The best communicators aren’t always the ones who talk the most in meetings. Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Charles Duhigg joins host Krys Boyd to discuss what makes certain people so adept at facilitating the exchange of ideas, how we can make ourselves heard, and how we can better navigate tough conversations. His book is “Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.”
This episode originally aired on March 8th, 2024.
- +
Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] We’ve all been in meetings with somebody who dominates the conversation, weighing in at length on pretty much everything. So we all know how smart they are. But the person who is always ready to share what’s on their mind rarely wields the most influence in the room because the best communicators are genuinely interested in what other people are thinking. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. The people known to social science researchers as high centrality participants in a group conversation may not be the most talkative or clever or persuasive. In fact, they are often more open than average to the views of other speakers. They find ways to draw different people into the discussion, and while they don’t necessarily say what they think others want to hear, they do adjust their own manner of speaking to fit the mood of the group. Even if they don’t say much, these humble conversationalists are often the most effective speakers of all. My guest, Charles Duhigg, is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist who studied this phenomenon for his new book, “Super Communicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.” Charles, welcome back to Think.
Charles Duhigg [00:01:08] Thank you for having me.
Krys Boyd [00:01:09] So you opened the book by telling us about this guy named Felix Sagawa, who works with the FBI’s crisis negotiation unit and has really some remarkable successes on his record. You note, though, that the first thing people tend to notice about him is that he looks and sounds pretty unremarkable.
Charles Duhigg [00:01:27] Yeah. In fact, a couple of people told me they thought that he sounded and looked like a middle aged dad. Someone. Something wrong with that? I had myself. Yeah, I. I’m not sure what they’re saying, but. But I think what they meant was, you know, he’s someone who just kind of you don’t look at him and think, my gosh, this guy is so charismatic or this guy is such an extrovert. You just think, that’s just a nice, normal guy.
Krys Boyd [00:01:50] So what is his job? Because it is really consequential.
Charles Duhigg [00:01:53] Yeah, it’s interesting. So he he was recognized very early in the FBI as being someone who had this almost magical ability to talk to other people and draw them out. And as this realization emerged, he was promoted again and again and again until he became essentially for the FBI, one of these like super negotiators, someone who can go in and can end a hostage situation, someone who can convince the family that a witness to a crime to testify, someone who can get criminals to actually tell them, admit to their crimes and confess. And at one point, the Department of Defense was really interested in trying to figure out how he did this. What was so special about him that made him so good at having these kinds of conversations? And so they went in, they interviewed him. They sent a bunch of scientists, and they all sat down and they said, Can you tell us what makes you such a good communicator? And he said, well, rather than describing it, let me sort of demonstrate it for you. And he turns to one of the scientists and he says, you know, I’m wondering like, can you tell me what’s a memory that’s really important to you? And this guy mentions this time that his that he had gone to his wife’s or I’m sorry, to his sister’s wedding and how meaningful that was because his mom was there and she passed away a few years later. And what’s interesting is that Felix listened. He he showed he was listening. He proved he was listening by asking questions. And then he said, you know, I don’t know what that’s like, but my own sister, she also passed away. It was cancer and it was very sudden. And I know how hard it is to lose a family member that way. And this connection formed between these two individuals who knew nothing about each other except for these short stories they had just told that was real and felt meaningful. And that’s what Felix can do. He can connect with almost anyone. And it turns out that this capacity to be a super communicator, it is not something we’re born with. It is not something that is a neat to our character. It’s just a series of skills that anyone can learn.
Krys Boyd [00:03:52] Yeah, I love it. Felix himself is the first person to say this. Like he could be forgiven for letting the FBI continue to believe that he had magical qualities. But no, he’s eager to share these abilities with other people.
Charles Duhigg [00:04:06] Absolutely. Absolutely. And in fact, one of the things that we know is that when we talk to folks who are super communicators on a consistent basis, because we’re all super communicators at one point or another, but people who can connect with almost anyone whenever they want to, we find that there were times during their life they weren’t good at communication. They say things like, In high school I had trouble making friends or my parents got divorced and I had to be the peacemaker between them. And it’s that period where they had to think a little bit more about communication, ask themselves questions about how to get better at it. That oftentimes makes them a super communicator. And it’s something that any of us can do with just by being exposed to the lessons.
Krys Boyd [00:04:43] Okay. So we have all had thousands of discussions about everything under the sun. But you say there are in some ways only really three different kinds of conversations, right? Practical, emotional and social. Tell us a little bit about those.
