Holidays and elections mean tough conversations – it’d be great to have some tools to navigate them. Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt are counselors who specialize in creating safe spaces for conversations, and they join host Krys Boyd to discuss why you should avoid negative comments at all costs, how to grow with your partner to better understand their point of view and how to hear people out without becoming enemies. Their book is “How to Talk with Anyone About Anything: The Practice of Safe Conversations.” And later in the hour, we’ll talk with a researcher who studies social interactions about how to navigate everything from small talk to customer service to a doctor’s office visit.
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] If we’ve learned nothing else this election season, it is that we as Americans are very good at talking at each other or over each other or avoiding talking altogether, actually talking with one another, especially people with whom we strongly disagree. That just feels out of our reach lately. The good news is that with the right attitude and approach, these fraught conversations do not have to end in yelling or tears or stony silence. In fact, they might even end with understanding. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. As we reach the homestretch of the election and the transition to the holiday season and all of its potential pitfalls, seems like a good time to consider how we can improve the way we communicate with the people in our lives. Later in the hour, we’ll hear from an expert on social interactions about subtle signals. We trade during conversations that tell us if we are connecting with another person. And we’ll start with a look at how we can set the stage for having conversations we know are going to be tough. Harville Hendricks and Helen LaKelly Hunt are therapists who specialize in creating safe spaces for conversations. Their new book is “How to Talk with Anyone About Anything: The Practice of Safe Conversations.” I spoke with them in front of a live audience last week, and here is some of that conversation. Harville and Helen, welcome to Think.
Harville Hendricks [00:01:20] Thank you for having us. We are honored to be here.
Krys Boyd [00:01:24] So we’re going to learn about your safe conversations dialog process, and we’ll get into the specifics of that in a minute. But what makes a conversation safe or unsafe in the first place?
Harville Hendricks [00:01:38] Well, what makes a conversation safe and in the first place is that it is empty of negativity and judgment. And another thing that makes it safe is that with the person you’re talking to has some sense that, if I’m talking to you, that what you have to say is valuable in and of itself and you don’t have to defend it, that everybody has a. And we use the word validation. Everybody has a valid point of view, maybe different. Not this and it’s always different. Not the same, but it’s safe. If I don’t make it negative, judge it, put it down, causes you to feel devalued.
Krys Boyd [00:02:20] So we’re coming up on a big election here. We have Battle of the Yard signs and a lot of neighborhoods. Yes, it’s probably possible for most of us to avoid talking to people who we are pretty sure land on another side of things than we do. Why should we bother talking to people whose viewpoints about the world and about politics and about anything else important might be different from ours?
Harville Hendricks [00:02:45] The reason we should discuss it is a little known fact, and it’s a repeat of what I just said. Everybody has a valid point of view. And that we don’t get that point of view or their view of reality or put it to make it a little more dramatic. If you were in a room, if you were in a room and it had four windows and you went and looked out that window, you would see a part of the landscape. And most of us believe that we just saw the whole landscape. But if we went to another window, you would see another section of the landscape now. So now there’s another view of reality. And if you went to the other two windows or if there were four people in the room and one was saying, Hey, look out there, there are the flowers. Now, here are some elephants out here. So what is real? And the point is, it’s all real, but it’s seen from the perspective at which you are standing. The the the position through which you’re looking. And so and you can’t look through all four windows. You none of us see reality. We see the reality that’s through the the limited perception of our experience and our ability. So what we miss when we don’t talk to people who have different points of view is the rest of reality. It’s the most creative thing one could do. The most high level of learning is to listen to somebody with whom you do disagree and who disagrees with you, because what you discover is not a fantasy and it’s not pathology. It’s another view of reality. So if you’re open and listen, if you if you believe that, first of all, you have to believe that that you don’t see everything. Most of us believe that what we see is what is real. And if anybody sees anything different or report something different, they’re just delusional, which is a delusion itself. That’s the delusion is that you can see everything. But if you if you listen, which we all are not accustomed to doing, if you listen, it becomes highly educational that you get it. Hey, there’s an elephant out that window. And I didn’t know that. Now I realize this terrain includes flowers, elephants, and something else back. So it’s a creative and enlightening process to listen to another person’s report and give it validation.
Krys Boyd [00:05:11] So let’s talk about how that dialog process works. First, someone in conversation is invited to talk and they’re invited to say what exactly? How they see things.
Harville Hendricks [00:05:23] So the way when you when you decide that you will go in the direction of dialogical conversation or safe conversation, as we also call it, how do we ask couples to do this in our instance weekends? Now is the first thing that you do is give up spontaneously walking up to your partner and starting to talk.
