mess up. We're all going to yell at people sometimes if they break your nose.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
His name's Kevin, so I was like the mom from Home Alone. I like popped him down and ran away to look in the mirror.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Oh, me too. How fun. You guys, thank you so much for having me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
We're not quiet, shrinking violet. One of me would have already been a lot.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
We did a twin trick in my class the first year I ever taught. I didn't tell anyone I had a twin. Saved it till the end of the semester. It was our day on deception. And we dressed the same. And I went in and I did the normal milling with the students before. Then you go out to close the door. But Sarah came back in and she started the class and she just opened her arms and she was like, deception.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Thank you Thank you.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Of course. I think we only dated the same guy once. What if you said four times? You did do that. Maybe when you're young, one year we held hands for a week and then four years later they went on a date. I think that's kind of the extent of it. Because that would be really weird.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
They are similar in some ways, but quite different. She's always had different tastes than me, actually, in suitors and in the ways that complement how she and I are different from each other. And you saw this a little bit in the book. I was so hard on her about who she was dating. My expectations for who she would end up with were even higher than for myself, which are already so high.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Both. Because it's like having a mirror, you actually get a better sense of what you're good at and not good at because you have this example of someone who is actually slightly better or slightly worse than you at certain tasks. As a psychologist now, for a long time, I would have loved to believe that everything is malleable.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Everything is trainable and learnable and you can change so much about yourself. But I think being an identical twin does highlight how many things are outside your control and genetic. Our hands, if you laid them side by side, I could not tell them apart. Our feet, our voices.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I still to this day answer the phone, hello, this is Allison, because I can't even tell the difference in our voices just on the phone. There are things about our bodies and about your mind that you don't have control over. And then I had my own kids. They each come out so different. And you're like, holy cow, nature's really a thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Psychology was my major, and I got a minor. They called a certificate there in finance, not because I was interested in finance per se, but because I was really interested in economics and this judgment and decision-making behavioral science stuff.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
In this book and in my course and in conversation in general, there's so much mind reading that you have to do of all people. We're constantly trying to figure out what are they thinking about? How are they feeling? Are they interested in this right now? Are they bored? There's this tremendous level of mind reading. I think
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
twins get better at that with each other this is a hypothesis this has not been studied but possibly they get better at it with other people as well because they just had more practice doing it their whole development their whole childhood but i think that's where the stereotype comes from with twins is that they can read each other's minds they've spent a lot of time together they know each other really really well and their brains work similarly see
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Totally. And what it has shown me is even though we're so good at predicting what the other person will do, we have this tight knit, which psychologists would call shared reality. You're better at predicting what your twin's going to do than probably anyone else in the world. And I still don't know exactly what she's thinking and feeling. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
It just shows you even when you have so much in common, you have the same upbringing, the same genes, so many shared experiences, you still can't read people's minds. There's still a mystery element. You can get close.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
The more you interact with somebody, the more you actually care and are good at pattern recognition and pick up on patterns in their behavior and how they think, you can get better at it, especially within specific relationships. But you still don't know perfectly what Monica's thinking all the time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Yeah. And emotions.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I realized that there was a lot of research in clinical psychology about anxiety and the sort of high level anxiety that requires medication or. therapy. And I was like, you know what, though? Everybody's feeling anxious a lot of the time, and it's influencing how they're walking through the world, all of the decisions they're making, all of these choices, how they talk to other people.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I wonder if there's a way that we can study anxiety in that way, that's sort of outside the sphere of clinical psych as a pathology that needs diagnosis, which is obviously so important. But what about the sort of lower grade normal anxiety that most people are feeling a lot of the time? Let's figure out how that's influencing the choices that they're making as they go through their day.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Negotiation was one of the places that we looked, but we also looked at advice. When do you seek advice? When do you take advice?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Who do you seek it from? Do you feel like you have to listen to it? Dax doesn't seek advice from anyone.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Negotiation has been this course that's been taught at every business school and law school for a long time now. It's a great course. The students show up, they take on these roles and they pretend to be, you know, the manager of a factory and you have to negotiate all this stuff. It's informative. It's great. As I was teaching it, though, a couple of things occurred to me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
One, our students at Harvard are already very strategic people. And I was like, do I need to be teaching people who are already quite strategic to be even more... Hard driving. Does that align with my values? That's question number one.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
Number two, so many of the exercises were like, well, you have to negotiate for a car or you're going to go buy a house or you're going to negotiate a merger or a really big deal at work. I was like, I'm a grown up and I don't really have those conversations very often. Maybe once every two months. But you know what I do all the time?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
is talk to people in conversations that on their surface should be easy. And then at moments I'm like, oh, this is maybe not as easy or as fun as it should be. So my sort of aperture of what I was getting curious about and thinking about how to help people was sort of widening.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
What's that? I love that word. Chin wag is literally your chin just, ah, bah, bah, bah. It's a synonym for talking.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I needed to know. That's what you do here. It's true.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Alison Wood Brooks (on the science of conversation)
I remember very vividly back when I was teaching the negotiation course, I had a student raise her hand one day and she was like, so is this just about like solving a math problem? Because in the way that those exercises were set up and the way that we think about negotiating, it sort of is because it's all these things that are quantifiable.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
My name's Alison Young and I'm a police officer in the Metropolitan Police in London.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
You get given like three or four different faces. And you have to memorize those faces.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
So you have to try and work out which one of the faces is the face that you've seen before. And it's that kind of thing.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
It's just the notion of the word super kind of brings out as if we're some sort of superhero or something like that, whereas that isn't the case.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
Well, they're the catalogue of criminals, essentially, that are wanted by police. And what they decided to develop was a thing called snapping, which meant that we may not know who that person is, but...
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
If I look at this face, number one photo on this chart, and then I continue to go through further and further and further through different photos, can I find him in any other photos that he's wanted for? Which then means that we've got him for one offence of, I don't know, theft. We find him for another offence to do with theft.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
And you end up accruing this one person for around 25 to 30 different crimes.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
And they were overtly young in the respect that some of them were in school uniforms.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
And they basically had said to us, we need to find this man. It's young girls, it's predatory, etc. So myself and my colleague, Detective Sergeant Elliot Porritt, did some investigations.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
After a lot of investigation, we discovered that he had quite a specific route of generally being around Camden Town, which is an area in northwest London.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
So we made our way to Camden Town from Scotland Yard on a Wednesday. I can't remember the exact date, but I know it was a Wednesday.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
So we went to the CCTV bit, which was just behind a clear perspex glass where people buy their tickets. So it's right by the entrance foyer to the station.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
I just glanced up. And through the crowd, I just saw him. I saw him walk in, pick up a newspaper and leave, or go to leave. And at which point I, I mean, I screamed because I don't know why I did it. I just screamed. I don't know. I can't quite work out why, but I just made quite a loud noise and just said to Sergeant Porritt, he's outside.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
But it was quite difficult to get out because we had to go all the way back round, back round to the foyer. So by the time we'd got into the main foyer where he was, we couldn't see him anymore.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
And as we turned, we looked just behind the wall, he was there.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
As soon as we got up to him, as in face-to-face with him, the pair of us, like myself and Detective Sergeant Porritt, we were 100 million percent certain that this was the exact same gentleman in all the photos. So he was taking handcuffs immediately and explained to him what he was being arrested for, etc. And it was extremely noticeable that he was very nervous.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
His mouth just went completely dry and he just wasn't able to speak.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
I think my mom was just like, oh, you've got that from me.
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
modest as ever my mother um but my mummy is very very very good with faces very good we'll be walking just doing some shopping and she'll see someone and then go and speak to them and she'll have known them from primary school and she'll remember them and my mum's what's she now 61 and she went to primary school at like seven or eight with them and she'll remember them so do you think this is genetic or do you think this is learned
Hidden Brain
Do I Know You? (A Hidden Brain-Revisionist History special on facial recognition)
I've no idea. I don't think it's learned. I don't think you could teach someone. I don't think you could teach someone to be able to just do it at all.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. There's an iconic episode of the TV show Seinfeld where the character George muses about a woman who treated him poorly. She took advantage of his romantic interest in her, treated him like trash, and then discarded him. George begins fantasizing to his friend Jerry Seinfeld about what he would tell the woman if he met her again.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Are you trying to persuade other people to agree with you? Are you trying to continue to engage in this conversation? Are you trying to connect? Are you trying to learn from them? Are you trying to listen?
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
What we've found in much of our research is that in these moments, when you're feeling these high arousal negative feelings, it's very natural to have goals to defend yourself and to persuade other people to agree with you. You need to understand me. So you start making statements to try and persuade them. But the more effective way to react in those moments is to focus on learning, right?
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The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
which is not intuitive. So you need to learn as much as you can about the other person's perspective. Why did they feel this way? Why did he feel... He clearly felt moved enough that he needed to come and give me this feedback. Tell me more about that. What was that like for you? And how often do you feel this way? And how could I have said this differently?
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
So learning as much as you can about the other person's perspective is... much more effective for making the conversation continue in a productive way and ultimately, and this is sort of the ironic part, ultimately to be more persuasive because the other person is going to see you as much more reasonable and measured.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
I mean, in some ways, this is such a profound insight, Alison, because when I think about the difficult conversations either that I've had or that I need to have, I do think I have approached those conversations with a mindset of how do I convince this other person about this thing that I know is right? I know it's right. They don't know it's right.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
My job is to persuade them that in some ways they are wrong. And in some ways, you're saying that is the wrong way to go about it, that the approach, the orientation of persuasion in some ways sets us on the wrong track when it comes to having these difficult conversations.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
That's right. And you're not alone. Almost everyone has that instinct. It's a deeply held human instinct to feel like you're right and you want to persuade other people to see your point of view and to persuade them to agree with you. It's just not an effective mindset or effective behaviors in the context of a live unfolding dialogue because it's impossible.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Telling someone they treated us poorly. Demanding a raise. Taking away an elderly relative's car keys. We look at what makes difficult conversations difficult and a series of psychological techniques to help you navigate them. How to have difficult conversations today. This week on Hidden Brain.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
It's so difficult to be on the receiving end of that. that it's hard to continue to listen and engage in the ways that you need to to even keep a conversation going.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
So some time ago, Alison, we featured your colleague Julia Minson on Hidden Brain. She has studied the effects of something called conversational receptiveness, which is closely linked to this idea of turning a difficult conversation from an exercise in persuasion to an exercise in learning. What is conversational receptiveness, Alison?
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Julia Minson's work, Hannah Collins, Mike Yeoman, this work is incredible and groundbreaking on receptiveness. They define receptiveness, especially in conversation, as openness to opposing viewpoints. And the ability to engage receptively live in a live conversation is an incredible skill that we can all work on and is counterintuitive to most people.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Can you talk about some of the elements of conversational receptiveness? Julia Minson and others talk about starting with the role of acknowledgement, that you actually acknowledge what it is that the other person is saying to you.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
That's right. And acknowledgement is a very simple thing. It's almost like just repeating back what you've heard from someone. I hear you saying this, right? Is that correct? I hear you asking this question about receptiveness, Shankar. Am I hearing you right? It's sort of this acknowledgement of like, I'm listening to you and I'm understanding what you're saying. Yeah.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
The sort of next bump up from acknowledgement is affirmation. So you take what another person has said and you attach a positive affirmation to it. So I say, I hear what you're saying and also I appreciate it. It makes sense that you would feel that way about this thing. That's great. You're such a reasonable person.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
So this sort of affirmation, I love how you said, I love how you asked this question. It's a great one. And so you attach this positive attribution and affirmation onto your acknowledgement. Now, all of this is completely independent from agreement, right? You are not necessarily going to go on and agree with what they've said. They're just making the point that linguistically—
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
It's so important to start from a place of saying, I hear what you're saying. I understand it. I like it. I think it's reasonable that you feel that way. Tell me more about it. And just maintaining a tone that your partner is going to be able to continue to engage with, whether you go on to agree or disagree later in the conversation. Another way to think of it would be like validation.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
You need to validate their feelings, even if you're not going to agree with their beliefs.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
One of the things that we often do when we're having difficult conversations is that we fixate on the areas of disagreement that we have with someone else. And that's understandable. That's what makes a difficult conversation difficult. But what are we missing when we do that, Alison?
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The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
It's wild. This has been very eye-opening for me. When you're in a conversation, as soon as you stumble across even any sort of difference, when you realize, oh, this person feels differently than me, or they have a belief that's different than mine, or they have a piece of their identity that's very different, our instinct is to focus so strongly on that disagreement or that difference and
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that we almost completely forget about the 99% of other things that we have in common and agree about. I mean, really, like, everyone wants to feel loved. Everyone wants to feel safe. Everyone wants to feel adored and admired. Everyone likes ice cream. Everybody likes being in a warm room, right? Like there's so many things that we all agree about.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
And for whatever reason, all of those things sort of go out the window and we fixate on these little moments of disagreement and difference.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Yeah. And this is not to say that the areas of disagreement are not real. They are real, but it may be that it's actually 15% of the painting as opposed to 85% of the painting.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
That's right. And we forget about the rest of the painting.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
One of the other ideas that Julia Minson and others talk about is that when we are proposing our ideas, so when it's our turn to speak, to hedge those ideas a little bit, to not speak in overly declarative language or confident language, to basically say, I think, or here's something to think about. What does that do in a difficult conversation, Allison?
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
It goes back to this idea of our instinct says that I'm right and I'm going to prove to you that I'm right. And to do that, I need to say it in such a compelling and strong way that you can't possibly deny that I'm right. We forget that it's really hard to be on the receiving end of that, to be the listener and to be receiving such like strong words. statement, righteous sort of language.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
And so this point about qualifying your language, expressing the points that you're uncertain about, like, I actually was wondering if this or I think I'm pretty sure this or I wonder about this. Those qualifications, that qualifying language goes against our instincts to be strong and resolute and decisive.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
In your head, do you play out this conversation? And in every telling, does it end in hurt feelings, misunderstandings, and unhappiness? Alison Woodbrooks is a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School. She studies the art and science of conversations and how we can get better at having difficult conversations. Alison Woodbrooks, welcome to Hidden Brain.