Charles Duhigg [00:04:58] Yeah, a lot of this started I actually started writing this book because I fell into this bad pattern with my wife, which is, you know, we’ve been married for 20 years and I would come home from work after a long day and I’d start complaining. And she very reasonably would offer like a practical suggestion, like, why don’t you take your boss out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other a little bit better. But instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get even more upset and I’d say, like, why are you outraged on my behalf? Or why aren’t you taking my side? And then she would get upset that I was attacking her for giving me good advice. And so I started going to researchers and asking them What’s going on here? Like this pattern, it emerges sometimes at work and imagines that hope emerges at home. I think it emerges in all of our lives where we want to connect with someone and we and we have trouble doing so. And what the researcher said is exactly what the question you asked. They told me that we tend to think of a discussion as being about one thing, right? It’s about my day or it’s about our kids grades. But actually, they said every discussion is made up of different kinds of conversations. And in general, they fall into these three buckets that you just mentioned. There’s the practical conversation, which is where we’re making plans or we’re solving problems. That’s what we’re going to do on vacation next year. Then there’s the emotional conversation where I might tell you how I’m feeling, and I don’t want you to solve my feelings. I want you to empathize. And then finally, there’s these social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other in society, the social identities that are important to us. And what’s interesting is if we’re having different kinds of conversations at the same moment, it’s very, very hard for us to hear each other and connect. In my case, when I came home from work, I was having an emotional conversation and my wife was having a practical conversation. And both of those are legitimate conversations. But because we weren’t having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, we didn’t really hear each other.
Krys Boyd [00:06:47] You know, I can imagine that there are often times when you’re having all three kinds of conversations at once. So if you take just a kind of a quotidian argument that lots of spouses have with one another, it might be about getting the kids dressed for school and it might sound like a practical conversation. But there’s also this question of, you know, one person feeling like the other person isn’t helping. There’s some emotion there. And then there’s a question of who are we if we let our kids go to school, you know, still with their pajama tops on.
Charles Duhigg [00:07:15] Exactly. Exactly. And you’re more right than you know, because what we know is that every discussion absolutely contains all three elements of these conversations. It’s almost impossible to have a conversation that’s only practical or only emotional or only social. But what’s interesting is that when we connect with each other, when we’re what’s known within psychology as and neurology is neurally aligned, it’s because we’re having the same kind of conversation at the same moment. So we might start by talking about something practical, like why can’t we get the kids, you know, ready in time, in the morning? And then I might say something to invite you to join me in an emotional conversation and say, Look, I know that you’re frustrated about this, and when you get frustrated, it makes me more frustrated and like, this isn’t as big a deal as you think it is. And as long as we’re moving between those different kinds of conversations together, we can go from emotional to practical to social, back to practical again. As long as we’re in tandem in the kind of conversation we’re having, then we’ll be able to hear each other. We’ll be able to connect. It’s when it’s when I insist on the practical, let’s come up with a plan. And and you’re in an emotional mindset and you say, look, I don’t understand why this is my problem. Like, you always put it on me. That’s when we end up having a fight or that’s when we end up failing to communicate.
Krys Boyd [00:08:32] So when you talk about this neurological synchronization that super communicators can have with their conversation partner, what is actually happening in the brain is this kind of thing observable?
Charles Duhigg [00:08:44] Yeah, absolutely. And it’s such a super communicators. This is at the core of communication and we’re living through this golden age of understanding communication for really the first time because of advances in neural imaging and data collection. And this is what we’ve learned. Whenever you’re in a conversation, including this one that we’re having, our bodies and our minds become more similar. So neither of us are aware of it, but our breath patterns have started to match each other. If we could look at our eyes, there’s a good likelihood that even though we’re separated by thousands of miles, our pupils are dilating at the same rate. And most importantly, if we could look inside your brain and see your neural activity, we would see that my neural activity is becoming more similar to you and vice versa. And this actually makes sense when you think about it, because if I described to you a feeling or if I describe an idea if it’s effective, you actually experience that feeling a little bit, you experience that idea. The fact that our brains become similar is the goal of communication. That’s how we share what’s going on. That’s how we communicate. And what’s really interesting is this explains why having different kinds of conversations is is so hard is because if I’m emotional and I’m using the inner core of my brain, there’s old neurological parts related to to emotion like amygdala and you’re having a practical conversation. You’re using the prefrontal cortex, the area that’s behind your forehead. It’s hard for our brains to become similar, but when we become aligned, then suddenly we’re in lockstep together and we can move from conversation to conversation together.
Krys Boyd [00:10:19] Yeah. It strikes me, Charles, that this also explains why some conversations with people we don’t dislike feel so off or so awkward, even when whatever we’re discussing is not particularly difficult to talk about. Like somehow we are just not fully aligned with the person we’re talking to.
Charles Duhigg [00:10:36] Right. And we have we have phrases for this, right? We’re not on the same wavelength. We’re not. We’re not we’re not we’re not sort of vibing with each other. What we’re really saying is we have not become neurally in train. But luckily, there’s a couple of a couple of skills, a couple of of tactics that help us get in neurally trained. And once we learn them, we can do it with anyone.
Krys Boyd [00:10:56] Okay. So start us out here. What is one thing we can do?
