Just because we’ve been doing something for a long time doesn’t mean we’re doing it right. One part of our lives where this may be particularly true is when we're talking with others. This week, we bring you the first of a two-part look at what makes someone skilled at socializing. Behavioral scientist Alison Wood Brooks explains why conversations are much more complex than most of us realize — and how to engage in a more meaningful back-and-forth with another person.For more of our work on the art of conversation, check out these classic Hidden Brain episodes: Why Conversations Go WrongRelationships 2.0: How to Keep Conflict from Spiraling
Chapter 1: What skills do we need to improve our conversations?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At various points in our lives, all of us turn to coaches and trainers. If you're a student athlete, you might need a coach to improve your tennis stroke or soccer footwork. If you need to take up a musical instrument in your 30s, you'll need the help of a piano teacher or guitar instructor.
If you decide you want to learn a new language in your 50s, you sign up for classes with an expert in that language. But there are lots of domains in our lives where many of us never dream of recruiting the help of a coach. That's because we feel we are masters in those domains already. We don't need a coach to help us breathe or walk or talk. Or do we?
Just because we've done something a long time doesn't mean we are doing it right. Just because we feel we are skilled at something doesn't mean we don't have plenty of room for improvement. Today on the show, we focus on a skill that seems so commonplace that many of us fail to see how difficult it is to do well.
We're going to look at how we engage in conversation and the things we can do to get better at it. Learning to talk This week on Hidden Brain. When discussing the children in our lives, we say they learn to talk at age one or two. For the late bloomers, maybe it's three or four. We make it sound as if learning to talk is something we master early and then practice without a problem as adults.
But it turns out that most of us have a lot to learn when it comes to having conversations that are dynamic, engaging, and meaningful. Alison Woodbrooks is a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School. For many years now, she has studied the science of conversation. Alison Woodbrooks, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thank you so much for having me.
Alison, when you were younger, you went on a blind date that was memorable for all the wrong reasons. Can you paint me a picture of what your life was like at the time and who this mystery man was?
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.
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.
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Chapter 2: Why is asking questions important in conversations?
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.
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.
So follow-up questions show that you are being responsive to your partner and that you're curious to know more.
Chapter 3: What lessons did Alison learn from her blind date?
I want to play you a bit of tape featuring two people having a conversation. This is the late night host Stephen Colbert and the news anchor Anderson Cooper. Both these men, of course, are gifted communicators, but both also experience the loss of people close to them. And they're talking here about the nature of grief.
i think i think when you meet someone who's had a loss you do you have two options one is to say i'm sorry for your loss which is a perfectly lovely thing to do but if you can share your experience then they're not alone well it's all it's always interesting how when you you know i bring it up uh meeting somebody for the first time and and they say oh i'm sorry to bring it up i you know and as if
What they don't realize is I'm thinking about it all the time. It is, as you said, it is one of my arms. It is an extension of who I am. Quite possibly for the rest of your life. Oh, without a doubt.
Alison, what do you hear when you listen to this conversation?
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
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.
I mean, you could also see, of course, that they are talking over each other. And many of us, I think, were raised to believe that it's rude to interrupt another person. But in some ways, as I listen to this, I'm not hearing, you know, rudeness at all. I am hearing, as you say, co-creation of the story that Anderson Cooper is telling Stephen Colbert.
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.
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.
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