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The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
But being on the receiving end of it, it makes that person sound so much more reasonable and realistic. And it's so much easier to engage with them. So you're probably detecting a theme here, which is... All of this stuff goes towards the goal of being able to continue talking to each other in a way that's productive and, dare I say, enjoyable.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Because if we go along with our instincts to prove to people that we're right, it's very hard to continue to have that conversation and it's going to spiral into a place that's not enjoyable. Yeah.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
You know, I was talking to another guest on Hidden Brain some time ago, and he used to be a champion, you know, debater in high school. And of course, when you're having a debate, you know, you present your strongest argument and the other person presents their strongest argument. And then a judge decides whose argument is the best. And he was pointing out that in many ways,
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The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
we conduct difficult conversations the same way, which is we try and prosecute our argument and expect the other person is going to prosecute their argument. And then imagine that there is some kind of imaginary judge who's going to come in and give us the prize for coming up with the better argument. But of course, in real life, there is no judge.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
There is no third party to adjudicate and say, your argument was better than the other person's argument. Your goal, in fact, is to get across to the other person and to sort of find common ground with the other person. And that's very hard to do when you're trying to beat the other person into a pulp.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
That's exactly right. And there's this sort of thought experiment that I like to do that I think of as my way, your way, the right way. For almost any task or any topic or any issue, let's just call it loading the dishwasher. I have my way of loading the dishwasher. You have your way of loading the dishwasher.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
But probably neither of our ways of loading the dishwasher is the objectively correct or optimal way of loading the dishwasher. And so nitpicking with each other and arguing about, well, my way is the best way. And then you say, well, my way is the best way. It's all so silly, especially when neither of you knows the sort of ground truth, objective reality of what's the best way.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
When the emotions we're feeling are unhelpfully negative, you say, Alison, that we should reframe them in a more positive light. Can you explain what you mean by that? What do you mean by reframing a negative emotion in a positive light?
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When we feel negative emotions, which we all do a lot of the time, we have a lot more control over how we experience that emotion than we would think. So I'll give the example of anxiety. When we feel anxious, it's a high arousal emotion. It's very negative. Our instinct tells us to try and calm down, try and get rid of that emotion.
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The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
People go to great lengths to try and calm down when they're feeling anxious. But calming down requires a sort of two-step move. You have to reduce your physiological arousal. So your racing heart, your sweaty palms, your cortisol in your body, those things are really hard to control. You actually don't have a lot of executive control over those things.
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And you're trying to move from negative emotion to positive. So it's this two-step thing that turns out very hard to do, if not impossible. The idea of reframing is let's focus on the part of it that we do have more control over, and that's our appraisal of negative versus positive. So if you're feeling anxious, what if we stay in high arousal world and you just say to yourself, you know what?
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I'm excited. Just that small flip helps move you from negative valence anxiety to positive valence excitement.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
So you can see, for example, distress as passion, for example, as a way of reframing or reappraising the distress that you're experiencing.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
That's exactly right. So I have worked with Lizzie Bailey-Wolf about this. Often people say, I'm stressed, I'm so distressed. But you can reframe that for your own benefit and saying, no, no, this is just a signal that I care about it, that I'm passionate. And actually saying it out loud is really compelling to the people around you as well.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
So in some ways, what I understand you saying, Alison, is that the goal here is not so much to change the emotion itself, but to shift your interpretation of the emotion.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Alison, one way we mishandle difficult conversations is that we avoid having them all together. How common is such evasion?
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
That's right. Psychologists call this reappraisal. You're shifting the appraisal, not how you're feeling physiologically, but just how you're thinking about and interpreting that feeling.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
You have a colleague, Cynthia, who has a very effective way of reframing emotion when a discussion gets too heated. What is her technique, Alison?
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
My colleague Cynthia is amazing. She's an incredible teacher, and I love watching her teach because she constantly keeps her sort of hand on the dial, the sort of temperature knob of the mood of the classroom. And when she feels like things are getting too down or sad or angry, she calls it out. She says, I'm not loving the emotional vibe in here. Let's hit the refresh button. And she does.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Even just by labeling it and saying, let's hit the refresh button, it really helps so much.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
So in other words, just like we can call attention to what's happening inside our minds and label it and say, you know, I'm feeling defensive, I'm feeling upset, I'm feeling called out, I'm feeling threatened. What she is doing is saying we can call attention to what's happening in the conversation. Notice where we are in the chat.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
That's right. It's what makes levity so powerful as well. You notice if people are getting bored or disengaged from the conversation, it's so important in those moments to realize the emotional timbre and to do something about it. Switch topics, make a joke, smile, give someone a compliment. Just to lift the mood is incredibly powerful.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Avoidance is so common. And it's common in my life, too. I'm an avoider. And so I deeply understand why so many people avoid having hard conversations. They avoid people that they know will be hard to interact with, and they avoid topics that feel at least ahead of time like they're going to be very difficult for any number of reasons.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
One error we make in difficult conversations is we sometimes try to see things from the perspective of the other person, which on the surface seems like a good thing. But the problem is when we do this, we imagine how we would think and what we would do in their circumstances. Talk about what happens when we do this, Alison.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
It's such a well-meaning instinct, but unfortunately, the human mind is so egocentric. So we try to imagine what another person would be thinking and feeling, but we use our own thoughts and feelings as a sort of proxy, as a guess. This is what helps us guess how other people are thinking and feeling. We're relying on our own point of view. And unfortunately, no two people are exactly alike.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Even my twin sister, Sarah, and I are not exactly alike. And most people are just incredibly different from each other. And we underestimate how different other people are from us. So... Very famously, psychologists have found that people are just really, it's very challenging to take another person's perspective.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
The most direct way to take another person's perspective isn't to guess, but to ask them for it, to ask questions and actually hear from their own mouth what's going on in their mind.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
When we come back, why seemingly innocuous comments can deeply hurt another person and a magic key to disarming someone who is very angry with you. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Have you ever noticed that when you're having a difficult conversation, or even a conversation that wasn't supposed to be difficult, something you say can set off another person and send the conversation haywire? You are not trying to give offense, but the other person is deeply offended. At Harvard Business School, Alison Woodbrook says she teaches her students an exercise to avoid such landmines.
Hidden Brain
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My students find it helpful to use a model to think about why these difficult moments pop up in conversations, sometimes unexpectedly, often unexpectedly. And we use a model that we call the layers of the earth. Above the surface of the earth, this is the content of the conversation.
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So the words that we're saying to each other, the sound, the way we sound to each other, our nonverbal cues, all the things that are observable above the surface. Right at the surface of the earth are our emotions, and sometimes parts of our emotions are observable. You can tell when I'm getting angry or anxious or upset, and sometimes they're hidden beneath the surface of the earth.
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Right below that layer are our motives or our goals. And, you know, maybe sometimes I want to seek your advice, but you don't want to give it. Or I want to persuade you, but you are not ready to be persuaded. When we have incongruous motives, it's another way that difficult moments can erupt. And then at the very core of the earth, of course, are our differences in our identities.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
And anytime conversation shoots down to the hot magma of our identity, things are going to feel really hot and heated and difficult. And even sort of easy conversations have a way of shooting down to that hot magma core of our identities in sort of unexpected ways. And my students talk about this a lot. Like, you know, you can even an innocuous question like, oh, where did you get your glasses?
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Or, hey, I love your haircut. can feel sort of deeply threatening to people if they're imagining that this question is going to lead to something very sensitive about their identity or where they're from or their race or their gender or their, you know, sexual orientation. And so what we talk about in my class is becoming a little bit more aware of differences at every layer of the earth.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
So at the surface where our words, are we literally using the same, the right words? Are we understanding each other and what we mean when we're using certain words? And often moments of difficulty come from like, oh, we're just misunderstanding each other. We're using the same word to mean different things or we're not talking about the same thing.
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You know, I remember many years ago as a small child, my grandfather, you know, had rented out an apartment to someone and that person wasn't paying my grandfather the rent. And my grandfather knew he had to have, you know, a conversation with the tenant. And basically, it was going to be a difficult conversation. And he was a people pleaser and he hated having difficult conversations.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Often these differences in our emotions cause problems. I want to go have fun. You actually want to have a deep conversation. We have different motives. And then, of course, differences in our identities. And I think most... of the most difficult moments in conversation come from the moments when you poke an invisible barb into somebody's identity.
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And sometimes you realize when it's happened and sometimes you don't. It goes back to the story of this LGBTQ student who came and talked to me about making an insensitive comment, a heteronormative comment in class. I poked an invisible barb into an important part of who he is and he didn't feel seen and acknowledged. and valued and worthy of care.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
And so anytime that we make our conversation partner feel like we don't understand them, we don't see them, and we are not making them feel worthy of care, it's going to cause problems.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
When you were a college student, Allison, you and your fellow students found yourselves in opposition to an administrator. The students saw this administrator as an enforcer, and they thought that she was heavy-handed. They often clashed with her. You decided to try another approach. Can you tell me what happened?
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So I was a member of a club, a social club, when I was an undergrad. And there was a woman there whose full-time job it was to take care of this beautiful property and to keep all the students who hung out there and ate their meals there to keep them safe. And historically, the student members of the club had this really confrontational sort of oppositional relationship with this house manager.
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And I remember watching this oppositional dynamic unfold, and it really made me feel not only uncomfortable, but also I started to feel like this isn't serving the students well either because it puts her in this enforcer position, in this oppositional position. She's not going to give us the things that we want.
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And so when I became the sort of vice president of this club, I thought, I'm going to try and convince my fellow students, the fellow leaders of the club, and this woman, let's reposition ourselves as allies. Like, why don't we try and work together? And so first I had to convince the other students that this was a good approach.
Hidden Brain
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That was not easy because there was a lot of animosity between the students and this house manager. But then the really hard conversation was facing this woman myself. And I remember it very vividly. It was at her, it was in her office, in private, sort of woman on woman. I was the first woman who had ever been an officer in this club.
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And I went and met with her one-on-one, and she was so gracious and so grateful when I apologized for the behavior of all the students historically and how unkind they had been and why this animosity had erupted between the students and this house manager. I just said, I'm so sorry. We don't want you to feel that way. We want to work together. We want to be on the same team here.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
And she just said, thank you so much. Thank you so much for saying this. This sounds so amazing. And we both cried and she was so grateful. And it really felt like this turning point. in the dynamic, which did prove out to be really great for us going forward. It really worked out well. She gave the club so much more of what we actually wanted.
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So whenever he saw the tenant, you know, come up the other side of the road, you know, he would run and hide in the bushes because he didn't want to. The difficult conversation with the tenant. And of course, as a small child, you look at that and you realize, oh, these are difficult conversations. One way to handle them is to basically not have them at all.
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And then what was really moving, it ended up being one of the most meaningful sort of conversations of my life. That was, you And that was an inflection point for the club going forward. The students then developed a new norm of being friends with this woman and being on good terms. And it continued on for the next 15 years. And I saw her at my 15th college reunion. And she looked great.
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She looked so healthy and happy. And she pulled me aside and she said, I just can never thank you enough for for having that conversation with me and making this change. It changed the club for the better, and it changed my life. And it meant so much to me.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Wow, that's an amazing story, Alison. And it's really testament to what happens when we handle difficult conversations well, that there is a huge payoff here, a huge psychological payoff here.
Hidden Brain
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Yeah. And don't get me wrong. It was scary to have that conversation. It felt like, you know, she didn't like the students. She was mad at us all the time. We were always in trouble. And there was so much historical animosity that I was trying to sort of undo and shake up. And it took a lot of chutzpah, sort of a lot of courage to go in there and try and sort of work through it. It wasn't easy.
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One of the incredibly difficult and incredibly powerful things that you did was that you apologized to her for the way that she had been treated in the past. And I think for people who feel like they have been wronged or people who are in opposition, there's often a sense of, you know, sort of burning injustice. You know, I'm just an administrator. I'm here trying to keep the students safe.
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He would remind her of all the ways she treated him like dirt. He would stand up for himself. He would insist that she respect his dignity and apologize. Since this is comedy, George, of course, runs into the woman shortly thereafter at a social gathering. Instead of being brave and forthright, he is meek and obsequious. He allows her to run right over him all over again.
Hidden Brain
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You know, all they have is ill will toward me. They treat me so badly. No one recognizes what I've done. And so you have this narrative in your head of all the ways in which the world has been unkind to you. And of course, the world doesn't constantly come and admit that. But when someone actually walks in the door and says, I'm sorry, it has a transformative effect on you.
Hidden Brain
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Can you talk a little bit about the power of apologies in the course of having difficult conversations.
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I think as a conversation researcher, as a human being, apologies are one of the most powerful tools we have in our conversational toolkit. They are so remarkably powerful. And they're quick, right? It doesn't take that many turns of a conversation to deliver an apology. And they can do so much good. And even though they're so powerful, many people are reluctant to give them.
Hidden Brain
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That's right. That's right. And it's not always the wrong instinct, but you do have to sort of think about. Who is it leading us to avoid and why? Why are we avoiding these topics? And are those reasons good? Are they biased? Are they preventing us from having a deeper relationship?
Hidden Brain
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Talk a little bit about that. Why do you think that is, Alison? Given how powerful they are, why are we so reluctant to deploy them?
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Apologizing requires that you make yourself vulnerable to the other person. It feels like it requires you to humble yourself. It can feel like you are admitting that you were wrong in some way. And it makes yourself vulnerable to the other person because they could exploit that and say, oh, yes, you were wrong. I was right. And that just takes an incredible amount of humility.
Hidden Brain
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But in practice, when you go through with it and you apologize, doesn't necessarily equate to an admission of blameworthiness. It just feels so good for the other person to be on the receiving end of it that it makes the conversation and the relationship so much better.
Hidden Brain
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I want you to tell me the story of when your son Kevin was a toddler. I understand to the extent that he could talk, you had a series of very difficult conversations. Tell me how those went and what happened, Alison.
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Oh, my sweet Kevin. So Kevin's nine now, but back when he was, and he's a terrific kid, back when he was a toddler, he was a late talker. He was really frustrated and he had so many big ideas and he couldn't express them. And so he would get really angry and mad and yell and scream and sort of flop around.
Hidden Brain
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And one day during one of these sort of tantrums, he reared his head back and he sort of butted his head right into my face and he broke my nose. Wow. And it was so painful and so physically painful, of course, but also emotionally painful. Like as a mother, how do I have this child who's capable of like hurting me in this way? And how do I teach him to not be this way?
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
And I just remember I plopped him down and I ran over to the mirror to see if my face was okay. And it was a really dramatic moment that it was really hard. And he was so young. It was hard to decide how to react in that moment.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
I understand that you came back to this incident some years later, Alison. Can you tell me what happened?
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
That's right. It became infamous in our family, the nose-breaking incident with toddler Kevin. And so over time, he heard me and my husband talk about this moment. We told it to him as a story. And, you know, he learned to talk. He learned to regulate his emotions. And he sort of came to find this story intriguing. Like he couldn't believe that he would have behaved that way.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
And one night, he was probably seven or eight years old, and we were reading together, and he was reading one of his favorite books at the time, you know, Diary of a Wimpy Kid. A lot of kids love this series. And the main character in the story...
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
typically can be sort of uh thoughtless and can be kind of cruel to his best friend but there was a part of the book where greg apologized to his best friend and it was a rare moment it was a very sort of kind moment for the character in the book and in that moment kevin stopped reading and he looked up at me and he said mom he said yeah and he said do you
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Remember when I broke your nose when I was a toddler? And I said, oh, yes, I do remember, Kevin. I don't think I'll ever forget. And he looked at me right in the eyes and he said, Mommy, I'm so sorry. So sorry that I did that to you. And my heart just sort of burst in the way that I had cried so much when he first had broken my nose. Now I was crying again, but this time out of pride.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
It was such a meaningful moment to see how he had grown from being this toddler struggling so much with language and his emotions. And in such a short time, maybe five years later, was in this place where he was able to own that and apologize and empathize and recognize my pain was just incredible.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Can you think of a conversation that you need to have with another person that you've been putting off, Allison?