Krys Boyd [00:05:48] You need to make an appointment.
Helen LaKelly Hunt [00:05:50] If you want the partner to really listen.
Harville Hendricks [00:05:54] Now, most people and most couples really hate that. So I have to ask my partner for an appointment to talk. And the answer is, well, you can ask for an appointment or you can do what we call boundary violation, which is your partner is actually, no matter how much they love you and how long you’ve been together, sitting around waiting for you to come and fill up their head with what you want to talk about. They’re just not doing that. Some of us think that our partner is just waiting for us to show up and talk and stimulate us with their thoughts. But they’re not. They’re running their own movie. And if you walk up and start talking about your movie, then you are asking them to project your movie onto their screen while they’re running their movie. Am I making sense about this? Now, some people are nice and they will say, that’s okay, I’ll turn off my movie. Some people are not nice and they will say, Would you turn off your movie? I’m busy watching my movie. So, you know, and what we call that a boundary violation. You just plunged into your partner’s world. But if you stop and say, Hey, Helen, I have something I’d really like to talk about. Are you available? Helen can say, Well, actually, I’m running my movie.
Helen LaKelly Hunt [00:07:21] If it’s Helen, are you available to talk about dinner. Or to talk about an argument.We had about how to do a vacation this year? Now I have time for a short conversation, but not a long one. So you have to say, is now a good time for an appointment to talk about blank.
Harville Hendricks [00:07:34] Yes. And you can say, well, not now. Or maybe in ten minutes or maybe in an hour. So it’s okay not to say, okay, I’m going to stop. But you have to make the appointment and then show up for the appointment. You can’t say have to go back and keep asking and.
Helen LaKelly Hunt [00:07:51] You can’t look at your iPhone.
Harville Hendricks [00:07:56] You have to pay attention. So that’s the first thing. Is that you that’s the bridge to a safe and dialogical conversation. And then when your partner talks, you don’t listen and wait for them to stop. So you can. Counter them, which is what we often do, or tell them that they’re not seeing it right. And this is the way to see it. You you do something and I want to say this because I’ve done the research on it, so it sounds outrageous, but it’s it’s a fact of research. People, we have not been trained as human beings to listen. It’s just not in our DNA. We have been trained to talk. And I’ve done the research on talking and listening. There’s an enormous library of research on talking, how language develop, how to use language, how to project your voice, how to build your vocal cords, how to get people’s attention, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I tried to do it and I tried did a parallel one on listening, and there’s hardly any research at all on listening. We’re now beginning to learn that that that was there. So, so what you do when you and your partner starts talking is you do something is very hard to do, which is. Well, let me see if I got that. You get what we call it a sit and still. Let me see if I got that. If I got you. And then you mirror back, say back, reflect back with it with as much accuracy as you can muster what your partner said.
Krys Boyd [00:09:31] So can we apply this practically to politics? So I’m talking to my brother in law and he wants a different candidate for dogcatcher than I want. Yes. And so my brother in law says to me, you can’t possibly think that this dog catcher is going to be better than that dog catcher. This dog catcher is going to only catch cats and the cats are fine. And then what I want to do is say, so if I’m hearing you right.
Harville Hendricks [00:09:56] That’s what you want to do. If I’m hearing you right, you’re thinking that this this person, this dog catcher will not be a good dog catcher anyway, and that what we really need to do is learn how to catch cats. Am I getting that?
Krys Boyd [00:10:15] Okay, so my brother in law would say, yes, you’re getting that. And then then you’re going to ask if there’s anything more.
Harville Hendricks [00:10:20] Is there more about that? And so I want him to say more and then he will say more.
Krys Boyd [00:10:27] Okay. So he says yes. And I think the best dog catcher has a truck full of nets rather than a truck full of chains.
Harville Hendricks [00:10:37] And the best dog, if I’m getting this, the best dog catcher has a a truck full of nets rather than what change? That’s right. Rather than change.
Krys Boyd [00:10:46] Okay, so what what just happened there? And where do we go from there?
Helen LaKelly Hunt [00:10:50] The goal is two things. Two different opinions coexisting.
Harville Hendricks [00:10:56] And so and what you can do if you find that this is kind of all that’s going to come, that you can say and do something that well, well, let me see if I’ve got it all. I know you think this dog catcher is blah, blah, blah, and you wish that the truck should be full of nets instead of change. Am I am I? Does that a good summary of what you said? And then I will. Well, you know, I can see how you’re thinking about that. That’s the validation. I can see how you’re thinking about that. Doesn’t mean I’m agreeing with you.