Charles Duhigg [00:10:59] Okay, so here’s what we know about people who are consistent super communicators, people who who tend to be able to align with almost anyone. One of the things that distinguishes them is that they ask a lot more questions than the average person, like 10 to 20 times as many questions. And some of those questions are questions that just invite us in like, would you think about that? Or yeah, what you say next. But some of them are what are known as deep questions. And deep questions are special because they invite someone to talk about their values or their beliefs or their experiences. And that can sound kind of intimidating, right? That hard thing to do in a normal conversation. But it’s actually pretty easy if if you bump into someone who’s a lawyer, for instance, you might ask them, instead of saying, Where do you practice law, you might say, yeah. What made you decide to go to law school? What’s the best case you have worked on? Instead of asking someone about the facts of their life, if we ask them how they feel about their life, they tend to tell us something that’s actually more meaningful and that meaningfulness, that vulnerability, that authenticity, when we match it, when we engage in what’s known as reciprocal authenticity, that is when we become a lot alike. Because you might say, I decided to become a lawyer because I saw my uncle get arrested when I was young. And then I could say, you know, I became a doctor because my dad got sick. Now, suddenly, we’re not only having a real conversation, we’re learning about each other, but we are aligned because we’re finding things that that speak to both of us in similar ways.
Krys Boyd [00:12:32] Yeah, Something you say is that when we are having a conversation that we think is meaningful, we want to be meaningful no matter what we hope to convey. We should also be trying to learn something.
Charles Duhigg [00:12:44] Absolutely. Absolutely. And and I think many people, when they go into conversations, they think the goal of the conversation is to is to convince someone of something. Maybe it’s to convince you that I’m right and you’re wrong. Or maybe it’s too it’s to figure out why. Why you keep disagreeing with me, or maybe just to convince you that you ought to like me. Or you ought to. You have to think I’m smart. But what we’ve learned is that the best communicators, they go into conversations with a very different goal. Their goal is simply to understand what the other person is saying. Understand their worldview and speak in such a way that that other person can understand them as well. And the reason why that’s so powerful is because it lowers the the burden of a conversation. If you’re only job in a conversation is to really understand what the other person is saying, to be able to show them, prove to them that you understand what they’re saying, that you’ve been listening…Then your job is much easier in that discussion. And what we’ve discovered is if you can do that, if you genuinely listen to each other, genuinely proves that you’re listening and understanding, that’s when you can actually persuade people much more effectively because now they’re ready to listen to you rather than putting up their hunches and getting ready to have a fight.
Krys Boyd [00:13:57] Charles, you mentioned that it’s important. We’re trying to learn something in a conversation. We’re trying to let our conversation partner know we are learning from them. We are listening to them. The old advice is nod your head a lot and smile and go, Ha! But that turns out to be pretty overwhelming in a lot of situations.
Charles Duhigg [00:14:15] And it actually goes completely unnoticed. You know, one of my favorite examples of this is, is that there was this experiment that was done where they brought together a bunch of gun rights advocates, people who owned many, many weapons and a bunch of gun control activists and people who fought to to limit the firearms in the United States. And these were people who knew each other. They had been shouting at each other for years on the floors of legislatures or at protests. And so the experimenters bring them all together and they say, look, our goal here is not for you to find common ground because we don’t think that’s possible. It’s not even for you to try and convince each other of anything. We just want to see if you can have a civil conversation. And before you do, we’re going to teach you this one skill. And this skill is known as looping for understanding. And it’s one of the most powerful tactic tactics in any conversation. It’s a hard conversation where there’s conflict or disagreement, and it has three steps. The first step is ask a question, preferably a deep question. The second step is, once a person has answered that question, repeat back in your own words what you heard them say. And then the third step is ask if you got it right. Now, the reason why this is so powerful and this doesn’t surprise anyone, right, that proving to someone that we’ve listened to them can be powerful. But the reason why it’s so powerful is because oftentimes when someone is listening to us, we don’t realize that they’re listening to us. Speaking is such a cognitively intense activity that we tend not to notice what our audience is doing. We don’t notice their nods or their smiles. We’re focused on what we’re saying ourselves. And so it’s what we do after we finish listening that shows someone that we have been paying attention. And when we do that, it feels like such an enormous relief, in fact. It triggers an automatic response that if we feel like someone is listening closely to us, we’re almost incapable of not listening closely to them in return. It’s something about the human psychology that just pushes us to do that.
Krys Boyd [00:16:16] And just so I understand here, when you talk about looping for understanding and repeating back what we heard the other person say and making sure that we got it right, that’s not the same as telling them we agree with them or endorsing their position. It could be, but it doesn’t have to be.