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Alison Woodbrooks is a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School. She's the author of Talk, The Science of Conversation, and The Art of Being Ourselves. Alison, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Do you have follow-up questions for Alison that you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience? If so, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line conversation. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. For more Hidden Brain, be sure to subscribe to our free newsletter. In each issue, we'll bring you more ideas about human behavior, plus a brain teaser and a moment of joy.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
So many. I feel like I avoid certain topics often right now, maybe just today.
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The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
You can sign up at news.hiddenbrain.org. That's n-e-w-s dot hiddenbrain dot org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
I mean, I could initiate conversations with many of my students, for example, and tell them that I don't think that their performance in the course so far has been terrific and that I'm disappointed in them and that I think it's not only going to affect their grade, but their learning and also how I personally feel about them, right? Like it's affecting our relationship in a sort of personal way.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
And the way I avoid that conversation is by asking my assistant to write emails to the students and just let them know what assignments they're missing. Rather than starting a conversation with, you know, 20 different people that I think will be hurtful or unpleasant or hard or time-consuming or make them feel bad.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
There's so many reasons that prevent me from sort of reaching out one-on-one to them.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
You know, it's interesting, Alison, you know, many of us think when we are subordinates or students or in a position where someone else has power over us, that the manager or the supervisor or the administrator has no problem whatsoever telling us what they think and feel. Because of course, this person has all this power. We build them up to have all this power in our mind.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
But I think what you're saying is that this actually runs both ways. Your students might understandably have trepidation coming to you and discussing something difficult with you, but you have the same problem discussing it with them.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
That's right. It's a profound human instinct to try to avoid unpleasantness or things that you don't think will go well. And often that unpleasantness comes from us grappling with this feeling torn between honesty and being kind. And that really has nothing to do with status, right? If we're grappling with, can I tell you the truth? And is that going to be hurtful to you?
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
So in 2013, you taught a negotiation class about a fictional football quarterback named A.J. Washington. You were a relatively new professor and you worked hard to make your presentation engaging. You even had planned a big reveal at the end of the presentation. Can you describe what happened that day?
Hidden Brain
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Shankar, I was so excited about this day in class. It was a case about a fictionalized quarterback in the NFL named A.J. Washington. And it had been written actually about Tom Brady, our famed Boston New England Patriots quarterback, and his negotiation over his salary and his player contract.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
So there's a big reveal at the end of class where I reveal that this whole case has been about Tom Brady the whole time. And I had brought a very important prop to class to share with the students at the end of this case discussion. And it was on loan to me from my dear colleague who had been the chief operating officer of the New England Patriots for a very long time.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
But in that same scene, another woman comes up to Jerry Seinfeld. She went on a date with him long ago, and she felt he did not treat her well. She tells him what George had meant to say.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
And he let me bring one of his Super Bowl rings to class.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
to help with this big reveal about Tom Brady. And I was so excited. And I made this big show of it. At the end, I sort of lifted it up in the air and I knelt down and all the students erupted in applause. And they all came down at the end of class and wanted to take photos with the Super Bowl ring. And it was so fun. I was very early in my career at the business school.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
And I was like, oh, man, I am nailing this, this, this. I am an amazing teacher. This is going so good. Couldn't be going better. But a few days later, I got an email, as I so often do from students, asking to meet with me. And this student comes to my office and...
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
I have so many meetings with students and the topics are all over the map, but I thought that he would be asking about, you know, a job that he'd applied for, some personal problem that he was coping with. Instead, he sort of sat down and said, I love the class. It's going so great. Thank you so much. There's just one thing. There's just one thing that I want to talk to you about.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
And I was like, oh, no, geez. And he said, do you remember in class when you flashed the photo of Tom Brady up on your slides? I said, oh, yeah, that was awesome, wasn't it? And he said, yes, but you paused on this slide and you said, hey, ladies, enjoy the view. And I said, oh, yeah, I remember that. I was going for this big dramatic effect.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
And he said, you know, framing it that way felt really heteronormative. And this was a long time ago. This was probably 2013. I don't think I had ever heard the word heteronormative before. And I said, oh my goodness, tell me more. What do you mean?
Hidden Brain
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And he said, well, it kind of felt like you were only talking to the people who are heterosexual, only people who are interested in the opposite gender in the class. What about all the male students who wanted to enjoy the view?
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
It's worth pausing for a moment and asking how you would have responded in this situation. You're a teacher, and you've just put in a lot of thought and effort into creating a great presentation. A student is upset because of a phrase you used. Would you dismiss the student as being overly sensitive? Too woke? Would you even listen?
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
The point here is not what you would have actually done, but to illustrate what happens when we are confronted by difficult conversations. very often the conversation inside our heads can get so loud that we stop paying attention to the conversation outside. Allison did not tune out the student.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
I thought, whoa, whoa. You're right, for sure. I definitely was coming from this sort of heteronormative perspective. And I couldn't have imagined that such a sort of a moment of levity could be experienced in that way as sort of exclusionary.
Hidden Brain
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And I was really disappointed in myself. I was really, I was in my 20s still. I was really young as a professor. And I thought, gosh, of all of the faculty here, the young woman is the one who's getting this wrong. And I'm so sorry. Like, I really, I want to be the inclusive one. And then he said the sort of saddest part of all, he said, well, most professors make me feel this way.
Hidden Brain
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You're just the only one that I feel comfortable enough sharing it with. And I thought, oh, my goodness. Like, I guess that's good for me, but so bad for us collectively in terms of sort of conversational safety and the ability to have these hard conversations.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
So there's so much going on in that story, Alison. And as you're telling the story, I'm putting myself in your shoes, sitting across from the student. The student basically says, effectively, you were being insensitive when you made this joke in class.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
And I can imagine you at that moment sort of tensing up and sort of getting a little anxious and getting a little worried and feeling a little aroused. You know, there's a spotlight being trained on you and you are being called out as someone who is, you know, an unkind and sensitive person.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
That's right. And we all feel these moments and there are these fleeting moments where you have high arousal and negative feelings. There's a map that scholars call the affective circumflex, but my students like to call it the wheel of feelings. And it's sort of high to low arousal on the y-axis and then negative to positive on the x-axis.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
You were never going to call me. You thought you could waltz through the rest of your life and never bump into me again. But you were wrong, Jerry. You were wrong.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
And that upper left quadrant is this high arousal, negative feelings, anger, defensiveness, anxiety. Your heart starts to race. You're feeling bad. And these feelings happen in conversation when something starts to not feel right. And it's a familiar feeling.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
And that's definitely how I was feeling in that moment, this arousal, my heart's racing, probably your stress hormones start to release in your body. And there are a number of ways that you can react to it. And I think we all grapple with, well, should I react defensively? Should I react angrily?
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Do I have the sort of self-control to continue engaging in this conversation in a way that's reasonable and productive?
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
And I mean, I think the student did a very smart thing by coming and talking to you in the privacy of her office, because in some ways now you're having a one-on-one conversation. If the student had brought this up in the class, for example, that could have made you feel even more defensive and even more put on the spot.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
In the class or, you know, online, on social media, we see this happen all the time, these... in my mind, really, it's very rare to feel like any topic is too sensitive to discuss, but there are so many contexts that are too sensitive. I sometimes wonder, is there such a thing as a sensitive topic or is it all just sensitive contexts?
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Last week on the show, we examined the science of conversation. We looked at why an ordinary chat is far from ordinary. These interactions involve hundreds of micro decisions and a delicate dance of coordination. If you missed that episode, I would urge you to listen to it first. You can find it in this podcast feed. It's called We Need to Talk. Today, we look at the conversations we all dread.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
And so it was so kind that the student came and met one-on-one and also that they started the conversation by being so complimentary and saying, hey, I really love this class. I think you're doing such an amazing job teaching us. And It's because I feel so comfortable with you that I feel safe sharing this constructive feedback about this one moment.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
When we come back, the single most important lesson to learn when you are engaged in a difficult conversation. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
I'm Shankar Vedanta. Think back to the last time you had a difficult conversation. Maybe it was with a manager or an employee. Maybe it was with a partner or a parent. What did it feel like in the moments before you had the conversation? Did you feel yourself getting tense? Did you feel the need to get a drink first or to avoid the conversation altogether?
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
At Harvard Business School, behavioral scientist Alison Woodbrook says that handling difficult conversations starts with noticing how we respond to them. You cannot be an effective interlocutor with someone else when you are unaware of how you yourself are reacting.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
Alison got a chance to apply her research in her own life when a student came to her and complained that she had been insensitive in class.
Hidden Brain
The Conversations that Bring Us Closer
It's recognizing your own emotions. It's also trying to recognize what your goals are in that moment. So emotions are often automatic, and you get into that upper left quadrant, those high arousal negative feelings, and there are these sort of parasympathetic nervous system signals that are happening that you can't control. But reflecting about what your goals are is so important.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
That's right. We cannot possibly communicate about all of these micro decisions. We cannot. The irony of it is that even while we're talking to each other, we can't actually communicate directly about all of these things. Not only for feasibility concerns, we don't have enough time to communicate about all these decisions. But also we have this expectation of sort of naturalness.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
A good conversation needs to feel like you've alighted on delightful topics without talking about it, that you understand each other's minds without communicating directly about it. That's sort of where the magic lives. And too much direct communication can quickly undermine that magic.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
That's right. In many ways, he finally met the right woman to give him feedback that was so valuable for him. But in other ways, some would say that he went on a date with the wrong woman, mess with the wrong girl. That's right. It's so rare to get certainly direct feedback about, you know, oh, that joke was really funny. Or I really loved when you gave me that compliment.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Or, hey, you've asked me 16 questions so far. Good for you. Yeah. Or, hey, that thing that you said, I didn't quite understand it. Or, hey, when you said this, it really hurt my feelings. We just don't have time to communicate in that way and give live feedback like that. And it just goes against all of the sort of norms of human-to-human communication.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
And I think every once in a while you encounter someone who is courageous enough and kind enough to actually tell you that, hey, I really admired when you did this thing or it really hurt me when you did this. But it takes such an incredible array of sort of stars to align and a very skilled person to be able to deliver feedback in a way that doesn't feel overly personal, overly threatening.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
It also requires a really sturdy relationship. You have to really trust each other in order to be able to say something so vulnerable to someone.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Yes, even a professor of conversation is not immune from the perils of small talk. About once a week, I would say, I have a conversation where I think, wow, I really messed up small talk there. This conversation, we were taking our three children out trick-or-treating. It was an unseasonably warm night. It was beautiful.
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We have a wonderful flat neighborhood where we walk around and the kids trick-or-treat and get candy. And we joined up with a number of other families to go together. And we knew most of the other families, but there were two families we had not met before.
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So at some point, as we're walking around on this beautiful night, watching our adorable kids pick up enormous candy bars, I strike up a conversation with one of the neighbors, one of these family members that I didn't know before. Uh-huh. And it was a man from Ohio. I overheard him saying that he was from Ohio.
Hidden Brain
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And so as the two of us became isolated, I quickly started asking questions about Ohio. Where are you from in Ohio? Did you go to Ohio State? Oh, I've been to German Village. It's such a All of my Ohio knowledge to kind of find a way into this conversation.
Hidden Brain
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My husband's from Michigan, so I start talking about Big Ten football or, you know, the rivalry between Ohio State and Michigan, and I'm really going for it. But really, no matter what I say about Ohio... It doesn't seem like we can find a way out of it. We're sort of stuck.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
We're trapped in Ohio. He's not really giving me a lot in response to my questions. And I chalked it up to a sort of small talk failure. And I said, you know what? I think I'm going to try again with this guy later in the night.
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Absolutely. My mom is an amazing sort of intuitive psychologist. And when I was young, probably starting in late middle school, but definitely high school, we would drive home from social engagements and she would often ask us, hey, did you talk to anybody who was a really good question asker? And I'm grateful to my mom for that. It made me sort of pique my interest in interpersonal dynamics.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Yes, Rachel Greenwald, I think she's amazing. She's sort of the grand poobah of professional matchmakers. She started out her career as a matchmaker, and then she had so much success that she started training other matchmakers to do this job. And she said to me, we have a phrase for people who don't ask questions.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
When you think of people who ask zero questions, especially on a date, we call them ZQs, zero questioners. And there's this quote, she says, you know, they say curiosity killed the cat, but on a date, curiosity does not kill the date. In fact, the ZQ kills the date.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Boomer asking is not people over 50 who ask questions. It's named after the arc of a boomerang. And so imagine you're throwing a boomerang and the boomerang has this arc that goes out and then comes around and comes right back to you.
Hidden Brain
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And the structure of boomer asking is you ask a question to your partner, you let them answer the question, but then you bring the focus of the conversation right back to yourself. So it would be as if I said to you, Shankar, how was your weekend?
Hidden Brain
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Ooh, well, I actually went skydiving with Harry Styles and it was terrific. So you let your partner answer, but then you almost ignore what they share with you and you bring the focus right back to yourself. It makes your partner feel like you weren't interested in their answer in the first place. You were just asking as a way to set up your own disclosure. It's a sort of thinly veiled way to...
Hidden Brain
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Yes, I was living in New York City and I was set up on a blind date by a friend. It might have been the only blind date that I've been on in my life. Um, and it was, uh, with a man who had a job, a good job, great job in finance. He had gone to a good college. He'd played football in college and I had seen photos of my friend had shown me photos of this guy and he was, you know, so handsome.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Oh, sugar, this happens all the time. I think the reason this clip is so funny to us is because it's so relatable. We have done research recently to show that people's minds are wandering 24% of the time during conversation. Wow. And this was based on their own self-reports.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
So we interrupted them every five minutes in a conversation and asked them, were you listening attentively to your partner or was your mind wandering? And 24% of the time they say, actually, my mind was wandering. I wasn't listening to my partner. We suspect this is an underestimate because people know that it's sort of embarrassing to not be listening to their partner.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
You see this happen during video calls or like on Zoom. People are smiling and nodding at the camera even while they're like to the side texting their friend or making a grocery list because there are these norms of politeness, right? We know that we should make our partners feel like we're listening to them.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
That's right. We often talk about this idea of the myth of naturalness. So many of my students and so many people believe that good conversationalists are born, that they are extroverted and gregarious and charismatic, and that's just how they are. It's their personality.
Hidden Brain
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But so much of the work that I've done over the last 15 years suggests that many, many things about conversation are very learnable. Even for the most introverted, shy, awkward people who really think that they weren't born charismatic, these things can be learned as well. And one of the most valuable things that we've learned in our research and in my class is this idea of topic preparation.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
So I was excited. I went and I met him. downtown for dinner at this sort of busy, bustling, loud restaurant slash bar. And I settle into the table and off we go.
