The Conversations that Bring Us Closer

Last week on the show, we looked at the science of conversation, and how even ordinary chats can involve a delicate dance of coordination. This week, we explore the discussions we all dread: the tough ones. Telling someone they treated us poorly. Demanding a raise. Taking away an elderly relative's car keys. We talk with Alison Wood Brooks about what makes difficult conversations difficult, and a series of psychological techniques to help you navigate them.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. There's an iconic episode of the TV show Seinfeld where the character George muses about a woman who treated him poorly. She took advantage of his romantic interest in her, treated him like trash, and then discarded him. George begins fantasizing to his friend Jerry Seinfeld about what he would tell the woman if he met her again. He would remind her of all the ways she treated him like dirt. He would stand up for himself. He would insist that she respect his dignity and apologize. Since this is comedy, George, of course, runs into the woman shortly thereafter at a social gathering.

• 0:41Shankar Vedantam?

  Instead of being brave and forthright, he is meek and obsequious. He allows her to run right over him all over again. But in that same scene, another woman comes up to Jerry Seinfeld. She went on a date with him long ago, and she felt he did not treat her well. She tells him what George had meant to say.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Remember me?

• 1:06Speaker 02

  I'm sorry.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Mary Cantardi? No? Doesn't ring a bell, Jerry? We had a date three years ago. Said you'd call me the next day.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Well, I'm sure I meant to call. I probably just lost.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Liar! Liar! You were never going to call me! You thought you could waltz through the rest of your life and never bump into me again, but you were wrong, Jerry. You were wrong.

• 1:28Shankar Vedantam?

  Last week on the show, we examined the science of conversation. We looked at why an ordinary chat is far from ordinary. These interactions involve hundreds of micro decisions and a delicate dance of coordination. If you missed that episode, I would urge you to listen to it first. You can find it in this podcast feed. It's called "We Need to Talk." Today, we look at the conversations we all dread: telling someone they treated us poorly, demanding a raise, taking away an elderly relative's car keys. We look at what makes difficult conversations difficult and a series of psychological techniques to help you navigate them.

• 2:13Shankar Vedantam?

  How to Have Difficult Conversations, this week, on Hidden Brain.

• 2:27Shankar Vedantam?

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• 2:58Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. The mighty dollar. Once upon a time, it had a whole menu named after it. Now, no more. But $1 a day lets you add Progressive Renters Insurance to your auto insurance. Learn more at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates and other insurers. Average premium cost based on Progressive Home data from 2025. Product and prices may vary by state.

• 3:30Shankar Vedantam?

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• 4:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Is there a conversation you need to have that you keep putting off? In your head, do you play out this conversation? And in every telling, does it end in hurt feelings, misunderstandings, and unhappiness?

• 4:18Shankar Vedantam?

  Allison Woodbrooks is a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School. She studies the art and science of conversations and how we can get better at having difficult conversations. Allison Woodbrooks, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 4:34Shankar Vedantam?

  Allison, one way we mishandle difficult conversations is that we avoid having them altogether. How common is such evasion?

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Avoidance is so common. It's, and it's common in my life, too. I'm, I'm an avoider, and so I deeply understand why so many people avoid having hard conversations. They avoid people that they know will be hard to interact with, and they avoid topics that feel, at least ahead of time, like they're going to be very difficult for any number of reasons.

• 5:12Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, I remember many years ago, as a small child, my, my grandfather, you know, had rented out an apartment to someone, and that, that person wasn't paying my grandfather the, the rent. And my grandfather knew he had to have, you know, a conversation with a tenant, and basically it was going to be a difficult conversation. And he was a people pleaser, and he hated having difficult conversations. So, so whenever he saw the tenant, you know, come up the other side of the road, you know, he would run and hide in the bushes because he didn't want to have, you know, the difficult conversation with the tenant. And of course, as a small child, you, you look at that, and you realize, oh, these are difficult conversations. One way to handle them is to basically not have them at all.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right. And it's not always the wrong instinct, but you do have to sort of think about, who is it leading us to avoid? And why? Why are we avoiding these topics? And are those reasons good? Are they biased? Are they preventing us from having a deeper relationship?

• 6:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Can you think of a conversation that you need to have with another person that you've been putting off, Alison?

• 6:28Speaker 03

  So many. I feel like I avoid certain topics often. Right now, maybe just today. I mean, I could initiate conversations with many of my students, for example, and tell them that I don't think that their performance in the course so far has been terrific and that I'm disappointed in them and that I think it's not only going to affect their grade, but their learning and also how I personally feel about them. Right? Like, it's affecting our relationship in a sort of personal way.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  And the way I avoid that conversation is by asking my assistant to write emails to the students and just let them know what assignments they're missing, rather than starting a conversation with, you know, 20 different people that I think will be hurtful or unpleasant or hard or time-consuming or make them feel bad. There's so many reasons that prevent me from sort of reaching out one-on-one to them.