Charles Duhigg [00:16:30] It usually is it, right. And that’s what’s so wonderful about it, is that if you tell me something that I disagree with, and before I tell you how much I disagree, if I listen closely and I prove to you that I’ve heard what I’ve what you’ve said, and then I say, look, I want you to understand there I, I want you to know I understand where you’re coming from. And I and I think I think I’ve heard what you have to say. And I disagree with you. And let me explain why I disagree with you. Now, we’re having an actual conversation right now. We’re having a back and forth where that person is trying to understand what I’m telling them to do. As I mentioned, the goal of the conversation is not to not to change someone’s mind. It’s not to persuade. It’s simply to understand. And that means that you can walk away from the conversation still completely disagreeing with each other as those gun rights advocates and those gun control activists did. Neither of them change the other’s minds, but they walked away understanding what the other person was genuinely saying and why they were saying it. And in doing so, they were able to find some aspects of both themselves and humanity that they shared. And it gave them a deeper appreciation of how to connect with someone. Even when you disagree about something that’s very important to you.
Krys Boyd [00:17:44] Why is it so hard to do online?
Charles Duhigg [00:17:47] Well, it’s really interesting. So that same experiment, the the gun control folks and the gun rights folks, they have this conversation. It takes about a weekend and people walk away saying this isn’t wonderful. This is like if we could teach everyone to do this would change the world. And then they set up a private Facebook group and within 45 minutes, people were calling each other jackbooted Nazis. All right. And this is something that we’ve all experienced, that we meet someone, a neighbor who’s wonderful, and then suddenly you’re on line and they’re calling you, You know, the worst names you can think of. I think what happens in situations like this is that oftentimes we forget that different kinds of communication require different behaviors. And in particular, one thing that happens online is that we try and control each other in ways that we don’t even realize. A lot of what we know about this comes from looking at marriage therapy. There’s a basic question why do some couples have fights? And it seems like not a problem. They just have the fight and then they go on with their lives and other couples have fights and it leads to rancor and divorce. And what researchers found is that the big difference between these good fighters and these bad fighters is that the bad fighters are constantly trying to control each other. And that makes sense when you’re in a fight, when you’re in a disagreement, when you when you feel when you feel a little bit threatened or anxious, we look for something to control. It’s very natural. And the easiest thing to control is the person sitting across from us. And so we say things like, you know, I’m not going to talk about that. That’s that’s not worth talking about. I try and control the conversation. I try and say, If you’ll just listen to me, if you just shut up for one minute and listen to me, then you’ll see that I’m right. I’m trying to control your behavior. Or sometimes I might say things like, you got upset about that. That’s not worth getting upset about. You shouldn’t have. You shouldn’t have minded so much. I’m trying to control your emotions. That’s toxic in marriages and in online conversations. When we try and control each other, all it does is increase the tension. But what’s interesting is that the good couples, the good married couples that were able to fight well instead of trying to control each other, they try to control something different because this instinct for control is there. It’s not going to go away. So instead of channeling it into controlling the other person, those couples, they would often try and control things together. They would control, for instance, the environment. If a fight started at 2:00 in the morning, they would say, look, let’s let’s wait until 10 a.m. when we’re both better rested and we can talk about this more rationally. Or they might try and control the boundaries of the disagreement. You know, sometimes a fight about where we go for Thanksgiving becomes and your mother hates me and we don’t have enough money and you don’t have a good enough job. But instead, these good couples, they would say, look, we’re just let’s just have a fight about Thanksgiving. Let’s not bring up mothers. Let’s not bring up money. We’re just going to control the boundaries of this discussion together. And what happens is that and this is true online as well, when we stop trying to control each other and instead we try and find things that we can control together, we might still disagree with one another, but there’s a little bit of cooperation there that allows us to find some kind of shared humanity. And so that conversation doesn’t get ugly. It doesn’t get rancorous. Rather, it it becomes an actual dialog back and forth.
Krys Boyd [00:21:06] Sure. And it sounds like we’re on the same team as opposed to fighting each other.
Charles Duhigg [00:21:11] That’s exactly right. And being on that team feels amazing, right? Our our brains have evolved to be good at communication. Communication has been Homo sapiens superpower. It is what has set us apart from every other species and so our brains have evolved to crave communication and the way that we the way that it rewards communication is it makes us feel wonderful when we connect with someone else, even if there’s someone we disagree with, even if we hold different opinions. Because the truth is, we all different opinions with everyone. But when we connect with them, when we find something where we can understand each other, it feels wonderful because our brains have evolved to reward that.
Krys Boyd [00:21:51] Let me ask you something as an investigative journalist. Years ago, when I was a reporter, I came across other reporters in similar situations who could just go in and ask their exceptionally challenging questions of people in power, people who had done something wrong and just like not look back. I always struggled with that because even if someone needed to be held to account, I sort of recognized that there was another human being across from me. Do you have to set some of this aside when you are doing particularly challenging work in an investigation, or do you actually find that these skills are helpful to you in those situations?