Krys Boyd [00:11:25] Okay. So validation says, I hear you. It doesn’t say I agree with you.
Harville Hendricks [00:11:28] That’s right. It says, I hear you and I get it how you’re thinking about it that way and that and and you make sense.
Helen LaKelly Hunt [00:11:35] And it makes sense from the way you’re looking at it.
Harville Hendricks [00:11:38] And I can also take another level and say, and I can imagine that if Peter gets the dog catcher thing, you will be really excited about that. So that’s the empathy. I go and hear how your brain is working, and then I also mirror back how I imagine you might be feeling. Or I might ask you, how would you feel? How would you feel if that happens? So you’d feel really excited if X got it or you’d feel really sad or scared if I got it.
Krys Boyd [00:12:07] So this all sounds good. And it sounds like my brother in law will understand that. I want to understand what he’s thinking. What are the chances that he’s going to turn around and do the same for me and listen to my idea.
Harville Hendricks [00:12:19] That that’s that’s the question that I really like. And it’s often ask if, you know, what if you know about the structure of the dialog process and somebody else doesn’t. So what do you expect? Well, what I found that people have found and I’ve found it over the years is that some people, their defenses will go down, their energy will go down, and they will say, okay, so I can see that others have different thoughts from me. Can you tell me what you’re thinking about who should be dog catcher? They might get curious. And curiosity is very, very connecting. So that might happen. Or they may say, well, I just I can’t imagine that you see anything differently. And you can say so You can’t imagine that I would see anything differently. So thanks for telling me about that. And being clear about how you think about it and just hold him in his reality. Let him or her have that reality without trying to take it away from them. And so that’s. So there’s no then tension, no opposition, no polarization. You you see him and you hold him. And, you know, sometime later he might come back and say, What was that thing you did the other day when you moved back? You you said back to me what you heard me say. They might get curious, but if they don’t, that’s okay. What you didn’t do was go into the useless phenomenon of polarization.
Krys Boyd [00:13:47] We’ve been talking today about the many tricky aspects of navigating conversations. Surely you’ve been on the phone with a parent or a friend. The initial thing you call to discuss has been addressed and you’re left wondering, Can we wrap this call up for help with questions like this? We’ll hear now from Elizabeth Stokoe, a professor of social interaction at the Loughborough University in England. She joined us last year to talk about an article she wrote for the journal Nature headlined “Conversations and How We End Them.” Liz, welcome to Think.
Elizabeth Stokoe [00:14:18] Hello. Nice to meet you.
Krys Boyd [00:14:20] We we all engage in conversations all the time. Few of us stop to think about how well they work for us and why they sometimes don’t. What does it take to study conversation in a lab setting?
Elizabeth Stokoe [00:14:33] Well, I guess my research is a conversation, and an analyst does the opposite of studying research in a lab setting. So I study real talk in the wild, not experimentally produced talk, not simulated talk. I don’t interview people, ask them on a survey retrospectively about their conversations. I study real talk as it happens.
Krys Boyd [00:14:55] How do you find that real talk?
Elizabeth Stokoe [00:14:58] It’s endlessly fascinating from the most mundane moments, the kinds of things that you hear when you’re on a bus or on a train, when you can hear a conversation in the seat behind you all the way through to the most serious encounters that I’ve studied myself professionally, like doctors talking to patients or negotiators talking to people in crisis. It all happens through social interaction. So much of life is driven through the machinery of talk. And so it’s a rich seam of research that for now and forever, I think.
Krys Boyd [00:15:30] The study done by other researchers that you highlighted in your piece for Nature looked at the end of conversation specifically, and it turns out there’s pretty much always one party in every conversation that is ready for it to end before the other. How did they discover this?
Elizabeth Stokoe [00:15:46] Yeah, it’s a really fascinating piece of research. They discovered it by asking people. So they did a couple of studies. The first one was to ask people to remember the most recent conversation that they had and to talk about when they, you know, to estimate at what point in the interaction they would have liked it to end. And then in their second study, they brought participants into the laboratory previously unacquainted parties, ask them to have a conversation that the people knew that they would have to stay in the room for a certain amount of time. So even if the conversation ended, they couldn’t just escape the room, they had to do something else. And then again, they asked both parties to sort of give their perceptions on the interaction when they wanted it to end and when they thought the other party wanted it to end. And what they found was really compelling and makes sense to a lot of us that people feel as though they would like the conversation to either last longer or that they would like it to end sooner and that we’re not that calibrated between us, that that was what they found.