Hidden Brain
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Topic preparation is literally just thinking about what are possible things that we could talk about before the conversation begins. It's not complex. And many people find this idea of preparing for a conversation, especially for people that we're close to outside of work, to be very aversive.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
You sort of have this instinct that I shouldn't need to prepare for a conversation with someone that I'm close to. We'll get together and I'll know exactly what to talk about or we'll have many things to talk about. And many of my students feel this way too. They're sort of like, why are you making me prepare for a casual conversation?
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Yeah, it's slightly more normative, more common in work settings where it's more common to have an agenda ahead of time, or at least somebody has thought about it. Although you might be surprised by how rare it is even in work settings. I was working with Google a few years ago who had this huge campaign within Google.
Hidden Brain
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And the only goal was to get people to think ahead about their meetings even a little bit. Like they had such a problem with people just showing up and not thinking ahead that they started this huge campaign. So even at work, I think there is sort of a resistance to topic prep or at least a lack of making time to think ahead about our conversations.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
And certainly in casual conversations, people feel like they don't need to. And so they don't.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
That's right. This story is surprisingly sort of tender and important to me. It is a friend that I'd spent many years singing in a band with. She's this talented, wonderful friend. And we had both started having children. And after she had her first child, she became sick. And it was just, it was devastating.
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And meanwhile, I had my own baby, so I wasn't even available to go and visit her very often. And so this conversation when we got together felt so momentous. It felt like we needed to catch up on so many things about this incredibly difficult period of her life.
Hidden Brain
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And brilliant woman that she is, not only had she prepared topics and really thought carefully about all the things we needed to catch up on together in our limited time together, but she had given each topic a Whitney Houston song title. Really, it almost makes me cry thinking of it. It was so thoughtful and so fun in such sort of dire circumstances.
Hidden Brain
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And so she had prepped topics like Whitney Houston's song, Higher Love. She said, when was the last time you took your baby on an airplane and how terrible was it? Yeah. Or the Whitney Houston song, Run to You. I think it's run to you, run to me. And she said, you know, are you still running? Right. Like, what's your running regimen these days?
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And so she had just it was just so thoughtful and so like her to make to prep topics at all and to show me that she was thinking about us even when we were apart and then to bump it up even another notch and give them these Whitney Houston song titles.
Hidden Brain
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We did play some of the songs and she is the most miraculous, beautiful singer. Due to her sickness, she wasn't able to sing, but I do have an incredible video that I will save and cherish forever where she's lip syncing along with this Whitney Houston song. And it's just divine. One of the greatest moments of my life.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Yeah, so we ran these studies and we wanted to find out what's better. Should we stay on one topic and try and get very deep? Or is it better to switch topics frequently? The best conversationalists do switch topics more frequently. But as soon as they land on a new topic, they get deep on it quite quickly by asking a lot of questions. Hmm. And so they're actually doing both.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
It's not a tradeoff between depth and breadth. You should be aiming to do both. And you should be keeping your hand on the sort of temperature gauge of the conversation. As soon as a topic seems like it's running out of juice, you should be unafraid and confident and switch to something else to keep the conversation fun and interesting and fizzing along.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Exactly. I don't know about the trust fund, but truly everything else, this was this sort of Adonis of a man that so many women, I think, are hoping to meet. Yes.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Yeah, this is a very common feeling. We worry about being rude. I think politeness is a major reason that we sort of hesitate and hold back on switching topics. Our fears of being rude, what we find in our research, are overblown. One of the beautiful things about conversation is that you can always come back to the topic. You can come back to the topic later in the conversation.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
You can come back to it later in your relationship, in a different conversation. The bigger risk is staying too long and stagnating.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
The topic pyramid is a tool that I realized that my students needed so badly, and I think everyone needs so badly. There are three levels to the pyramid. At the base of the pyramid, this is where small talk lives. These are topics that you could talk about with anyone. So what about this weather? How was your weekend? What are you excited about? You know, what's going on at the weekend coming up?
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Those sort of well-trodden, well-known small talk topics. It's totally okay to be at the bottom of the pyramid. In fact, many conversations have to start there. It's this well-trodden ground, especially with strangers or with people you haven't seen in a long time. You have to start there. That's part of the norm of conversation.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
The mistake is staying at the base of the pyramid too long and letting it stagnate and become dull. And that's when these alarm bells go off in your mind where you say, oh my, we gotta get out of this. We gotta get to something more meaningful. So the second tier of the pyramid
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
is what we call medium talk or tailored talk, where you're moving towards a topic that is more interesting, more personal, and closer maybe to what your partner has in terms of interests and expertise. So it's becoming more personalized. The third, the top tier of the pyramid, is deep talk.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Deep talk is what friends and family members and work besties, this is what we're all hungry for, the type of conversation to have with people we're very close to. It's a sort of unique place of shared reality where maybe only the two of you could be talking about this topic in this way. And so not every conversation needs to get to the peak. That's not always the goal.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
When your neighbor's just taking out their trash, you don't need to get to the peak of the pyramid necessarily. The key here is fostering a little bit more of an awareness of where you are in the pyramid and making sure that you don't get stuck at the base of the pyramid for too long.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
That's right. Our work suggests that asking more questions is like the sort of baseline best thing that you can do in your life to get better at question asking. Just ask more. But there's a lot of nuance in the types of questions that are better and worse in certain circumstances. So open-ended questions, invite your partner to share, right? These are questions are like, what's on your mind?
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
So I settle into this table at this buzzy restaurant in New York City downtown. And I mean, across from me at this table is this beautiful man. And I'm so excited. And we just launch into a launch into conversation. Now, the whole point point of a first date is to get to know each other. So I am pelting him with questions. Where is he from? What's his family like? What was his college like?
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Or what was your morning like? What are you excited about lately? These questions that are born of curiosity that invite your partner to share their perspective with you. Whereas closed-ended questions, as many of us know, usually have a very distinct answer. So, do you like how this conversation is going? Did you sleep well last night? sort of yes-no questions are very closed.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
And so in our research, what we found is open-ended questions are so powerful because your partner answers in more than twice the word count compared to closed-ended questions. This is powerful in any conversation, but particularly in conflictual conversations or when you're negotiating and we're learning information about your counterpart is so pivotal.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Asking an open ended question like, what do you care about or what's important to you here? You're going to learn so much more information about their perspective and their needs and their motives and their positions than will you accept this offer?
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
That's right. When we studied question asking among negotiators, what we found is that only 9% of turns across hundreds of conversations included open-ended questions. And this is a huge mistake. Open-ended questions are the most direct pathway to extract information from your counterpart because they're going to answer you in a much more open-ended way.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Follow-up questions are superheroes. They are amazing. When we studied... 1,100 speed dates, so people going on these four-minute speed dates, what we found is that people who asked more questions were more likely to get second dates, so their partners were more likely to say yes to them.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
So much so that if you ask just one more question on each of your 20 dates, you would convert one more of your dates into a yes. Wow. one question on each date. And what we found when we dove into the actual language that people were using and the types of questions people were asking, we realized that this effect was driven almost entirely by follow-up questions.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
So follow-up questions follow up on anything that your partner has said previously. The reason they're so powerful is because they're an undeniable indicator that you have listened to your partner, right? You ask them a question, you let them answer, and you heard their answer and you want to know more. So people who study intimate and close relationships call this responsiveness.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
So follow-up questions show that you are being responsive to your partner and that you're curious to know more.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
What was it like to play football there? Tell me more about your football career. What's your job like now? Where do you live? Do you have lots of friends in the city? So I'm asking him lots of questions. And I realized that 10 minutes have gone by and he has not asked me a single thing about myself. Wow. 10 minutes.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
This is a beautiful conversation. You can hear their mutual engagement. And Anderson Cooper is sharing a story about his own loss, his own grief. But it feels like Stephen Colbert is helping him tell this story. And it's a phenomenon that psychologists call co-narration, where
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
where someone is listening so intently and they're working in tandem in the conversation so well that they're finishing each other's sentences. It's like your conversation partner is helping you deliver the story. They're co-narrating the story with you. And it's a signal of excellent, involved, attentive listening and trust and relationship closeness. And it's wonderful to listen to.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
It's very important to think about interruptions in two different ways. The first way is on-topic interruption. Here we hear Colbert and Cooper, they are very much in the midst of a deep and meaningful topic, and they are not going anywhere. Stephen Colbert is not trying to change the subject. In fact, he is, like, going deeper and deeper with Anderson on this topic.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
So it's really, these are, they're finishing each other's sentences, but they're also on-topic interruptions, as opposed to the type of interruptions that nobody likes, which are off-topic interruptions.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
It's that you're switching, you're sort of ignoring what someone is saying, and you're switching to something completely new, and that feels so abrupt, so rude, and often sort of hurtful and annoying. Yeah.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Yes, this was back in college. This character we'll call Dave was well known for being very charming. And a girlfriend and I went to this party and Dave was greeting everyone at the door. And we walk into the party and Dave turns to me and he says, Allison, you're so beautiful. So you look so beautiful tonight. So beautiful. Welcome. Come on in. Come on in.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
And then he turns to my girlfriend and says, oh, Claire, you look so beautiful, so beautiful tonight, unbelievable. And we sort of say, thank you, Dave. Thank you so much. And we walk off into the party. And as more people are arriving at the door, you hear him going through this sort of, flattery shtick over and over. Every person that comes in, oh, you're so beautiful.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
It's not even constrained to just the women, right? To the men, oh, you look so handsome. You look so great tonight. Everyone who walks through is getting this, the Dave flattery treatment. And it was a real epiphany moment for me. You know, I had known him a long time. I knew that he was sort of smarmy, had this shtick. And at the same time, I reflected and I realized, you know what, though?
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
And I realize at this point that this has been a complete sort of absence of question asking in my direction. And at that point, you sort of have this out-of-body experience, and I'm floating over the table looking at you. looking down at this conversation game that's now afoot.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
It really did make me feel a lot better. It made me feel welcome at this party. It made me feel confident as I went into the party with my friend. And the most amazing thing, later that night, the friend that I had walked to the party with, I saw her kissing Dave later in the night.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
And it seemed like his sort of flattery, however insincere it obviously was, had worked its magic on my very smart friend.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Thank you for acknowledging how great I look tonight. That's how I feel. Like, thank you so much for noticing. Yes.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
I poked an invisible Barb into an important part of who he is, and he didn't feel seen and acknowledged and valued and worthy of care.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
And you start to play this little game where you're like, how many questions can I ask this person before they ask a single question back to me? Like, how far can I push this? And I think he doesn't really realize that I'm now playing this game. And he certainly doesn't realize how badly he's losing the game. And another 10 minutes go by. 20 minutes, he has asked me nothing about myself.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
He has no idea that I'm like devastated and really feeling sort of hurt, but he doesn't seem reciprocally interested in me.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Absolutely. How quickly can I get out of here? So I excuse myself to the restroom and I sort of collect myself. You know, I'm looking in the mirror, maybe touch up my lipstick and I'm thinking, what do I do now? And this really decisive question. feeling washes over me. I just got to go. I got to get out of here.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
There's just no way that I have a future with someone who can go 20 minutes without asking me a question, right? I need someone who's interested in me and my perspective and my feelings and my life and so i make my way back to the table having made this decision i say thank you so much for meeting me for dinner um i have to go and i collect my things and i leave did you ever hear from him again
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
I did. He texted me later that night and he said, you're beautiful. I had a great time. I want to see you again. Which, by the way, still there is no question. I mean, it's like fine, lovely, but he's still there's no question of are you OK? How are you doing? Did you get home safely? Is everything all right? No question. I mean, it was really quite wild.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
And, you know, I'm a bit of a people pleaser. I don't usually, I'm not usually overly direct with people. But this moment felt like he really could benefit from some feedback. I mean, his future girlfriend who's looking for a man with blue eyes and a job in finance and 6'5 is going to find this guy. And I want him to be able to make that person happy. Uh-huh.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
And so I text him back and I just say, I just want you to know I left because you didn't ask me anything about myself. And it really made me feel like you weren't interested in me. I'm really grateful that you met up with me and I wish you the best.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Oh, yes. This was a dear friend of mine. We had been friends for a very long time, coming up on 10 years. And she was dating a guy who was great, but I just wasn't sure they were a good fit for each other. And I knew that they were starting to think about getting engaged and maybe married. And probably for over a year, I had just been sort of
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
feeling kind of worried about her like is this the right person for you um she was so spectacular and i just felt like maybe he he wasn't right for her and so i'd been grappling with this idea uh you know should i raise this with her should we talk about it is our friendship strong enough that we could handle a topic like this is it my is it my place to even raise a topic like this even with someone that i'm so close to so did you raise it at the dinner
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Yeah, so we were at this sort of trendy restaurant downtown, and there was music thumping, and we were eating delicious foods and having cocktails, and I worked up the—finally mustered the courage to tell her what had been on my mind. And I could tell that she was both—
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
intrigued and interested in what i was telling her and she engaged with me on it so nicely but you know as so many hard conversations hard topics become more difficult over time i realized that she'd heard me she was maybe getting a little bit emotional and so i didn't want to push it and i switched topics and we moved on but
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
So after this dinner, I felt so proud that I had worked up the courage to be direct and honest with my friend and proud of her for being so receptive to my perspective. And it just I felt like the conversation had gone really well. So fast forward two days and a text message pops up on my phone from my friend. And immediately I'm so curious. I'm thinking, oh my gosh, did I change her mind?
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Had she been thinking about this? Is she ready to open up about this? Maybe she's been wondering about this guy too. And maybe she kind of knows they're not a good fit for each other. And she's going to say, thank you so much for empowering me to really say this out loud. I was excited to see how she was going to react. And I opened my phone. I opened the text message. And what do I see?
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
I see a photo. It's very clearly her hand. It's the same bright red nail polish she'd been wearing at our dinner just two nights before. And a beautiful... diamond ring on her ring finger. Her boyfriend had proposed and she had said yes.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
That's right. And that she had already helped him pick out the ring. Oh, wow. I think she was grappling with a lot of feelings in that moment. She didn't want to embarrass me. She didn't want to hurt me. She didn't. Maybe I made her feel embarrassed that she was ready to go forward with this huge step in her life. Or maybe she didn't really hear me.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
You know, I kind of mentioned it quickly and I didn't want to make it a dramatic thing and we moved on quickly. So maybe she wasn't even really able to process what I was saying. I don't know because we never talked about it again. Yeah.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
I felt horrible. I felt like, I felt like such a terrible friend and such a terrible person and... Like I hadn't fulfilled my duty as a good friend to be excited and supportive and sort of there for her. I worried so much that my feedback had tarnished the moment when he got down on one knee and said, will you marry me? I mean, I worried that I popped into her head.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
If for even a split second she was thinking... Maybe I shouldn't do this because my friend doesn't believe in it." Like, I still to this day feel guilty if that was, if I popped into her head at all in that beautiful moment.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Absolutely. In searching in her eyes that became misty during that conversation, I saw someone who was listening to me and engaging with me so receptively on this difficult topic. I didn't see, oh gosh, she's struggling. She's struggling to share with me this reality that they are getting engaged imminently. And I think I was too focused on my own
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
perspective and working up the sort of courage to deliver this feedback and not focus enough on how she was receiving it.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
Oh, it is such a complicated coordination game. We are making hundreds of micro decisions at every moment of every conversation. And we have to coordinate those micro decisions about what we say and how we say it with another human mind. And then when we're in a group with many other human minds who are all making their own micro decisions at every moment of every conversation.