Charles Duhigg [00:22:31] I think they’re enormously helpful. And can I ask you something about that experience? Sure. When you so when you when you were in those situations. What happened before? You asked the hard hitting question. Did you get to know this person? Did you have any. Did you have an exchange back and forth or was it was it more of sort of an interview slash interrogation?
Krys Boyd [00:22:53] I would try to avoid the interrogation, but I would see other people plunging ahead with the interrogation. I like to let someone know that no matter what they tell me, I’m going to listen to their side of things and consider it and, you know, will at least try to fairly represent their position in the story.
Charles Duhigg [00:23:10] Yeah. And did you find that your sources were willing to sort of be more open with you than than those folks who went in and they sort of, you know, strutting the ask the aggressive question and the politician responds with the with the talking points. So they practice ten times.
Krys Boyd [00:23:25] Well, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Yeah.
Charles Duhigg [00:23:30] I so I think that I found the exact same thing. I found that, you know, there was definitely when I was a younger reporter, I would I would try and impress, you know, impress myself and my editors and impress that this person I’m interviewing by asking the hard hitting questions. And the problem is that when you ask hard hitting questions right away, what you find is that everyone is prepared to respond and they give you something that they’ve practiced 10 or 15 times, something that’s not really authentic or meaningful. But instead, if I took a different tact, if I came in and exactly what you said, if I say to them, I really want to understand you. And so before we get to the hard hitting questions, let me just ask questions about, like you and your background, like how did you come to this job? Why why is this job important to you? What what’s your background like? You have a family. When I asked those questions, by the time I get to the hard hitting question. They don’t see it as an attack. They see it as an invitation to explain. Now, what they explain might be something that.
Krys Boyd [00:24:29] Might be nonsense.
Charles Duhigg [00:24:30] Yeah. Yeah. They might say, look, I put the poison in the baby powder because it was going to be a lot cheaper that way. But but the point is that I’m not trying to trick them into saying anything. I’m just trying to convince them and show them that I’m going to listen, that I genuinely want to understand. And once you once you can convey that, once you can make that promise, people want to explain to you who they are. It feels good to do so. And so as a result, we become more honest and authentic and vulnerable.
Krys Boyd [00:25:03] Okay. So, Charles, when you say that every conversation is a kind of negotiation, what do you mean by that?
Charles Duhigg [00:25:11] Well, what I mean is that it’s what’s known as a quiet negotiation. And we tend to think of negotiation as being something where we’re trying to win a battle. Right? We’re trying to win something at the table. But a quiet negotiation is very different. Quiet negotiation has the goal of simply understanding what everyone wants from a conversation. And we often do this subtly. We take our discussion that we’re having right now. You know, it started with you asking some questions. And then when I give answers, you ask these really smart follow up questions. You showed that you were interested in it. And from that, I intuit that your goal is to learn something that that you can pass on to your listeners, that they can they can benefit as, as using you as a proxy. And I think you probably picked up that. One of the things I want from this conversation is these ideas that I think are so important is to share them with other people. And think about how different the conversation would be if my goal was simply to get to know you as opposed to to share ideas. Or if your goal was to try and convince me that I should come, you know, move to Texas. When we when we know what we want out of a conversation and then we help other people elucidate what they want, then it becomes much easier for us to align with each other. That’s when we begin to have a real dialog. And sometimes we can simply say like, why are we here? What are we discussing? Or sometimes it’s as it’s as obvious as you’re interviewing me. And so we both kind of know what our role is, what we want out of this. But at other times it can be more complicated or harder to tease out. And in those moments, you can ask sometimes, why are we here? Or you can conduct little experiments. You can bring up topics and see if the other person leans into them. You can try and figure out, is this a formal conversation or a or a casual conversation? Maybe I’ll make a joke and see if you laugh in response. Perhaps we’ll interrupt each other to see if interruptions are okay or if, in fact we’re going to take turns. This quiet negotiation plays out through a series of small experiments, both deliberate and more subtle, that allow us to figure out what do we want out of this conversation and what are the rules that we’re going to use to really connect with each other.
Krys Boyd [00:27:19] You mentioned experiments, Charles. I love the section of the book where you deal with trying to hear emotions that nobody is going to articulate aloud. How did this NASA’s psychiatrist crack the code on selecting astronauts with kind of the right stuff for living in cramped quarters and dangerous conditions with people who amount to coworkers?