Krys Boyd [00:16:50] What’s fascinating is that this appears to be true even among people. Presumably some of the people in their study are were quite empathetic and able to read the emotions of of others and tell when a conversation partner is happy or upset or angry. Why is it hard for us to tell when the other person is done talking?
Elizabeth Stokoe [00:17:11] I think it really depends on all sorts of things like what we’re having a conversation for in the first place. And one of the differences between the study that I was writing about and the kind of work that conversation analysts do is that rather than get people into a laboratory and say, have a conversation where the purpose of it is to be a research participant, which is a bit unnatural when you look at people talking for the reasons that are just a natural feature of that encounter. So they’re phoning the doctors to make an appointment or they’re there talking to a friend to have a catch up or on Zoom or whatever it might be. The tends to be a purpose, and so that’s a bit different for a start. Sometimes we don’t have much control over whether or not the conversation, even if we want it to end, we can’t end it. And when you look at real talk in the wild, it’s surprising how infrequently things like a hang up happens. So, for example, I’ve looked at lots of cold calls between parties where excuse me, where people have been telephone, you know, by company, someone trying to sell them something. And you would imagine perhaps that people don’t want that conversation. And so the easiest thing to do is just hang up. And people definitely say things like, I just hung up. But actually, it’s much harder to just hang up than we might think. Even hangups are orchestrated and and quite clearly common people do signal that they’re coming. But of course, the poor salesperson has to just keep trying. So there’s lots of things that are relevant to why we keep talking and why we might not be able to get out of an encounter is these days we would perhaps want to when we report it later.
Krys Boyd [00:18:48] What are some of the things those cold callers, those telemarketers do to keep us on the line? Like, are they exploiting some feature of our personalities that that makes it hard for us to hang up?
Elizabeth Stokoe [00:18:59] I think they’re exploiting the machinery of social interaction. So there’s a bunch of things that people do, for instance. This might be familiar to to to us all, whether they work, whether whether we’re a cold call or not. But, you know, those people that they never seem to get to the end of and then actually they start talking about, and yesterday and you start thinking, why is this going? And they never see their intonation never fall. So there’s never a point at which you can jump in and take the floor. So I think salespeople do a bit of that. They they start something and never quite finish it before they jump into the next little unit of their turn. And that keeps the floor. And something else that they do is they sort of rush past the point where it might be relevant to say, yes, or you’re just trying to get a word in edgewise. We all know that experience. So so there’s that as well. But but one of the main things that happens in those calls is, is the the attempt at small talk and the attempt to say, how are you today and get people to engage in something as though they know the person they’re talking to. And my research shows that those don’t really work and yet people do them anyway because I guess they’ve they’ve been trained to think it works. And we don’t really inspect actual calls enough to see what is actually happening inside them.
Krys Boyd [00:20:11] And they don’t work because I’m well aware that the person trying to sell me a timeshare doesn’t care how I’m doing today.
Elizabeth Stokoe [00:20:17] Absolutely. Yeah, I, I like to tell people when I’m talking about this, this research to stop building rapport and to instead get people to think about the difference between the outcome of an encounter rather than what you might do at the start. So I suppose my research basically shows that you don’t build rapport and then have a conversation. You have a really effective, frictionless conversation and by the end of it you feel like you’ve got a good relationship with that person and that’s the right way round, I think. And that stops people from loading their conversations with all the stuff that no one really wants to hear. And everyone can also see what you’re doing too.
Krys Boyd [00:20:55] What have you learned about what makes some of us better conversationalists than others?
Elizabeth Stokoe [00:21:02] I think it’s really listening. That sounds like a cliche because everyone knows that it’s important to listen, and any communication training ever will tell you the importance of listening. But it is. I am fascinated constantly by people’s cut, sometimes quite obvious, not listening, you know. And I think it’s I think people feel it. I don’t know if this is a good example, but it’s not quite not listening. But it’s a it’s an example of a bad conversationalist. And that is, if you are at a conference or a meeting and you go and say, you say hello to someone and you sort of shake their hand and you look in their eye and you can tell that they’re looking over your shoulder as they say hello to you might be more interesting in the room. And I think that’s very obvious to the person on one side of the conversation, whether or not the person who’s doing that thinks they are subtle, you know, that they think that they’re actually having a great conversation with you. But in fact, they’re looking at all of the other people in the room. So so I think being a really, really good listener for what people are doing when they’re talking is is key.
Krys Boyd [00:22:04] So is there some cultural proscription on ending conversations outright? I cannot imagine saying at a at a conference or a cocktail party. All right. I’d like you, but I’m no longer interested in talking with you. Goodbye. But I wonder if there are places in the world where this kind of thing can happen. And it’s understood to be polite and just the thing that needs to take place.