Hidden Brain
We Need to Talk
So when you start to sort of study the science of it and look at these micro moments and these micro decisions, you also realize that it's a miracle that human beings have figured out how to... talk at all, really, to coordinate their turn-taking, to speak and listen, to share understanding through their words and their gestures is miraculous.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
I think one thing that I've learned by doing this research and teaching this course about conversation is that our evidence to ourselves and to other people that we matter and that they matter, the place where that happens is so often during our conversations. And in these little tiny moments where we make small choices that show, oh, I believe in myself or I believe in you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Our evidence to ourselves and to other people that we matter and that they matter, the place where that happens is so often during our conversations and in these little tiny moments where we make small choices that show, oh, I believe in myself. or I believe in you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And the difference between like micro kindnesses and micro harms, sometimes when you're looking at a transcript, they look very subtle, but I think in the emotional experience of those interactions, the difference can be massive in terms of how much you are conveying that you believe that you matter and how much you care about the other person and convey that they matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Oh my goodness. Well, congratulations on being engaged. I heard the word fiance in there. And I think you're right in sharing that story about coming home at the end of the day. And of course we're tired when we get home. So there are going to be moments when you It's hard to maintain continuous attention on another person, but we always have to remind ourselves that attention is a gift.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Just meeting the gaze of another person, listening to what they're saying and giving them the gift of your attention is a way of showing that you care about them, you respect them and that they matter to you. I've recently learned that like many 40 somethings who were raised in a time when neurodivergence wasn't as diagnosed, I recently learned that I have ADHD.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And so I all my life have also struggled with these moments when your mind is wandering and it actually is quite effortful to keep your attention trained on another person and on the conversation. And even if you don't have ADHD, the human mind was built to wander. Our minds are very our brains are really good at connecting ideas and brainstorming spontaneously and thinking about things.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And so we should know that about ourselves. I think there is often this assumption that we are continuously and always hanging on the word of every other person in the world. That's just really hard to achieve. And in our studies of people listening to each other in conversation, we found that people's minds are actually wandering more than 25% of the time during conversation. And that's normal.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
You don't need to feel... bad about it. However, because giving attention to someone else is a signal that they matter and that you care about them, we should work hard to repair these moments of inattentiveness. And so if you notice that your own mind is wandering, you can ask repair questions like, oh, hey, John, I felt like you asked a really good question, but I missed the second half of it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Could you repeat yourself? A repair question like that is a form of caring. It's saying, hey, I actually do want to hear what you said, and I missed it. It takes a little bit of courage to do that. It means that you have to admit openly that you missed something, that you made some sort of mistake, and that can take a little bit of courage and bravery.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And then, of course, the greatest repair strategy of all is an apology, right? So saying, I'm so sorry, I didn't hear what you just said. but I really want to. Can you just repeat that or can you help me out, help me understand what you were trying to say? These things can be very powerful for showing people that you care about them and you care about their perspective.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
It's funny. I often get invited to come and visit military training. So the Army War College and different military groups are very interested in this topic. I think they know how much communication matters and are realizing like, oh, there's people out there teaching it in a different way. The course that I teach at Harvard is called How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Just as you said, it's lovingly referred to by the students as TALK, which is the acronym that we walk through in the book. But the How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life title feels like a great victory that I was able to both convince Harvard to let me use a title that seems silly alongside very serious courses like Capitalism in America and things like this. So that felt like a win.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
The Ellen talk is levity. And so it's not a coincidence that the course title would have a sort of silly seeming name. But it also is a double entendre, right? The word gooder also refers to the K in talk, which is kindness. How can we be good? How do we strive to be the best and most good that we can be through our conversations?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And so there is, there's a sort of a double meaning in there and I feel very proud of it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Fabulous question. Well, when we think as a scientist and as a teacher, when you think about trying to teach people to have more effective conversations, it raises this question of what does success even mean in conversation?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And what you quickly realize is that success is a very complicated question in any domain, but particularly in conversation, and it has to be determined by the people involved. I don't march in and tell them what they should care about. But rather, let's think very deeply about what we are aiming to achieve, what we're aiming to do with our words in our interactions with other people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
What are our intentions? If we can think a little bit more about that before the conversation happens, and then afterwards, you have much more clarity to assess, well, did we achieve those things? And so in the book, we outline a framework to help people think about what their goals are in conversation. Every conversation, you have at least one goal.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Otherwise, you wouldn't bother having the cover. You wouldn't bother talking to the other person at all, even if that goal is just to have fun or just to be polite. Someone wanders up to you and they start talking to you and you feel like it would be rude to not talk back. That means your goal is politeness and upholding the very basic expectation to respond to somebody.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
But usually when we have conversations, our system of goals is much more complex than that. We hold many goals at once. And some of those will align with our conversation partner goals and some of them will conflict. For example, so we use this framework called the conversational compass. It has two axes. The X axis is relational.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
At the high end of the relational axis, these are goals that reach for things like trust and showing someone that they matter. So things that serve the relationship and serve the other person. At the low end of the relational spectrum, these are self-focused goals, things that serve yourself. They are not intrinsically bad. They're not evil.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
It's just the fact of life that every person has their own needs. And so we're constantly navigating this relational access. Then the Y axis is informational. And at the high end of the informational axis, these are goals that reach for accurate information exchange. The most obvious purpose of communication is that we're trying to exchange information with each other.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
It's why humans evolved the ability to communicate and use our words. So this is things like learning, teaching, brainstorming, persuading, making a decision, very highly information-rich things. motives that people hold in conversation. But let's not forget that there's a low informational end of that y-axis of that spectrum.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
We hold all kinds of motives that are not related to exchanging accurate information exchange at all. So things like filling time, having fun, keeping secrets, protecting privacy. These are goals that are not about exchanging accurate information. Sometimes it's about concealing accurate information, or maybe it's not about information exchange at all. And these goals also matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
So we, in my course, use this compass to help plot our goals for any given interaction to get more sense around, well, what do I care about and what are my top priorities? What do I really want to achieve in this interaction? And you go off, you have your conversation, and after it's ended, you can look back and say, oh, my number one goal was to learn about John's history in the military.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Did I achieve that goal? Did I ask him enough questions about that topic? Were we able to do that? So it gives you a tool to assess how you did. Now, here's the tricky part. And this is part of why conversation is just so darn hard.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
No matter how much you work to understand your intentions and go into an interaction with intentionality, you don't have perfect control over everything because there's another person involved. And at any moment in the conversation, they could say something that completely changes your own conversational compass and completely changes their conversational compass.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Imagine if all of a sudden I said, John, I was also in the military and I didn't like it. All of a sudden you've learned something about me that we now really need to unpack, right? And you didn't know that ahead of time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
I wasn't really in the military, but just as an example, they can say something that changes the dynamic of the conversation, shifts everybody's goals, and we need to be ready to be nimble and adjust to that new reality. And that's what makes conversation so hard.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
John, you're talking about topic prep. That's one of my favorite things. We talk about it a lot in the book. This is something that people do that is such a great life hack for showing people that you care about them and that they matter, is that you've thought about them away from the conversation. You've thought about them ahead of time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
So in our research, what we find is even 30 seconds of forethought before a conversation starts will help you brainstorm topics and thoughts that can show the other person that you were thinking about them and that they matter to you. So even 30 seconds and you jot down just one or two things. Oh yeah, last time we talked, he told me that he worked for Lowe's. I want to revisit that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
I want to go back and say, by the way, how was it? How was it to work for Lowe's? How long did you work there? And who were your favorite coworkers? What were they like?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
So just a little moment like that where you remember what you talked about last time or what they've been doing in the time between or what they have coming up and jotting down a couple of ideas can make your conversation much more effective once you're in the conversation itself. You're a very good topic prepper, John, but more people could be like you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Oh, so this is good. It's related to this idea of topic prep, right? Because in every, and in most tasks that are live, but certainly conversation there, you have to strike the right balance between preparation ahead of time versus intuitive improvisational decision-making in the moment. And the same is true in conversation.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
You want to put enough prep in to show people that you were thinking about them when you were apart and that you prepped some topics and that you have thought about your intentionality and what you'd like to get out of the conversation. But once you're there, you need to let things go and be in the moment and rely on your more intuitive judgment, what psychologists would call system one thinking.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And so striking the balance between the two is really key. Now, many of us end up relying too heavily on our intuitive judgment. We don't prep topics. We don't think about what our goals are. We just bump into people randomly in the world and then we wing it. And our research suggests that is also not the right equilibrium.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
You should be both preparing ahead of time and feeling comfortable improvising in the moment to become the best conversationalists that you can be. We call this the myth of naturalness. When we see other people who are really great at conversation, often we believe that they're just born that way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
and that they have amazing intuition and amazing intuitive judgment about how to behave in the moment. When in fact, what you can't see is all of the stuff that's happening under the surface for them. You don't see the many years when they were working hard to develop a skill, or like you, John, working to overcome some sort of challenge in their communicative abilities.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
You don't see in the moment how hard they're working Think listening so intently to what you're saying and thinking about how they can relate it to some other idea. All of that work is invisible. And so we come to believe, oh, this is just easier for some people than others. And maybe I'm not naturally gifted at it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
So your question is, how can we think about the way that we communicate? How does that relate to us mattering? It's such a profound question.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
The truth is the best conversationalists work hard at it and they probably have worked hard at it for a long time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Absolutely. Thank you. That's very nice positive feedback, John. So T is for topics. Topics are, let me just say the maxims to start and then I'll dive into each one. T is for topics. A is for asking. L is for levity. And K is for kindness. So let me break down each one of those briefly.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
T is for topics is really, we know that conversation, we have to choose topics and conversation, but most of us think about, oh, what are we going to open with? What is our opener? What's the first topic or what's the most important topic? When in fact, a helpful mindset shift can be to realize that you're choosing topics every time you're speaking.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
We're making these little micro moves to have steered topics. And we're asking ourselves, should we stay on this topic or should we move to something else? Should we drift gently to something else or should we jump cut to something extremely different? Should we call back to something we talked about earlier or should we move elsewhere?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And we're making these sort of small moves every time we speak. And our partners making these small moves every time they speak as well. So managing, we can all learn to manage topics more effectively. We should be thinking about how the topics we choose can serve our intentions, our goals. So if my goal is to ask you for advice, I need to work up the courage to actually ask you for advice.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
If I forget to ask you for advice, I probably haven't served the goal that I was looking to achieve in that conversation. If I want to make you laugh, I need to raise topics that are going to be fun to talk about to make you laugh. So whatever your goals are, your topics should follow along with your intentions and just realizing that we're making these choices all the time. Now, a very...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
important piece of advice is that people tend to stagnate too long on topics. And it's better on average to as soon as you feel like a topic is losing its juice to switch to something new and fresh and different to keep everybody engaged because mutual engagement matters so much. And on that note, I will switch topics to A is for asking.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
A is for asking underscores how important question asking is in all of our conversations. Asking questions is one of the most powerful tools we have available to us in our toolkit. It's the best and most direct way to lure out the contents of another person's mind.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
In the context of this conversation we're having, John, you're expected to ask me questions, but I can also break norms and ask you questions, which might make the conversation even more interactive and interesting. In the book, we talk about the power of asking more questions to understand other people's minds and to make them more feel like they matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
But we also talk about the types of questions and the patterns of questions that are most effective. And so I'll just hint at two of them. One is follow-up questions. Once someone has shared something about themselves, it's so important to ask another question after that to show that you heard them, to show that you care about them, and that you want to learn more.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
So follow-up questions are superheroes. And then the second great pattern of question asking that I would recommend would be open-ended questions. So closed and open questions all have a place in conversation, but open-ended questions are the ones that we remember. So if I say to you, John, what was your episode about bipolar? What was the most meaningful thing about that episode to you?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
What did you learn? And then you'd give me an answer. I don't actually want to go there right now. But if that kind of question, if I were to let you answer and we let the conversation go there, it's the kind of thing that you would remember, right? It would allow you to share your perspective, something that you learned. I would ask you follow up questions about it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And that would become very meaningful. So open-ended questions are an amazing tool for that. The best open-ended questions often start with the word what. Why questions can feel a bit accusatory. So like, why did you do an episode about neurodivergence can feel a bit accusatory as opposed to what were the things you learned the most about that from that episode?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
feels less threatening, and extracts more information. So follow-up questions and open-ended questions that start with the word what are very good ideas. Do more of them in our conversations. Moving to levity.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Please, yes.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Sure. Yeah, when you start to get into the idea of, hey, it's better to ask more questions, a very natural follow-up question is, well, is there a tipping point? When does lots of questions become too many questions? When does it get annoying or feel interrogative or intrusive? And so we use the speed dating data as an example of a very cooperative context.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
So speed dating is where strangers get together. They might have four or five minutes to get to know each other, and they haven't met before. In that sort of context, you have so much to learn about each other. You need to find out where they're from, what they like, where did they go to school, what are their hobbies, what are their families like?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
There's just so much to learn about each other that we actually never see a tipping point in the number of fights. You can't possibly ask too many questions in a very cooperative way. context like speed dating. We just never see it. It just never gets annoying because you have so much to learn.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Now, when we start to think about more conflictual context, so let's say a negotiation or maybe a feedback meeting to someone at work, We do see instances where there is a tipping point where you can ask too many questions, where someone starts to feel defensive. There's information they don't want to share with you. Or are you going to use, why are you asking me so many questions?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Are you going to use my answers to exploit me later? So people are just a little bit more guarded in those contexts. But even there, even in the most intense negotiations or the most conflictual contexts, we're What surprised us in the data is that the tipping point where lots of questions becomes too many questions is way further out than you would think.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
The bigger risk in any context is not asking enough questions. Walking away and having asked zero or one or two questions the whole time is a much more common mistake. than asking too many. So there is a tipping point when people have conflict, but we should think less about that and think more about the silent killer of conversation, which is not asking enough.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Let's go to levity. Let's go. When you say go to levity, I imagine us like sledding down a hill or riding a balloon into the air because levity is a very fun place. It's a place we need to go in our conversations. It's these moments of sparkle and bubble and fizz that keep things fun and engaging. And they're so very important.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
That was an intimidating moment. I didn't, I actually, I ruminated about that afterwards because I did feel very put on the spot about tell me a joke. And I was like, oh, I wish I had prepared.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
I know, exactly. I hope I did a good tap dance in that moment. I think I did come up with something, didn't I? It was probably quite bad.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Oh, how cute. Actually, yeah, the problem is we read a lot of these joke books together with my kids, but they love them so much that they memorize the jokes. And then I don't because I rely on the kids to say them to me. They recite them back. So anyway, it was quite the memory challenge. But I appreciated it because they started from a place of levity.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