Charles Duhigg [00:27:40] Yeah, I thank you for asking. I love this story. So in the 1980s, NASA’s had this big this new problem. Ronald Reagan was president and he had said that he wanted to build a space station and send people up to up to space for 6 to 12 months at a time. And up until then, most of NASA’s missions were like seven days long. And so NASA’s realizes if we’re going to send people up into space and they’re going to live alongside each other for an entire year in this little tin can surrounded by vacuum, we need to find astronauts who have emotional intelligence. We need to find people who can get along with each other and won’t drive each other crazy. And so they start trying to figure out how to detect which candidates for astronauts have emotional intelligence. Now, the problem is they have this head psychologist and he says, look, by the time you make it to the final round of an of a of an interview to be an astronaut, you are you have the right stuff. You’re amazing. You know the right answer to every single question. In fact, you can fake emotional intelligence really, really well. And he said so as a result, I can’t tell who actually has emotional intelligence and who fakes it really well. But the problem is, after three months in space, it’s going to be really obvious who’s been faking it and who has actual emotional intelligence. And so he’s struggling with how am I going to how am I going to do this? What questions can I ask? How do I interview folks in order to to learn whether they they really want to connect with other people and they value it. And he discovers something when he’s listening to old recordings of previous interviews. And he notices that some candidates laugh differently than everyone else. So what he does is he he comes up with a new form of interviewing. He goes into the room to do the interview and he’s carrying a bunch of papers. And as he walks in, he spills the papers as if on accident. And then what he would do with every single candidate is he would laugh this big, boisterous laugh like, I is such a klutz. I can’t believe I did that. And then he would pay close attention to how the candidate reacted because everybody would laugh back. Right. We know that we’re supposed to laugh back. That’s just social politeness. But some people some people would laugh differently than he had just laughed. They’d go, It’s funny. I’m. I’m sorry. Here, let me help you. And then some other candidates would go. Others. Let me give you a hand. I’m sorry. This is. The candidates who matched the intensity of his laughter, who matched his energy and his mood. They were the ones who were showing him that they wanted to connect with him. They were the ones who had high emotional intelligence. And it’s not just laughter. He would then mention a story later in the interview about a sibling who had passed away and see if they tried to comfort him, if they asked questions, or if they simply said, my condolences, I’m sorry. This is what we know about these non-verbal or non linguistic expressions. Laughter is a great example of it. 80% of the time, according to studies, when we laugh, it is not in response to anything funny. Oftentimes when we laugh in a conversation, we’re laughing to show the other person that we want to connect with them. And when they laugh back, the most natural response, they’re showing us that they want to connect with us in return.
Krys Boyd [00:30:58] Charles We have all found ourselves in group discussions, say in a work meeting, sometimes led by a manager, but sometimes just led by like the dominant personality in the group. I think most of us would assume that that person is setting the tone for the meeting, but it often doesn’t work that way.
Charles Duhigg [00:31:17] Now it’s really interesting. When I started doing this research, I assumed that super communicators would be charismatic and outgoing. And in fact, what we’ve learned is that oftentimes it’s the person who’s we don’t notice at first who becomes the super communicator. In fact, when we’re there is an experiment done by a guy named Bo Cyphers at Dartmouth, and he put together groups and he found that groups that had a strong leader tended to actually gel less because the strong leader would oftentimes dominate the conversation. He or she would push people into their own thoughts and into their own hands rather than groups. That became much more aligned. The groups that came to the right answer faster, the groups that got along the best groups and said that they felt bonded afterwards. They contained very different kinds of people. They contained people who high centrality participants, as you mentioned, are super communicators who tended not to have a lot of their own ideas, but rather to listen to other people’s ideas and rephrase what people had said, share it with the group and say, you know, Jim had this idea. Let’s let’s go back to that, because I think it’s kind of interesting. And it turns out that these super communicators would actually have their own ideas, but most people didn’t recognize them because it always felt like it was a it was an invitation for other people to participate or a recognition of what someone else had said. These same people, these super communicators, instead of dominating conversation or telling a lot of jokes or speaking up, would often they would often say things like, You know, Jim, you haven’t said anything a little while. Like, what are you thinking? Like what’s going on inside your head? And they would become seen as a natural leader, not a leader, because they’re dominating or or providing all the directions, but a leader because everyone else wanted to defer to them to help make that conversation better. And this is what we know. You know, I think one of the best ways to identify a superior communicator is just to ask a simple question. I’ll ask you, if you were having a bad day and you wanted to call someone who you know would make you feel better, do you know who you would call? Does that person come into your mind right away?
Krys Boyd [00:33:20] Absolutely.
Charles Duhigg [00:33:21] Yeah. Can I ask who it is?
Krys Boyd [00:33:23] It’s. It’s either one of my daughters, actually.
Charles Duhigg [00:33:27] Okay.
Krys Boyd [00:33:27] They’re adults.