Elizabeth Stokoe [00:22:25] I mean, there might be, but I don’t see any evidence of that from some of the research around the world and in my field. And there are plenty of conversation analysts doing research in lots of different languages. I mean, there are, you know, very, very heavy constraints, which sounds like that, that they’re sort of built by people that that that that these tacit rules that we’re all kind of following. And actually, I wrote a piece last week because it was the the Friends reunion. And I wrote a little article just on how friends, script writers, one of the ways in which they generate humor is to break conversational rules. So a really nice example of that is in the very first episode, one of the characters asks Into the world, Do you want to come over tonight and put some furniture together? And they say no. But they say in a classic kind of they say, you know, in a polite way, which is although, you know, I’d really like to, but I’m going to hang out here tonight. It’s been a long day. And then they ask another character, do you want to come over? And she says, I’d really I’d really like to, but I don’t want to. And that’s the Phoebe character. And you can kind of the audience immediately laughs, you know. Well, we didn’t laugh about the other rejection. So we’re sort of tacitly following, creating, breaking, breaching, being held accountable to holding it to the to account to all the time.
Krys Boyd [00:23:43] Does social hierarchy affect the ability to swiftly end a conversation?
Elizabeth Stokoe [00:23:48] I’m sure it does. I mean, I think if somebody is setting up a meeting in an agenda and they’re your boss, then then that that hierarchy is there. I mean, one might argue and observe that some hierarchies are more stable and rigid than others. And some people work hard to not let those kinds of dynamics shape their encounters as well. So I think there’s a lot out there to be read and listen to about how to be a leader that doesn’t doesn’t do that. You know, it doesn’t insist on shaping the entire agenda and so on. And I think there are plenty of encounters that are not workplace encounters, where the hierarchy is obvious, where one person dominates the interaction relative to the others. So this is just one of the interesting, sometimes problematic aspects of being human in conversation.
Krys Boyd [00:24:38] And I want to talk about some of the signals we might give or other people might give that the conversation should come to a close. Can you explain a pre closing event in a conversation?
Elizabeth Stokoe [00:24:52] Anyway. Something like that. So something that gives a clue to anyway, what you’re doing tomorrow is a pretty strong cue that this conversation is going to come to an end quite soon. From that, from the point of view of the person who who does that pre closing cue. And there are lots of things like that that we pick up on the even even earlier in encounters. So I’ve got a lovely example of somebody phoning the vet and they phone up and say, I’m just calling to ask how much it would be to get some injections done for my new puppy. And so that’s that’s what they’ve called for is pretty, pretty clear. No rocket science here. But the receptionist says, yeah, sure. Well, she could be called. And then there’s a little delay. And the name I’ve changed to protect the innocent dog. But there’s a delay. And then? And then the pattern, says Victor. And already that that person, if they’re listening, is okay, this. This caller doesn’t really want to get into loads of small talk about the new dog but but then but they say they’re not listening and so the next thing they say is and, and is this your first puppy? Yes. So so, of course, if you were really listening, you know, some people are dying to have an in-depth chat about their new puppy. And so a good listener and a good person taking the call. The vet will will hear whether or not this rapport that I’m trying to build is being reciprocated and participated in and and sort of mutually engaged in. And if the person is basically trying to show you, just give me the price, we do things like Victor. Yeah.
Krys Boyd [00:26:21] Liz after reading some of your work, I realize I’m terrified of thinking how often might I be the person that is droning on and on when someone wants to escape my conversational clutches? Is there something we can do to be a little more sensitive to the cues people are giving us that they want to go?
Elizabeth Stokoe [00:26:38] I mean, I think this is the reason that I wrote the piece partly was because I think the research is really interesting, but it asks the question in a setting that is separate from what we’re actually doing in conversation and everyday life. And I think the idea that we just want to leave is almost too simple. And one of the cases that I write about in in the piece is from some colleagues research. And what they’re looking at is conversations between a young person with learning disabilities and in residential care. And her dad and Sue is asking adapt to bring extra pocket money when he next visits. And that is followed by the first turn, which we can probably all recognize is is moving to close the conversation. So he says something like, right well, I’m going to get home now. I’ll be there about 9:30 tomorrow morning. But the conversation keeps going for quite some time before Dad says something else like, Right, I’m going to go now, darling. And then the daughter says, Yeah, I’ve got to finish doing something else. And. And they still keep going. And then at the end, they say, okay, lovey. Yeah, I love you. I love you. And they do all of that. And it’s incredibly poignant. And I think the idea that you might reduce that to, you know, asking dad later, well, did you want to go three minutes before the conversation actually ended with your daughter? Doesn’t seem quite the right question because, of course, everyone has got things that they perhaps need to do outside of the call. The idea that you it’s what anyone wants, isn’t it? Just doesn’t quite for me hit the purpose of that conversation in the first place. And whether or not people want it to end doesn’t isn’t quite what I would ask. I would. You can certainly observe that there are structural, very routinized ways like Dad did, to start to close the conversation and prepare the ground for someone to to exit the conversation.