So levity in the book and in my class that we talk about is So many conversations go off the rails for obvious reasons where people, there's hostility, there's confrontation, there's disagreement. These are very obvious, loud problems and they exist and they are very important, but there's a more quiet killer of conversation and that's boredom.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Boredom and disinterest can be really problematic in conversation. It might be even more pervasive than the sort of louder problems of hostility and disagreement. And so levity is the antidote for boredom. It's the way that we pull each other back in. It's moments of humor, laughter, and warmth.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
that just pull you back in enough so that we can maintain this feeling of sustained engagement with each other and really to go on and accomplish any of our goals, whether they're silly or serious. And a conversation devoid of levity, it's going to be very hard for people to maintain the engagement that you need to just enjoy life and enjoy each other and trust each other.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Well, you've been talking about making people feel like they matter. And boy, if there's anything that makes people feel like they matter, it's callbacks. Callbacks are any time you reference back to something that someone has said earlier in the conversation or earlier in your relationship. There's such a fabulous, undeniable indicator that you've listened to somebody.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
The only way you can do it is if you heard someone earlier in the conversation, you held it in your mind, and then you're clever enough to raise it later.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
The other bonus, the other lovely thing about callbacks is that they're almost always funny because it's the sort of moment, witty moment where it's like a little surprising and just feels like a hug that like someone was listening enough to you that they would call it back later. I work with an improv company called Freestyle Plus.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
It's a company that's been spun out from a Broadway show called Freestyle Love Supreme.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Amazing. Well, you'll love this. So the guys who come and visit my class are Anthony Veneziale and Sammy Weegent, who are the CEOs, co-CEOs and founders of Freestyle Plus. They helped to originate this Broadway show called Freestyle Love Supreme together with Lin-Manuel Miranda. This was before Hamilton Times, before In the Heights. And this Broadway show is fully... freestyle rap.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And so they've got a live beat boxer. They interact with the crowd. They ask crowd questions like, what's the hardest, what's the hard thing you've been going through in your life? And then they get up on stage and they freestyle rap and retell the whole story. Then they tell it backwards. Then they tell it again with a different ending all the whole time, just freestyle rapping.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
It's the most amazing thing that I've like ever witnessed with my eyes that human beings can do on stage. So these guys come to my class at Harvard and work with my students to workshop their improvisational chops. And this year, what we were working on in particular were the students' ability to use callbacks. And so we designed a new game where you practice doing callbacks.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
So you start by having a conversation about any topic of your choosing. And the goal is to latch on to something specific that your partner has said from earlier in the conversation. So for example, in this one, John said he knows Angela Duckworth, and he's talked to her before. And when he talked to her about intentionality, her focus was on self-control.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And so I'm now calling back to that moment that John was talking about my friend and his friend, Angela, and her focus on self-control. The only way I can do that is because I was listening really intently to what you had to say and that I care about you. I care about your ideas. And I thought that was a really nice point. And so we can all do this anytime.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And knowing that callbacks are possible actually leads people to listen a little bit differently. It helps you to stay attentive, even when your mind is built to wander. And it, because, oh, I'm on the lookout for stuff that I'll be able to call back to later. Little details, little funny phrases, good ideas that are worthy of bringing up again.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And it helps you to maintain your engagement in the conversation. Often when we think of very charismatic conversationalists, actually, these are the kinds of things that they do. They use callbacks.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Just like you were saying, when people think of their favorite conversationalist and then they give them a call, they very quickly realize, oh, they're just calling back to stuff that we experienced together in the past. And that feels so good. It feels like it's kind, it brings levity, and it just shows that they care about you and that you matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Yes. So this is our final maxim. We made it to the K. K is for kindness and a huge emphasis in this in this chapter on kindness is about listening. So there have been decades of work on active listening. So things like nodding and smiling and using nonverbal cues to show someone that you've heard them, eye contact, leaning forward. This is all really great.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
It's the basics of being a good listener. What we've uncovered more recently in our research on conversation is that the best conversationalists go a level beyond active listening. They don't just use their nonverbals to show their partner that they matter and that they're being heard. Because those things can be faked sometimes. They also use their words.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
They use verbal cues to show that they've heard someone. Verbal cues, unlike nodding and smiling, verbal cues can't be faked. The only way that I can call back to something that you said earlier, the only way that I can ask a follow-up question, the only way that I can repeat back something that I just heard you say and validate your feelings about it is if I heard you say it in the first place.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
So here's the advice. This is what this means for all of us. Put in the hard work to listen to people. But if you do, if you put in that hard work to be attentive to the people in front of you, make sure that you show it. Make sure that you show the person that you've heard them by using your words, by saying it out loud. Hey, I just heard you say this. Am I hearing you right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Or, hey, I just heard you say that. That was really great. Hey, remember when you talked about Angela Duckworth and her emphasis on self-control? I thought that was a really nice point. So these verbal cues that you heard someone are so very powerful and should definitely be part of your listening toolkits.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
What a great question. I think when we think about big concepts like kindness and dehumanization, I know I always felt this way, even as a child, but still into adulthood. My question was, well, where does that happen? Where does this unfold? When and where and with whom?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And as a behavioral scientist and in writing this book and teaching this course, what I've realized is it so often happens in these micro moments during our conversations, even our private conversations with people that we care about. We're making these tiny choices. I can give you a compliment. This interview has been so wonderful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Or I can give you a backhanded compliment like, oh, this has been so wonderful compared to all of the podcast interviews that I've done about the book. That's a very small change in language and it has a massively different impact on who you're saying it to. Straightforward compliments make them feel good. It makes them feel like they matter. It makes them feel like you care about them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
The emotional tone is very positive. A backhanded compliment where you say the comparison set out loud feels hurtful. It feels almost more like an insult than like a compliment. And so we're just constantly making these tiny choices in our language that lean in the direction of micro kindnesses and towards micro harms.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And I think a big concept in the book is, I don't know if I can make you a good person, but if you are a good person who cares about other people and wants them to feel like they matter, conversation is an amazing opportunity, an amazing place that we all have access to where we can put our goodness into practice.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And it's also often the place where we put our not so goodness into practice and we should work to get rid of that, right? So lean into the good stuff and lean away from the accusatory, from the defensive, from the hurtful, tiny little jabs and barbs that we poke into other people, because that's what makes someone a good, kind person versus a hurtful person.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Oh, I would love to have you, John. And thank you so much for having me on your podcast. It's just such an honor to be here. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Oh, great. So my website is allisonwoodbrooks.com. There's all the ordering and pre-ordering information about the book, which comes in a hardback copy and a Kindle and an audio book. So if you don't have time to read books, I'm with you. I hear you. And you can listen to it on walks and runs around your neighborhood.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
All the information you need is there about my research and about the book and about the course. And I'd love to connect.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Thanks for having me, John. You're awesome.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Thank you so much for having me, John. I'm so happy to be here.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And the difference between micro kindnesses and micro harms, sometimes when you're looking at a transcript, they look very subtle. But I think in the emotional experience of those interactions, the difference can be massive in terms of how much you are conveying that you believe that you matter and how much you care about the other person and convey that they matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Thank you so much. I'm really excited to share it with the world.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Oh my gosh, the story, the journey. Well, as an undergrad, I was very interested in, I thought I wanted to go to medical school originally. So I've long had a passion for humans and caring about people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And as an undergrad, I had the great privilege of taking courses from some really amazing behavioral scientists that made me fall in love with behavioral science rather than going to medical school. So I took the judgment and decision-making course with Danny Kahneman. I think it was the last time he ever taught it. He was co-teaching it at the time with Eldar Shafir.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And I remember taking that class before Danny had won his Nobel Prize. And just thinking, this is so fascinating. Like what an amazing way to come to understand each other and the world is through the study of people. And so that was the beginning of my journey.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
I did some research internships in the summer as an undergrad at Columbia University and fell more and more deeply in love with it, decided that this was the life path for me. And I went to I applied to grad school and went to Wharton and worked with Maurice Schweitzer and Katie Milkman and Adam Grant. So in a way, just stumbled into this incredible milieu of behavioral scientists.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And I studied people's feelings, mostly anxiety, like how can we come to understand why so many of us feel anxious so much of the time and what can we do about it? Which then led me to my professorship at Harvard, where at the beginning I was recruited to teach negotiation and presumably to do research on negotiation and people's emotions and negotiation.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And after a couple of years there, I started to get a little bit frustrated and I realized I'm not sure I want to teach students who are already very strategic. to be even more strategic. And it was this coincided with this epiphany that for many decades, behavioral scientists had been studying difficult conversations.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And all the way along, I had this niggling feeling like, well, but even conversations that seem like they should be easy are also very tricky and we're making all kinds of mistakes. So let me see if I can figure out how we can do every conversation better. And that led me to a place of designing a new course called Talk at Harvard and eventually writing this book about that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Oh, what a fabulous question, John. Maurice is one of the most amazing people and such a fantastic mentor. In fact, he's known as one of the best mentors in the field, and I was so lucky to benefit from that mentorship. He devoted so much attention and time to developing me as a scholar, and it was so incredibly helpful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And to this day, he's one of my best friends and continues to be a very valuable mentor. He spent a lot of time with me. We spent a lot of time in conversation. We spent a lot of time brainstorming.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
He taught me a lot about the importance of developing your taste for ideas, that there are a lot of people out there that can go through the motions of conducting behavioral science, but what might be the more rare skill is coming up with good ideas that touch on something real. And so I really, I had such a great privilege of working with Maurice.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
What a gift you have given to them to help them develop their musical skills. It's fabulous. My husband is a drummer and we've met playing in a band together and we continue to play in a band together with a couple of my Harvard colleagues as well. So drummers are a special breed, John.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
They're very, at least for my husband, I always say he's like the heartbeat of our family and it's really amazing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Definitely. I love the idea of just the fact that they're having them do it rather than just read about it or study about it or learn about something. It helps to close what we call the knowing doing gap, right? It's one thing to know something. It's a completely different thing to be able to do it in practice.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And so the best way to learn how to close that knowing-doing gap is to actually practice doing it, which sounds like your son is getting to do in this class, which is fabulous. It's also what I do in my course at Harvard called Talk, which is, it's one thing to know what good conversation looks like. It's a completely other thing to be able to actually execute and do it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And so when I put my students in lots of different situations to actually practice the art and the science of conversation in real time in a very safe and I hope loving environment in our classroom.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Oh, what a great question. We can definitely use your term. I like micro choices just as much as micro decisions. Well, we talked about this a little bit, John. Life is a series of moments. It's a series of micro choices. And what I realized in my research on conversation is that that's what we're doing when we're interacting with somebody else.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
It's just a series of hundreds of micro choices over time as every conversation unfolds.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And if we can aim to make some of those choices just a little bit more effectively, because we talk to people so often and every day across every domain of our lives, in accumulation, if you can make some of those choices more effectively, that's going to have a massive impact on your life, on your career, on your family, on your love life, all of it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
And so the whole sort of premise of this book is how can we learn to make some of those micro choices more effectively?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Oh my goodness. What a profound question. First of all, thank you for sharing that with me. I think there are a lot of people who struggle with communication and you're not alone in it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
Actually, some of the people that I've talked to are people who are in the deaf community also find that they work so hard at communicating that they too put such a value on developing it as a skill in the same way that it sounds like you've been working hard for much of your life to develop communication as a skill. So your question is, how can we think about the way that we communicate?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Alison Wood Brooks on How to Make Every Conversation Matter | EP 563
How does that relate to us mattering? It's such a profound question. I think one thing that I've learned by doing this research and teaching this course about conversation is that
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
conversation is a surprisingly vast ocean of complexity. There's a lot going on under the hood for something we learn to do as toddlers and practice doing every day of our lives every day, all day long with a huge range of partners. It feels like we get to adulthood and we should be experts. And in truth, we are far from being expert at conversation.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
yeah i think we we in a way are learning all the time by watching other people and just sort of bumping and stumbling through life we have little mini successes and we think okay well i'll try that again or we have little fail little or big failures and think oh well i guess i won't do that again And so we're kind of learning through the school of hard knocks as we go through life.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
But you're right. It's a very wicked feedback environment where we don't get perfect feedback about how we're doing. And we certainly don't often take classes about how to have conversation until now.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
That's right. Yeah, we're getting less practice than ever before in human history. And with less practice comes less feedback and sort of the feedback we do get is even more mysterious and diffuse. I mean, when you're texting someone, you have no idea how your messages are landing with them, right? You can't read their facial expressions.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
You really have no idea if they've even read your message until they respond. So yes, we find ourselves in an even more difficult learning environment about our communication than ever before.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
The definition of a good conversation is not up to me as a scientist or as a professor. It's not even up to you, Mike. It's determined by the goals of the people participating in the conversation. And the goals that people have when they interact with other people are vast. I mean,
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
If you didn't have we always have at least one goal, even if it's just to have fun or be polite or to uphold the very basic expectation that you're going to respond to another person. Usually people have many more than just one goal. So you kind of hold on to this rich constellation of things you might want to.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
share a story you might want to seek someone's advice you might want to have a great time you might want to give them a compliment you want to persuade them to agree with your view on a certain issue and also you need to leave in five minutes so we all hold these very many goals at the same time and the person you're talking to has their own constellation of goals that they hold on to
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
And so the definition of success in any given conversation depends on achieving at least some subset of those goals. And achieving those goals is harder than it first appears.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
Yeah, I know. I've heard that about Bill Clinton as well. There are people in the world who have developed conversation as a skill. And it's very easy to look at someone like Bill Clinton and think, boy, he is gifted. He is a gifted, natural conversationalist. He has this charisma. He's really good at connecting with people. And maybe it's effortless for him.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
And when you look at someone like Bill Clinton, who just seems charismatic and so good at connecting with people, such a great listener, it kind of can make you feel bad about yourself. Like, what am I not doing right here? What is this thing that he's so good at? Which I call the myth of naturalness.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
Even for someone like Bill Clinton, what you can't see are all the many experiences that he's had in his life that led him to this place where he became such a good communicator. And you can't see all of the effort that he's putting in to every conversation to make sure that his partners are feeling so understood and loved and listened to and charmed and delighted.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
Also, when people describe Bill Clinton in particular, I suspect what he's quite good at is listening. And listening is one of the most important skills in conversation overall. And it's much more complicated than it first appears.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
So I think as humans, we tend to fixate on talking, thinking about, well, when am I going to speak up and what am I going to say? What am I going to disclose? What should I ask this person? When in fact, I think perhaps the more important part of the equation is listening, focusing on your partner and working really hard to
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
Listen to their words, but also to their nonverbal cues, their gestures, their facial expressions. When we study listening as behavioral scientists, we think of it as all of the information that's coming at you visually. and through your ears, the audio, right?