Charles Duhigg [00:33:29] Which is wonderful. And that. And my guess is that for you, they’re both super communicators, and you’re probably a super communicator for them when you telephone them and they’re having a tough day, you know exactly what to say. You know how to to show them that you’re listening to them. You know, which questions, which deep questions are going to be a source of of rejuvenation for them. You are super communicators for each other. Now, what’s interesting is that there are these people who have managed to be consistent super communicators for everyone. And what we’ve discovered they’re doing, in addition to showing people that they want to connect, is they’re doing the same thing that you do for your daughters and that they do for you. They’re asking questions to try and understand what you’re going through. They’re inviting you and giving you space to explain what’s happening inside your own head. And they’re not judging what you’re saying. They’re instead just listening and accepting. And they might disagree with you. My guess is that your daughters have disagreed with you.
Krys Boyd [00:34:29] On multiple occasions. Yes.
Charles Duhigg [00:34:31] Right. But the fact that they disagree with you does not become an impediment to that conversation. Rather just becomes an aspect of it because, you know, going into it that your goal is to understand what your daughter is going through. And her goal is to understand how you’re seeing this, what you’re going through, your reactions to it. And once we achieve that, once we are super communicators with each other, super communicating, then then suddenly the differences that we have, these things that otherwise might make it hard for us to connect with each other, they fade away. Not because you’re coming in as mom with advice, not because your daughters are saying, we know more than you do because we’re younger, rather because you’re coming in and you’re saying, I want to understand you. Tell me how you see the world. Tell me how you feel about your life. And I’m going to prove to you that I’ve heard you. I’m going to ask you deep questions that help us figure out what’s really going on. And when you are authentic and vulnerable with me, I’m going to be authentic and vulnerable back. And we’re going to, as a result, trust each other a lot more.
Krys Boyd [00:35:38] Another story I was really drawn to in the book, Charles, was this surgeon who had struggled when giving patients their options after a cancer diagnosis. What changed when he shifted from like starting with the range of choices they could pick from to asking open ended questions about their lives and what they wanted out of treatment. Which is a different thing. From which treatment do you want?
Charles Duhigg [00:36:04] That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And I love this story. This is the story of Dr. Afar Addai, who’s a cancer surgeon in New York City. And you’re exactly right. He specializes in prostate, then removing prostate tumors. And what’s interesting is that for a long time, he would have patients who had come in and they had just learned that they had a tumor on their prostate. They would be very panicked or or overwhelmed. And he just assumed that it was his job to give them medical advice. And so he would give them advice. And his advice often was, I know this is scary, but you shouldn’t do anything. Your cancer is so slow growing and the risks of doing surgery because the prostate is located close to the nerves that control urination and sexual function. The risks of the surgery are high enough that instead what we should do is this thing called active surveillance. We’re going to monitor what’s going on, but we’re not going to do any surgery, no radiation, no treatments of any kind unless the tumor starts growing faster than we expect. And his patients would listen to this and they would go home and they would discuss it with their spouses. And then they inevitably would come back the next day and insist on getting the surgery. They would say, I understand what you said, but you know what? You just got to cut it out as fast as you can. And for Dr. Addai, this was bewildering because he told me originally he thought these would be some of the earliest, easiest conversations he ever had. He’s telling patients that they didn’t have to have surgery, but for some reason they were failing to hear what he was saying. And they would insist insist on going under his knife, even against his recommendations. So he reaches out to a couple of of researchers at Harvard Business School and they say to him the same thing that we were talking about previously, that you that you mentioned to me. They say, look at the beginning of this conversation. You’re assuming what the other person wants. You’re assuming that these patients come in and they’re coming to you for medical advice, but you’re not asking them what they actually want from this conversation. You’re just telling them what you think they ought to hear. Instead of asking instead of presenting all these treatment options, instead of jumping right into this practical conversation, what we think you should do is start the conversation by asking something that allows them to reflect on what’s going on. And the best question to do that is tell me what this cancer diagnosis means to you. That’s a deep question, right? It invites us to talk about our values and our beliefs if we want to. So a couple of weeks later, a 62 year old patient comes in to Dr. Addai, his office, and he’d just gotten diagnosed with with prostate cancer. And Dr. Addai starts by saying, look, before we jump in, anything, just just tell me what this cancer diagnosis means to you. And he expected the man to talk about his fears or, you know, pain or issues of mortality. But instead, what the man says, he says, you know, when they told me I had cancer, it made me think of my dad who died when I was 17. And I saw how hard that was for my mom. And I do not want to put my wife or my kids through that. And it also it made me think about my grandchildren. And you know what with climate change and what kind of world are we leaving for them and and how do I take care of them? He never mentioned the cancer once. And to Dr. Addahi. This was eye opening. This was a man who had just been told he had this disease, but he didn’t want to talk about the disease. Not at first. He wanted to talk about how to make sense of the fact that death is real, that there’s part of the parts of the world we can’t we can control. You want to have an emotional conversation about how he feels. And so Dr. Addai matched him. He he had a similar conversation. He talked about his own dad getting sick. How he had brought them closer together. And once they were aligned in this emotional discussion, once they were both sharing with each other what’s most important to them. Then Dr. Addai could say, Look, I’d like to go over treatment options with you. Is that okay? And the man said, yes. And he said, Let me tell you about active surveillance. And within five minutes, the man agreed. And ever since, Dr. Addai has taken this approach that the number of patients requesting unnecessary surgeries has gone down by 30%. And in fact, it might be much higher than that now.