Krys Boyd [00:28:28] And the way these interactions and really does matter. You’ve looked at how receptionists that doctor’s offices for understandable reasons, sometimes want to sort of quit phone conversations with patients and patients might need more information. These interactions can actually affect how patients feel after surgery.
Elizabeth Stokoe [00:28:49] Yes. Well, I looked at telephone calls to primary care receptions and that the research focus was basically, well, what can we do to make the patients journey start really well? And what also kind of seems to correlate with low and high patient satisfaction scores. And one of the things that I found was that at the end of the call, what you’ll hear in some of them is the receptionist doing those routinized cues to say, you know, I’m done. And if you like, if they were asked, did you want the call to end, then they’d say yes. And so it’s things like saying, all right, thank you. And you can hear, you know, from the receptionist point of view that that that they’re done. But what would happen in overlap So sort of the patient would have to sort of interrupt the ending done by the receptionist is the pushing back into the call to ask something. So as the receptionist is saying, all right, thank you. A patient might say, so it’s that and you can hear that there’s something still on their mind to get confirmed. And it was really, really simple what they would then ask for, which was, you know, so I’m coming in on the 16th or so. Who am I seeing again? So when should I call back? So when? When my results begin and then the rest the receptionist does the confirmation and then the call ends. But what we found was that not only are those calls longer, so basically the receptionist that proactively say at the end of the call, so you’re booked in for Wednesday, then the call actually ends faster and smoother and the patient later reports high satisfaction with the surgery. But if the patient has to sort of push past the end of that call to get the information, the confirmation, then not only does it take longer, but also the patient is less satisfied. And it’s that feeling of of being a burden on someone and having to push them to give you something. And, of course, you know, the outcomes are the same In both cases, the patient got the information that in one case it was done proactively and more efficiently. And then the other case, it was something that had to be kind of dragged out of the receptionist. And no one really likes that sense of of having to pull something out of somebody.
Krys Boyd [00:30:54] Sometimes at the end of an interaction with somebody on a professional basis could be a salesperson or a restaurant waits server or even a doctor. That person will ask if there’s anything else they can do for us as a way of kind of closing out the conversation, you know, a way of saying, Are we done here? You’ve discovered it’s better for them to ask if there is something else they can do for us rather than anything else. What is the difference there?
Elizabeth Stokoe [00:31:19] Yes. Well, this is research conducted by colleagues at UCLA, John Heritage and and his collaborators. And actually, this is this is a nice U.S. based study. And actually, the original research was looking at primary care, again, consultations. And what they were looking at was how is it that people can go to see their doctor and they have more than one concern and yet they leave with a concern. So they only end up talking about one thing. And because a lot of doctors know this, they’re trained to ask that question. Is there anything else I can help you with? Once they’ve heard what the main reason for the visit is. And so the researchers conducted a trial where they got the doctors to half of them say, is there anything else I can help you with? And the other half to ask, is there something else I can help you with? And they established that all of the patients had more than one concern that they wanted to address. And what they found was something like in the in the is there anything else condition? 50% of patients who had more than one concern said more concerns and 50% didn’t. Whereas in the something condition, 90% of patients reported there were the concerns and only 10% didn’t. And this tells us a lot of things about interaction. So this is a randomized controlled trial, so we can’t really associate or explain it away in terms of, you know, things like gender or age or all the factors and variables that we might normally try to connect interactional patterns to. And also, you know, conversation, conversation and interaction, but not behaviorists. Just because you say is there anything else doesn’t necessarily mean that people will say one thing or the other. But what we know is that questions with the word any in the not designed for a sort of no problem know type answer. So so it’s more it’s not so much that one question is better than the other. It’s just really knowing that grammar constrains what can happen next. So if I say to you, would you like any more cake, you can’t say yes, I’d like any, but if I say, Would you like some more cake, you can say yes, I’d like some. And so the sort of the grammar of any. And they’re both. Yes, no questions. So in that sense they’re those those closed questions that people sometimes think would make the difference. But again, they’re both grammatically closed questions in that sense. But what I what I’ve seen in my own research is that this patent holds in so many different settings. So people are asked, is there anything else? And it’s kind of designed as a check. So sometimes it’s a really positive thing to do, to check in, give someone an opportunity if they really got a concern to to say it. But of course, it also means that if you’re training people to try really hard to elicit things from some of the people. So, for example, in my work, I study mediators trying to get from their client solutions to their dispute. And if they say, is there anything else that can solve the dispute, then that’s probably not the best question to ask to try and elicit things. It’s much better to say, you know, tell me what would work or what what what, you know, tell me something that would would work and to do it differently and to realize that we’re pushed and pulled around by language more than we typically think is really important.