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
And so that's the person and how they're moving, what they look like, the sound of their voice, the meaning of their words, and also the environment all around you, sort of reading the room. All of this is required when you're listening. So perhaps it's no surprise that listening is incredibly effortful. You need to be perceiving all of this information.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
And then in your mind, you elaborate and think more deeply about some of it. We can't really take it all in and think about all of it. And the third step of listening that's so unique to conversation is the expression of listening. It's not that you just hear and see things and then think about it. You can actually say and show your partner that you've heard them.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
So, Michael, just now you've made a really great distinction between talking and listening. The only way I can say that back to you is because I heard you say it in the first place. I'm thinking about this distinction very carefully. I'm compelled by it. And now I have the ability to repeat it back to you and affirm the distinction and say, hey, I'm willing to go there with you.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
Let's do this together.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
Yes, there is fantastic research on conversational endings by behavioral scientists Adam Masroiani and Gus Cooney. The end of a conversation, if we think of a conversation as the series of coordinated decisions between two people, the end of the conversation is the last coordination decision.
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Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
It's saying, OK, the next topic we're going to choose is silence and we're going to walk away from each other and it's over. And so even though that begins at the very start of like where, what are we going to talk about now and now and now and now, and then we get to the end and somebody has the power to end it.
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Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
So just like every other coordination choice, this ending decision is surprisingly difficult and causes a lot of awkwardness. In their study of conversational endings, they found that essentially we can't read other people's minds about when they would like to end. We're not even really that great at knowing when we would like to end a conversation. So self-awareness and sort of other awareness.
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Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
And because of this, almost no conversation ends when you want it to. Like, we're just bad at guessing. Which is on one hand, sort of depressing. On the other hand, I think very empowering. So it's saying like, look, you're going to get it wrong anyway. So as soon as you start to feel like a conversation is running out of juice, just leave, like just end it. It's okay.
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Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
The bigger risk is actually stagnating and lingering and staying too long. And you part ways and your partner thinks that you're sort of boring and uninteresting. So I think that the takeaway from this research is just leave.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
like what power do I have even in the worst of circumstances like it's really someone's really struggling they're really awkward or they're a windbag or they're not very nice or they're boring whatever whatever the challenge is I love taking that on as a personal challenge of like how can I make this interesting how can I make this productive how can I make it fun
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Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
It's a sort of treasure hunt for me. And the ways that I most commonly do that and try and pursue the adventure of making it good is through question asking a lot of the time. Trying to ask questions that... help us together search for better treasure.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
I know that every person out there, even those who seem boring or blustery or not that nice, I know they have something in their mind that I will be so interested to learn about and uncover. And so I like trying to figure that out. It requires giving other people the benefit of the doubt. It requires...
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
pushing yourself relentlessly to not be overly judgmental of people, especially when you find them unlikable or, you know, annoying. I also, I find many people to be sort of too serious and a little boring. And so I have a sort of personal mission of injecting levity. through humor, but also through warmth moves like flattery and just changing the topic to unexpected things.
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Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
My friend calls it breaking the pace. I like to break the pace sometimes.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
So I wanna push you on this. You never know what you could uncover, even in a seemingly sort of shallow context or a shallow conversation. You never know when you're gonna see someone again. You never know if you could uncover something in that conversation that would inspire you to see them again. So even in the unlikeliest of circumstances, I just wanna push you and everyone
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
to consider the idea that maybe it doesn't have to be as shallow as it first appears. I teach about this in my course at Harvard. There's this topic pyramid with three levels. At the base of the pyramid, this is where small talk lives. This is topics you could talk about with anybody, let's say at a dinner party or a cocktail party.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
So the traffic, the weather, the weekend, the holidays, whatever, stuff you can talk about with anyone. The problem isn't with small talk in general. In fact, it's a very important social ritual that helps us initiate conversations, get acquainted with people we don't know well, or reacquaint ourselves with people we haven't seen in a while.
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Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
The mistake that most people make, particularly at a cocktail party or maybe a networking event or really anywhere, is they stay too long at the base of the pyramid. So you need to think of small talk as a place to be searching for something more meaningful, for looking for doorknobs to go through doors to more meaningful rooms of the conversation.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
And if you find them, you can move into the second tier of the pyramid, which is medium or tailored talk. And the way to get there is to get more personalized. And this might look like asking questions that triggers self-disclosure from your partner. It might mean sharing something personal, maybe something joyful or painful about your own life.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
Or it could not be about disclosure at all, but just trying to find topics that are exciting to both of you, sort of chasing the energy to find topics where they're an expert or they have some interest or just positive energy in general. So chase the energy to launch away from small talk. At the very top of the pyramid is deep talk.
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Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
This is a meaningful topic that maybe only you two people could talk about at a specific moment in time. The conversation we're having right now feels like we're getting there, right? Like we're there because we have this substantive topic to talk about. You have this expertise. We're getting to know each other. We're sort of
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Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
hovering over deep talk and and having a substantive collaboration and and work work to work on together can help you get there um and we're all we're sort of all navigating this topic pyramid all the time not every conversation is bound for the peak of the pyramid it would be annoying if someone is always trying to have these sort of deep meaningful conversations with everybody you don't need to have a deep conversation with the barista at starbucks
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Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
But you could maybe give them a compliment or ask about their kid, right? If it's the same person you're seeing every day and get into that medium second tier of the pyramid. But I do want to push you and everyone on this idea of like, it doesn't have to be shallow and you never know when something that seems like a small talk conversation could become something more.
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Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
Yeah, or not. Maybe take a rest. Don't talk to anybody tomorrow. Yeah, exhaustion is real. So I think all of this stuff, thinking about how to have great conversations, how to really connect with people. One thing that has become clear through our research is it does require a tremendous amount of energy and effort.
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Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
You even just listening, your mind is wandering 24% of the time, even when you're trying to listen attentively. So to be a good listener like Bill Clinton or like you, it takes a lot of energy, a lot of focus. And we're not always prepared. We don't always have that energy.
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Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
So I think giving yourself grace about that and giving others grace about sort of social and conversational fatigue is also really important, particularly in this world where we're constantly toggling between, you know, text threads and emails and phone calls and Zoom calls and in-person conversations. We're sort of having more conversation
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
across all different modes of communication than ever before in human history. So the fatigue, the drain on our energy that comes from that is very, very real and should be taken seriously.
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Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
What a lovely question. I sometimes think of conversation as this sort of journey that you're going on, a sort of relentless search process where you're searching for deep, meaningful moments where you get to the peak of that topic pyramid, where you feel like, oh, we did it, we did the thing, where we feel really...
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Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
close and connected and like i trust you and we we talked about a thing that was felt really good we felt connected i don't think we can expect that all the time and even in conversations where you walk away feeling like oh my gosh that was great If you looked back at the transcript, what you would see is kind of like a train wreck. We interrupt each other all the time.
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Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
There's all kinds of moments of misunderstanding. We say things that we probably shouldn't. We forget to say things that we should. But there are these moments where you come together and say, wow, like, oh, that felt really good. And likely, if you're feeling that way, it's likely that the other person is as well. But to your point, Mike, you never know.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
We really cannot read the minds of other people. The most direct way to understand what is in someone else's head and how they felt like the conversation went is to ask them directly. Questions are the most direct pathway to learning about someone else's mind.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
Thank you so much for having me, Mike. I've had such a great time.
Something You Should Know
Why We’re Wired to Imitate Others & How to Have a Great Conversation
Even in conversations where you walk away feeling like, oh my gosh, that was great. If you look back at the transcript, what you would see is we interrupt each other all the time. There's all kinds of moments of misunderstanding. But there are these moments where you'd say, wow, oh, that felt really good.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Conversation is a surprisingly vast ocean of complexity. There's a lot going on under the hood. For something we learn to do as toddlers and practice doing every day of our lives, every day, all day long with a huge range of partners, it feels like we get to adulthood and we should be experts. And in truth, we are far from being expert at conversation.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
The definition of a good conversation is not up to me as a scientist or as a professor. It's not even up to you, Mike. It's determined by the goals of the people participating in the conversation. And the goals that people have when they interact with other people are vast.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
If you didn't have we always have at least one goal, even if it's just to have fun or be polite or to uphold the very basic expectation that you're going to respond to another person. Usually people have many more than just one goal. So you kind of hold on to this rich constellation of things you might want to. Share a story. You might want to seek someone's advice.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
You might want to have a great time. You might want to give them a compliment. You want to persuade them to agree with your view on a certain issue. And also, you need to leave in five minutes. So we all hold these very many goals at the same time. And the person you're talking to has their own constellation of goals that they hold on to.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
And so the definition of success in any given conversation depends on achieving at least some subset of those goals. And achieving those goals is harder than it first appears.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Yeah. Yeah. So in almost every encounter, we have some goals that are common across most conversations, one of which is that we want it to be enjoyable and feel meaningful and not overly shallow. We want to avoid awkwardness. We want to feel connected. We want to feel safe. Often, we want to learn new things from each other.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
It's why the human race evolved the ability to communicate at all as to share and exchange accurate information. To the extent that you can achieve enjoyment and safety and connection and information exchange all within one conversation, that's going to be a conversation that feels terrific. it can break down in any one of those ways.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
If it's not enjoyable, if it doesn't feel safe, if it's not advancing your understanding in the way that you want it to, and if you don't feel connected to the other person, like you're helping each other and like you understand each other, in any one of those ways, when we walk away, it can feel like a failure.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
So I wanna push you on this. You never know what you could uncover, even in a seemingly sort of shallow context or a shallow conversation. You never know when you're gonna see someone again. You never know if you could uncover something in that conversation that would inspire you to see them again. So even in the unlikeliest of circumstances, I just wanna push you and everyone
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
to consider the idea that maybe it doesn't have to be as shallow as it first appears. I teach about this in my course at Harvard. There's this topic pyramid with three levels. At the base of the pyramid, this is where small talk lives. This is topics you could talk about with anybody, let's say at a dinner party or a cocktail party.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
So the traffic, the weather, the weekend, the holidays, whatever, stuff you can talk about with anyone. The problem isn't with small talk in general. In fact, it's a very important social ritual that helps us initiate conversations, get acquainted with people we don't know well, or reacquaint ourselves with people we haven't seen in a while.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
The mistake that most people make, particularly at a cocktail party or maybe a networking event or really anywhere, is they stay too long at the base of the pyramid. So you need to think of small talk as a place to be searching for something more meaningful, for looking for doorknobs to go through doors to more meaningful rooms of the conversation.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
And if you find them, you can move into the second tier of the pyramid, which is medium or tailored talk. And the way to get there is to get more personalized. And this might look like asking questions that triggers self-disclosure from your partner. It might mean sharing something personal, maybe something joyful or painful about your own life.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Or it could not be about disclosure at all, but just trying to find topics that are exciting to both of you, sort of chasing the energy to find topics where they're an expert or they have some interest or just positive energy in general. So chase the energy to launch away from small talk. At the very top of the pyramid is deep talk. This is a meaningful topic that maybe only a
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
You two people could talk about at a specific moment in time. The conversation we're having right now feels like we're getting there, right? Like we're there because we have this substantive topic to talk about. You have this expertise. We're getting to know each other. We're sort of...
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
hovering over deep talk and having a substantive collaboration and work to work on together can help you get there. And we're sort of all navigating this topic pyramid all the time. Not every conversation is bound for the peak of the pyramid. It would be annoying if someone is always trying to have these sort of deep, meaningful conversations with everybody.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
You don't need to have a deep conversation with the barista at Starbucks. But you could maybe give them a compliment or ask about their kid, right? If it's the same person you're seeing every day and get into that medium second tier of the pyramid. But I do want to push you and everyone on this idea of like, it doesn't have to be shallow.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
And you never know when something that seems like a small talk conversation could become something more.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Yeah, or not. Maybe take a rest. Don't talk to anybody tomorrow. Yeah, exhaustion is real. So I think all of this stuff, thinking about how to have great conversations, how to really connect with people. One thing that has become clear through our research is it does require a tremendous amount of energy and effort.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
You even just listening, your mind is wandering 24% of the time, even when you're trying to listen attentively. So to be a good listener, it takes a lot of energy, a lot of focus. And we're not always... prepared, we don't always have that energy.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
So I think giving yourself grace about that and giving others grace about sort of social and conversational fatigue is also really important, particularly in this world where we're constantly toggling between text threads and emails and phone calls and Zoom calls and in-person conversations. We're sort of having more conversation
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
across all different modes of communication than ever before in human history. So the fatigue, the drain on our energy that comes from that is very, very real and should be taken seriously.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
What a lovely question. I sometimes think of conversation as this sort of journey that you're going on, a sort of relentless search process where you're searching for deep, meaningful moments where you get to the peak of that topic pyramid, where you feel like, oh, we did it, we did the thing, where we feel really...
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
close and connected and like i trust you and we we talked about a thing that was felt really good we felt connected i don't think we can expect that all the time and even in conversations where you walk away feeling like oh my gosh that was great If you look back at the transcript, what you would see is kind of like a train wreck. We interrupt each other all the time.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
There's all kinds of moments of misunderstanding. We say things that we probably shouldn't. We forget to say things that we should. But there are these moments where you come together and say, wow, that felt really good. And likely, if you're feeling that way, it's likely that the other person is as well. But to your point, Mike, you never know. We really cannot read the minds of other people.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
The most direct way to understand what is in someone else's head and how they felt like the conversation went is to ask them directly. Questions are the most direct pathway to learning about someone else's mind.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Yeah, I know. I've heard that about Bill Clinton as well. There are people in the world who have developed conversation as a skill. And it's very easy to look at someone like Bill Clinton and think, boy, he is gifted. He is a gifted, natural conversationalist. He has this charisma. He's really good at connecting with people. And maybe it's effortless for him.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
And when you look at someone like Bill Clinton, who just seems charismatic and so good at connecting with people, such a great listener, it can make you feel bad about yourself. Like, what am I not doing right here? What is this thing that he's so good at? Which I call the myth of naturalness.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Even for someone like Bill Clinton, what you can't see are all the many experiences that he's had in his life that led him to this place where he became such a good communicator. And you can't see all of the effort that he's putting in to every conversation to make sure that his partners are feeling so understood and loved and listened to and charmed and delighted.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
If you were to ask Bill Clinton, my guess would be that he thinks about people a lot when he's not together with them. He thinks about what topics he needs to bring up with them once they're together.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
And then once they're in a conversation, he's thinking very, he's listening very attentively, putting in tons of effort to really listen to people, elaborate on their ideas, follow up with them, and very actively sort of thinking about how to be the most helpful he can be to them in that sort of magical moment of the conversation.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Also, when people describe Bill Clinton in particular, I suspect what he's quite good at is listening. And listening is one of the most important skills in conversation overall. And it's much more complicated than it first appears.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
So I think as humans, we tend to fixate on talking, thinking about, well, when am I gonna speak up? And what am I gonna say? What am I gonna disclose? What should I ask this person? When in fact, I think perhaps the more important part of the equation is listening.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
focusing on your partner and working really hard to listen to their words, but also to their nonverbal cues, their gestures, their facial expressions. When we study listening as behavioral scientists, we think of it as all of the information that's coming at you visually. and through your ears, the audio, right?