Krys Boyd [00:40:14] Lots of organizations are, you know, waking up to the fact that we might have disconnects across like different identities like race or gender or religion or political orientation. And we’re trying to figure out how to have conversations. Why is it so productive to maybe acknowledge those differences and also seek at least one common identity point with people?
Charles Duhigg [00:40:43] Yeah, it’s a really good question. I imagine you guys have had conversations over the last five years within within your news station and within your community over. Yeah. And let me ask you, when you go into those conversations and I’m making an assumption about you here that you’re white, but when you go into those conversations, they say, okay, you’re the white woman. Tell us what you think about policing. How does that make you feel?
Krys Boyd [00:41:09] Well, I feel like I have an obligation to answer, but I also feel like any answer that I give is apt to be, I don’t know, tempered by what other people want to hear from me.
Charles Duhigg [00:41:24] It’s it’s really anxiety producing. Like even even that explanation you just gave me, it’s like it’s.
Krys Boyd [00:41:29] A bunch of gobbledygook. Yeah.
Charles Duhigg [00:41:31] Yeah, But you got to. You got to think through, like, where the pitfalls, how am I going to screw this up? And this is what we know is we know that conversations about identity. They are really anxiety producing, particularly now that identity has been in the news so much. There was actually an experiment that was done by a woman named Cara Sanchez, which is really interesting, where she asked friends who are black and white if they would be willing to have a discussion about their race. So when one black friend, one white friend, and they almost universally said, no, these were friends, these were people who had known each other for years, these are people who loved talking to each other. But when she asked if they would be willing to have conversations about race, they said no. And then she asked why. And what she found was this anxiety that the white participants were anxious that they would accidentally say something racist, and the black participants were terrified that their friends would accidentally say something racist and it would destroy their friendship. Yeah. And so what she found was that there’s these two things that help us get beyond that, because these conversations are important. We we need to have these conversations. And she found that, number one, if you start the conversation by saying, look, I want to acknowledge that this is going to be awkward and and I might say some things the wrong way and I apologize in advance and I hope you’ll forgive me. And if you say something the wrong way, instead of taking offense at it, I I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. I’ll ask you what you mean and I’ll I won’t hold it against you if you’re if your tongue is moving faster than your brain. That simply acknowledging that a conversation can be hard makes that conversation easier. And that’s not just true of conversations about race. That’s true of any tough conversation that we’re having. If we’re giving an employee critical feedback, if we’re trying to talk to our spouse about something that we think they need to change, that that acknowledgment that this conversation is hard. That is really, really powerful. But then the second thing that happened was that she found that all of us carry around many identities. Right. You notice before I mentioned, you know, you’re a white woman. Tell me what you think about policing. But the truth of the matter is that you’re so much more than just a white woman. You’re. You’re a mother. You’re a you’re probably a sibling. You’re someone who’s involved in your community. You’re a journalist. You’re someone who you probably interacts with with different parts of your your community every single day. You’re someone who maybe cares about politics and cares about justice. All of those identities are as important as the color of your skin. And when we introduce them into the conversation, when we acknowledge that all of us contain multitudes, then all of a sudden these hard conversations become much easier. You know, I saw this myself, went on during during the policing issues around George Floyd. I had a friend who was who was black, and we were talking about this, and I’m white. And he had a very different perspective. But instead of saying, as a black man, how do you think about policing? The question that I found was much more powerful is to say, look, as a black man, you have different experiences than me, but you’re also a lawyer. And I imagine that you see policing in a completely interesting way as a lawyer. And I know that you’re a father and you probably worry about your kids getting pulled over, but you’re also a son. And I know that that your parents have been impacted by policing. And I’m just wondering. And you coached Little League with me and we go to the same church. I’m just wondering, as someone who wears all these different hats. What do you think about policing? When I asked the question that way, it doesn’t become me pushing you into a stereotype. It doesn’t become something that feels like I’m being pigeonholed. Rather, it feels like someone saying, these are complicated topics and we are complicated people. Let’s talk about the wholeness, the identities that we possess. And in sharing that, we’re not going to fall into a stereotype where we’re hopefully going to find something true and real and meaningful and something we have in common where we can connect.
Krys Boyd [00:45:43] Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist and author of the new book “Super Communicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.” Charles, thank you so much for this conversation.
Charles Duhigg [00:45:54] Thank you for having me. This has been such a pleasure.
Krys Boyd [00:45:56] You can find us on Facebook and Instagram by searching for KERA Think and you can also subscribe to our podcast anywhere you get podcasts. It’s available as well on our website think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