Krys Boyd [00:34:26] So something else that you’ve discovered is that if you’re trying to get someone to say yes to something that they may not love the idea of, it’s better to ask if they’d be willing to do it than to ask if they will do it directly.
Elizabeth Stokoe [00:34:39] Yes. Well, this is again, a finding. I’ve looked at quite a few different situations where this is the case. All of the things all of the situations have in common. A context, though, which is to do with the person that is being asked the question about whether or not they’re willing to do something or not, the type of person that they are, it matters to them. So again, going back to the mediation setting, this this is a setting where, you know, people are in dispute. They found mediation, they’re resistant to mediation. And then the mediator asks something like, having explained mediation to you, are you interested in mediating? Does it sound helpful? Would you like to mediate? So there are quite a few different ways to try to turn your initial inquiry caller into a client. And what I found was that people are more likely to say yes after they’ve resisted, first of all. So that’s kind of important. So does it sound helpful? Well, I’m not really sure, but would you be willing to just do X? And so in a mediation or any kind of negotiation or dispute environment, you know, that’s it’s all about who you are as a person. And one of the reasons people sometimes resist the idea of mediation is that they don’t like the idea that the mediator is impartial because they are the good person and they want everyone to be on their side. So that can be a bit of a barrier as well. But it shows you that if you say to someone, would you be willing to just come and meet the mediator, Would you be willing? These were the words that got a turn around. And of course, it’s partly because if you spent ten minutes telling a mediator how lovely you are and how horrible your colleague is or your neighbor or whoever it is that you’re in dispute with, if you’re asked if you’re willing to do something, it’s quite hard to say no and still be that reasonable person. So I think that’s part of the reason why it works. But it’s also important to remember that there are some situations where it just doesn’t work because it’s too heavy. So my favorite example of this is asking your your partner to put the trash cans out or, you know, put the bins out. We’d say in the U.K. But you probably wouldn’t say, darling, are you willing to put the bins out? Because it’s a bit much. And it kind of implies that you might be the kind of person who won’t. And so you might do it after some resistance. But equally, it’s better fitted to something like, you know, if you’ve been in relationship doldrums with your partner for the last five years, you might say, would you be willing to go to marriage guidance? And that’s more fitted to the environment where those people think they’re great. So if you see what I mean, it’s it’s it’s not your first choice. It’s it’s a bit after resistance and in settings where the kind of person you are matters to, to the person you’re trying to persuade.
Krys Boyd [00:37:23] These days people are very down on small talk. It’s boring. It doesn’t mean anything. They just want to get over it. It’s insincere. Is there a value to small talk?
Elizabeth Stokoe [00:37:33] Absolutely. But again, the situation matters. So my cultural sales talk shows that trying to trying to build rapport through small talk with someone who quite visibly does not want to talk about the Christmas holidays they just had, that isn’t working at all. So, you know, drop the small talk and if you can hear that the person doesn’t want to go there with you. But my research has also shown that the that the most mundane bits of interaction, the how I’ll use at the start of the encounters can actually be life saving. So I wrote a piece based on a collaboration with another colleague. At the moment we’re looking at nine, nine, nine calls during the pandemic about domestic violence. And one of the things that is a challenge for callers is to make a genuine request to help. So to make sure that they don’t come across as a nuisance caller whilst also coming across to whoever might be in the house, is not talking to the police but talking to a friend. And actually one of the ways that this happens is that the person calling the police conveys. I want you to hear that I’m pretending to talk to a friend by doing things like, hi, you’re right. And hoping that the person on the other end will pick up on that most mundane. How are you in the place that appears in the conversation and here enough to to to to start asking yes or no questions and see if I can help this person.
Krys Boyd [00:38:59] Wow. What are some of the careful ways that negotiators are taught to keep someone on the line knowing that the person on the other end is probably unstable and really agitated?