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
And so that's the person and how they're moving, what they look like, the sound of their voice, the meaning of their words, and also the environment all around you, sort of reading the room. All of this is required when you're listening. So perhaps it's no surprise that listening is incredibly effortful. You need to be perceiving all of this information.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
And then in your mind, you elaborate and think more deeply about some of it. We can't really take it all in and think about all of it. And the third step of listening that's so unique to conversation is the expression of listening. It's not that you just hear and see things and then think about it. You can actually say and show your partner that you've heard them.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
So, Michael, just now you've made a really great distinction between talking and listening. The only way I can say that back to you is because I heard you say it in the first place. I'm thinking about this distinction very carefully. I'm compelled by it. And now I have the ability to repeat it back to you and affirm the distinction and say, hey, I'm willing to go there with you.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Let's do this together.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Yes, there is fantastic research on conversational endings by behavioral scientists, Adam Mastroianni and Gus Cooney. The end of a conversation, if we think of a conversation as the series of coordinated decisions between two people, the end of the conversation is the last coordination decision.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
It's saying, OK, the next topic we're going to choose is silence and we're going to walk away from each other and it's over. And so even though we're that begins at the very start of like where what are we going to talk about now and now and now and now and then we get to the end and somebody has the power to end it.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
So just like every other coordination choice, this ending decision is surprisingly difficult and causes a lot of awkwardness. In their study of conversational endings, they found that, essentially, we can't read other people's minds about when they would like to end. We're not even really that great at knowing when we would like to end a conversation.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
And because of this, almost no conversation ends when you want it to. We're just bad at guessing. Which is, on one hand, sort of depressing. On the other hand, I think very empowering. So it's saying like, look, you're going to get it wrong anyway. So as soon as you start to feel like a conversation is running out of juice, just leave. Like, just end it. It's okay.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
You know what's funny? When I talk to people myself, I truly, honestly have a mindset of how can I make this good? Like what power do I have? Even in the worst of circumstances, like it's really, someone's really struggling. They're really awkward or they're a windbag or they're not very nice or they're boring, whatever, whatever the challenge is.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
I love taking that on as a personal challenge of like, how can I make this interesting? How can I make this productive? How can I make it fun? It's a sort of treasure hunt for me. And the ways that I most commonly do that and try and pursue the adventure of making it good is through question asking, trying to ask questions that help us together search for better treasure?
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
I know that every person out there, even those who seem boring or blustery or not that nice, I know they have something in their mind that I will be so interested to learn about. and uncover. And so I like trying to figure that out. I also, I find many people to be sort of too serious and a little boring.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
And so I have a sort of personal mission of injecting levity through humor, but also through warmth moves like flattery and just changing the topic to unexpected things. My friend calls it breaking the pace. I like to break the pace sometimes.
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Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
Thank you so much for having me, Mike. I've had such a great time.
Something You Should Know
Why We Like Cute Things & How to Have a Great Conversation
You never know what you could uncover, even in a seemingly sort of shallow conversation. And you never know when something that seems like a small talk conversation could become something more.
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How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
The biggest thing that I think no one really thinks about is you breathe so much, about 20,000 times every day. And what folks don't often think is exactly what is occurring in the body when that's happening. Your body has to do this spectacular thing. It's trying to get in as much oxygen as possible, as quickly as possible, and put that oxygen in contact with the blood, right?
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How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
So the structure of the lungs, they basically have all these kind of little sacs people know called alveoli. They're kind of like little grape sacs. that the air goes into and then it gets put into contact with the blood.
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How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
But what that means is that basically with every one of those 20,000 breaths, you're spreading a soda can or two of blood across an area, a soda can or two of air, across an area about the size of a tennis court. It's really just this miraculous ability that happens every single time you breathe. My personal favorite detail about breathing is that it is so connected to the brain.
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How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
That makes a lot of sense, right? This is about the most important thing your brain can be doing. It's about as hardwired as it gets. Your brain is controlled by these pulses of activity, kind of washing across the brain this electrical activity. And there's real evidence that the speed of your breath affects those rhythms.
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How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
So if your brain is behaving in a way you don't want to, if your thoughts are racing, you can essentially kind of hack into your brain with your breathing and willfully exert some control over that process. It's really pretty amazing. And one of the few ways to actually affect your body's function willfully.
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How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
You know, for instance, things which seem totally trivial, right, red hair versus blonde or something like that, actually have dramatic consequences for your body. So here's some big things. The color of hair is very complicated, obviously, and determined less by evolution than by genetic drift, just kind of chance mutations. Couple of cool things here.
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How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
One, we often have this idea that blonde hair is associated with Northern Europe and Scandinavia or that kind of things. We know now though from genetic analysis that that's not where blonde hair came from at all. It actually came from over towards Mongolia and Russia around Lake Baikal. And it was only brought to Europe maybe 17,000 years ago with this mass migration of people.
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How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
That's a relatively recent one. Much more fundamental, though, is red hair. Red hair is much, much older. So old, in fact, that we know Neanderthals, some Neanderthals had red hair as well, which is really kind of amazing and mind-boggling. So the mutation that causes red hair... You know, it comes out of the skin, so it's tied up with a lot of the biology of the skin.
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How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
It is a much simpler and therefore, you know, much more profound mutation. And one of the things it dictates is, well, there are two really, two big ones. One, people with red hair are much more sensitive to ultraviolet rays, which means actually that if you have red hair, it's basically equivalent to 21 extra years of exposure to the sun. Pretty wild.
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How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
So it makes it important for somebody with red hair to wear their sunscreen, right? But then in a stranger and more profound way, people with red hair, they actually process pain differently. The mechanisms by which pain is felt by people with red hair are completely different for other people.
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How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
So if you're prescribing a medication for pain, like an opioid, you have to take that kind of thing in account or you should be considering that when you do so.
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Not necessarily less or more, but that it takes basically a different pathway. I think that would be the best way to explain it. It takes a different pathway so that the drugs you use to treat pain in somebody, say, with brown hair or black hair, might not work as effectively in somebody with red hair. Or a different, you know, they might be more sensitive to other drugs.
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Yeah, yeah. So one of the interesting things with hair is it's really, it's almost kind of a biomarker, right? Because it is so intimately tied up with your hormones, right? it's changing throughout your life. People's hair actually, it gets thicker and thicker, like it actually gets, the diameter increases up through your 20s, usually, in men, before slowly decreasing.
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How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
Of course, with a lot of men, the hair going away entirely.
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How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
Well, here's the good news. The purpose it's serving, actually, I think is really amazing and one of the least gross and distasteful things possible. Mucus, when I started this project, was not one that I was extremely interested in. You know, I'm not one to incline necessarily to the gross-out material.
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But I was interested in it because I had heard that they had this amazing lab up at MIT called the Biogel Lab, the only woman-run lab at MIT. It was really basically devoted to the study of mucus. So I went up there and visited this lab. And it turns out, mucus is one of the most important things, if not the most important thing that your body produces.
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How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
You know, we often just think of blowing your nose, that's what mucus is, right? But really, it lines the nose, the mouth, the eyes, the lungs, the entire digestive tract, all told your body's making like a gallon of mucus a day, basically. And as for what it actually does, you probably think of it the way I was taught to think of it, as a filter.
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Some pollen or some dust goes into your nose and mucus stops it. It turns out that could almost not be further from the truth. It does do that, but it also plays a ton of different roles. And in fact, probably the most important role it does is it's not about what it keeps out, it's about what it keeps in. So I'm sure you've heard of the microbiome, right?
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This kind of collection of thousands of species of microbes that live on and in the human body. You know, they've got more cells than the body itself, more DNA than the body itself. And they take care of all these vital functions for you, right? They help to digest our food. They break down fiber and complex carbohydrates, things like that, producing energy for us.
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They also discourage bad microbes. They stimulate the production of neurotransmitters. They help to regulate metabolism and hunger. Just this kind of really amazing suite of vital functions that these microbes provide. So what it turns out is that mucus is actually the soil that the microbiome grows in, right? This is where it lives. This is where it grows.
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How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
It is actually actively fed by your mucus, right? A single strand of mucus is basically like a long protein backbone studded with all these sugars. And those sugars are there to feed your microbiome. That's pretty wild, right?
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So that's, again, part of its role is also... keeping stuff out. And one of the neat things it does is, let's say, any microbe, you know, a bacteria, it can look one way, but it can actually evolve depending on its circumstances, right? What mucus can also do is when it realizes that something is in your body that shouldn't be, it latches onto that and can carry it away.
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And it turns out actually there are, we think of mucus as being one thing, there are 20, more than 20 different kinds of mucus. And each of these fulfill a different function. And one of those is to specifically attach to dangerous things that are in your body and take them out.
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Well, it's doing a lot of different things. You know, it really depends on what the material is. You know, for instance, like an environmental contaminant, say dust, right? There it's a very simple process of just we're going to increase the flow and wash this stuff away. But with a, you know, a different material like a microbe, then it can be a much more complicated process.
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You know, almost anything that goes wrong in there somehow is related to mucus.
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Urine is a pretty amazing one. It is actually, this is the beginning of laboratory medicine, right? If you go back to ancient Sumeria, you have actually like uroscopy, right? These, the original form of evaluating a fluid to try and tell something about a human being's body. You know, they actually have symptoms and charts to, as a way of diagnose what's wrong with you.
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And yet it turns out that urine is this amazing diagnostic tool, right? You can tell all kinds of things. You know, if your urine is purple, right, it means you have porphyria and it actually will glow under a black light. If it's green or blue, that might indicate an issue with some antidepressants. If it's very dark, it can indicate that you're dehydrated.
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Or too light, you have too much water in your system. It's really this amazing substance just for learning about your own body.
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Absolutely. And it's, you know, now these days it's also, it is chock full of hormones, right? You can, people will, they'll put vanilla actually into medication sometimes. because then you can tell just by the scent of the urine whether or not somebody is sticking with their medication regimen.
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You can tell by whether or not it has certain aromatics in it, whether or not somebody's been exposed to wood smoke for a fire hazard, or whether or not they need to be treated for that. One of the most amazing things is, for years actually, up in Manitoba, hundreds of thousands of horses were yet raised
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solely for their urine, just to produce the medication Premarin, which actually comes from pregnant mare urine, to treat symptoms of menopause.
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It's gone down now, you know, Premarin is not in its heyday. It was at one point in time one of the most prescribed medications in the country though. My favorite detail about that is that actually is one of those ones, you know, I gave a reading and a doctor came up afterwards and they said, you have to get Premarin in there.
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Hundreds of thousands of horses, their only reason to exist is just basically to pee in a cup and have it made into a pill.
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Yeah, yeah. So the important thing here, there are three kinds of tears, right? There are the kind of everyday tears, basal tears that your eyes just produce, trying to keep your eye lubricated and moving around. then there are reflex tears, right? You know, if something blows into your eye, if you get a bug in your eye, your eyes cry then.
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But, and this is one of the things that makes tears the most fascinating, humans, and only humans, have this third kind of tear, emotional tears, really, and we don't, we still don't have any idea why. They could also be used as a diagnostic tool, much like urine is, you know, if you were able to simply kind of harness the minute quantities there.
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And two, the thing I find most fascinating with tears is people are so afraid of them, right? Especially, you know, a lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea of crying, especially men. And I have a good friend, for instance, he's a lawyer, has never cried in his entire life. And when his first child was born, he was so overcome with emotion that he passed out.
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You know, he just lost consciousness because he didn't know how to deal with it.
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It's not clear why people cry from both happiness and sadness. But what is interesting about tears is that they do have this emotionally regulatory effect, it seems. And again, this is one of those things that can really vary person to person.
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But what they found with studies is that when you cry, actually, it changes the ratio of activity in your parasympathetic and your sympathetic nervous system. So one of these is kind of your fight or flight instinct, right? And one is kind of your just kind of relaxing instinct.
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And one of the things that tears seem to do is they amp up that fight or flight instinct, and then they suddenly quiet it down. So again, I think it does have some evidence there to back up your idea that Crying really kind of keeps you in this safe range.
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I don't think he's particularly proud of it. I don't think he's particularly disturbed by it either. But I think he had never thought about it too much when we talked about it. And then I think through our conversation, he realized it was something that he should be thinking about more. Because one of my biggest things that I took away from researching crying is just...
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It is a good way to realize what is important in life. This is how we realize that a relationship is important to us, right? Because we say goodbye to that person and we feel sad and we cry. This is how we realize that we loved that movie because we laughed so hard that we cried. It's just a great signifier. It can tell you so much about how you actually feel.
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Well, yeah, so Vomit, I decided that if I was going to write about this, I should experience it for myself in the most intense way possible. So I joined a cult in Orlando called the SoulQuest Church of Mother Earth. And this cult uses as its kind of quote unquote holy medicine a drink called ayahuasca made of this Amazonian vine.
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And what this drink does basically, it basically causes people to experience the most excruciating nausea they've ever experienced in their entire lives. So I signed up for this, much to my wife's dismay. And went down there. You know, they do this basically because you feel very, very sick. So sick that eventually you vomit.
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And in vomiting, they think, you know, you meet God, you commune with the spirit world, and you're healed of all this trauma. And for me, that was not the case. I just kept feeling sicker and sicker and sicker. And of course, you know, I'm lying out there in the sun in this... ridiculously humid. It's basically like being in a sweat lodge.
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And so I didn't have any transcendent experience, except the experience of realizing that I was so dehydrated I was about to die. And so yeah, I had to be evacuated from this place. I never actually even experienced my own vomiting. But this is the craziest thing.
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I am still so thankful for this experience because despite all of the personal unpleasantness for it, the crazy thing of going down there is seeing the other people who had come to this place looking for relief. Like I've said, this is basically the most punishing thing you can do to yourself.
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So the people who go there hoping to find kind of healing or help from this, they're really, this is their option of last resort. So you have people who are struggling with addiction. There was a woman there who was only 18 and had already lost count of all the times that she'd tried to commit suicide.
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One of the favorite people I met was a man who was a veteran of the Korean War, and he had such terrible PTSD that he could barely use his cell phone. You know, and were they healed by ayahuasca? Not really. But it was this really kind of beautiful atmosphere that you could get to meet these other people and actually kind of get a glimpse into the most kind of tender parts of their lives.
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And also, while it was hard to see, I think it was an important, for me, a very important thing to see about the United States. You know, this is what contemporary life is doing to us a lot.
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Thank you, Mike. I really appreciate you having me on the show, and I'm looking forward to following along.
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How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
Mucus is one of the most important things, if not the most important thing that your body produces. It lines the nose, the mouth, the eyes, the lungs, the entire digestive tract. All told, your body is making like a gallon of mucus a day, basically.