Elizabeth Stokoe [00:39:12] Yeah, absolutely. I’ve worked with the police in the UK. We focused on particular types of crisis. So suicide crisis where people are at that moment in their life, they’ve made a decision that they’re on the roof and they’re threatening themselves or somebody else. And the negotiator has to keep on taking turns. They have to stay there with them. And one of the really fascinating things about studying the recordings that are made, they’re made by the police at the scene, not for research purposes, but just for part of their work, is that you can find things in there that you cannot remember later and that don’t find their way into the training until you discover them. And so one of the most powerful things that me and a colleague discovered was that obviously one of the things that the negotiators do is propose dialog. And I say that it’s hard to get out of language to talk about language, but we basically looked at how what different ways did the negotiators actually propose that the two of them talk. And one of the most common ways is to say something like, I’m just here to talk to you. Can we talk Let’s let’s talk about how you are. And what we found was that those proposals built with the verb to talk were very often met with resistance. And they were met with resistance, partly in an almost idiomatic way. So people would say things like, I don’t want to talk. What’s the point in talking, talking, just doing a thing. And we have those idioms in English language. You know, actions speak louder than words. You can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk? And we kind of split off. Talk is not really doing anything much. And that was used by persons in crisis to resist the negotiation. But of course, what we’re also doing is looking for how the negotiator on the next attempt or how will the negotiators solve that problem. And what we found was that negotiators will sometimes say, I want to speak to you. Let me speak to you. So we speak about this. And they would use a different verb. And amazingly, you know, as if by magic, the person in crisis starts to talk. And we also found that when we looked at the way people in crisis themselves ask to ask for dialog, they would typically say, I want to speak to somebody. They didn’t typically say, I want to talk to somebody. And so this is a one word change that makes a real difference. And it’s the kind of thing that you’ll never know unless you look, because we do tend to think guided by psychology and and perhaps just where we’re led to see the roots of people’s behavior is, which is in that personality or the gender, age, culture, those kinds of things. So all of those factors and variables, I’m sure, are very relevant for the negotiator. You know, sometimes all they have is the tool of their voice. They might not even be able to see the person they negotiating with, and they certainly don’t have the history of the person’s sort of health and so on. And so they just have to feel that way through with with their words. And so discovering that some of them are more effective than others is both surprising. But also the way I do the job that I do. And then, of course, what we can do is show negotiators, negotiators, hey, this is the expertise that’s getting you through. And you can, you know, maybe do subtle tweaks to your training so that people think about speak as a resource rather than talk when they’re meeting resistance from the person in crisis.
Krys Boyd [00:42:49] It’s so interesting. Is that the idea in the U.S. there’s a joke that like when a woman says, I want to speak to your manager, she’s going to cause trouble. Is that the idea that we associate the word speak with with action and we associate the word talk with just kind of a chatter.
Elizabeth Stokoe [00:43:04] I think you’re absolutely right that that’s that spot on. So talk is more softly, softly, more relational, whereas speak is more transactional. But what we what we found was, again, sort of surprising things like the persons in crisis would resist offers of help in the same way that they resisted requests to talk, but they would engage with offers to sort things out and let us speak. So they would go with the with the words that that were more sort of action oriented, if you like, And and even perhaps more surprisingly, and it goes back to what we were talking about earlier about small talk and rapport and those kinds of things. So what what I found was that the the negotiators that tried to build the relationship through things like, I really care about you and this is just you and me. And they would sort of focus on the relationship that that that sort of works less well than actually having a maybe a more pragmatic sounding move through the encounter. And then at the end of the negotiation where you actually do have a relationship, you can see the negotiators doing what might be seen to be quite challenging. Things like saying things like, can you could you just come down? I think you’re really starting to, really annoy me now. I think you’re just doing it to upset me. And the person in crisis will say, Well, you can just go. And the negotiator says, you know, I have to stand with you, that you know how it works. And then the person in crisis comes down. But you can only do that in a sort of slightly jokey way with someone that you really have built a relationship with. You can’t stop that at all. So so actually what you see is expertise in action. And I can identify these things that would probably never find their way into the training because they sound too risky and they and things that find their way into the training because they sound plausible, but they’re not actually what happens in in the wild and real encounters.
Krys Boyd [00:44:56] That was my conversation from 2023 with Elizabeth Stokoe, a professor of social interaction at Loughborough University in England and author of the article “Conversations and How We End Them,” which appeared in the journal Nature. And earlier in the hour, we heard from Harville, Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt, coauthors of “How to Talk with Anyone About Anything: The Practice of Safe Conversations.” Think is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and listen to our podcast for free wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for KERA Think. Our website is think.kera.org. That’s where you can find out about upcoming shows and sign up for our free weekly newsletter. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