• 7:46Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, it's interesting, Alison. You know, many of us think when we are subordinates or students or in a position where someone else has power over us, that the manager or the supervisor or the administrator has no problem whatsoever telling us what they think and feel. Because, of course, this person has all this power. We, you know, build them up to have all this power in our mind. But I think what you're saying is that this actually runs both ways. Your students might, you know, understandably have trepidation coming to you and discussing something difficult with you, but you have the same problem discussing it with them.

• 8:19Speaker 03

  That's right. It's a profound human instinct to try to avoid unpleasantness or things that you don't think will go well. And often, that unpleasantness comes from us grappling with this feeling torn between honesty and being kind. And that really has nothing to do with status, right? If we're grappling with, can I tell you the truth? And is that going to be hurtful to you?

• 8:54Shankar Vedantam?

  So in 2013, you're taught in negotiation class about a fictional football quarterback named A.J. Washington. You were a relatively new professor, and you worked hard to make your presentation engaging. You even had planned a big reveal at the end of the presentation. Can you describe what happened that day?

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Shankar, I was so excited about this day in class. It was a case about a fictionalized quarterback in the NFL named A.J. Washington. And it had been written, actually, about Tom Brady, our famed Boston-New England Patriots quarterback, and his negotiation over his salary and his player contract. So there's a big reveal at the end of class where I reveal that this whole case has been about Tom Brady the whole time. And I had brought a very important prop to class to share with the students at the end of this case discussion. And it was on loan to me from my dear colleague, who had been the chief operating officer

• 9:57Speaker 03

  of the New England Patriots for a very long time. And he let me bring one of his Super Bowl rings to class.

• 10:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow.

• 10:05Speaker 03

  To help with this big reveal about Tom Brady. And I was so excited, and I made this big show of it at the end. I sort of lifted it up in the air, and I knelt down, and all the students erupted in applause. And they all came down at the end of class and wanted to take photos with the Super Bowl ring. And it was so fun. I was very early in my career at the business school, and I was like, oh, man, I am nailing this. This, I am an amazing teacher. This is going so good. Couldn't be going better. But a few days later, I got an email, as I so often do, from students asking to meet with me. And this student comes to my office and I have so many meetings with students

• 10:50Speaker 03

  and the topics are all over the map, but I thought that he would be asking about, you know, a job that he'd applied for, some personal problem that he was coping with. Instead, he sort of sat down and said, "I love the class. It's going so great. Thank you so much. There's just one thing. There's just one thing that I want to talk to you about." And I was like, "Oh, no. Jeez." And he said, "Do you remember in class when you flashed the photo of Tom Brady up on your slides?" I said, "Oh, yeah. That was awesome, wasn't it?" And he said, "Yes, but you said, you paused on this slide and you said, 'Hey, ladies, enjoy the view.'" And I said, "Oh, yeah, I remember that. I was

• 11:33Speaker 03

  going for this big dramatic effect." And he said, "You know, framing it that way felt really heteronormative." And this was a long time ago. This was probably 2013. I don't think I had ever heard the word heteronormative before. And I said, "Oh, my goodness. Tell me more. What do you mean?" And he said, "Well, it made it, it kind of felt like you were only talking to the people who are, you know, like heterosexual, only people who are interested in the opposite gender in the class. What about all the male students who wanted to enjoy the view?"

• 12:10Shankar Vedantam?

  It's worth pausing for a moment and asking how you would have responded in this situation. You're a teacher, and you've just put in a lot of thought and effort into creating a great presentation. A student is upset because of a phrase you used. Would you dismiss the student as being overly sensitive, too woke? Would you even listen? The point here is not what you would have actually done, but to illustrate what happens when we are confronted by difficult conversations. Very often, the conversation inside our heads can get so loud that we stop paying attention to the conversation outside.

• 12:48Shankar Vedantam?

  Allison did not tune out the student.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  I thought, whoa, whoa, you're right, for sure. I definitely was coming from the heteronormative perspective. And I couldn't have imagined that such a moment of levity could be experienced in that way as exclusionary. And I was really disappointed in myself. I was in my 20s still. I was really young as a professor. And I thought, gosh, of all of the faculty here, the young woman is the one who's getting this wrong. And I'm so sorry. I really, I want to be the inclusive one. And then he said, the saddest part of all, he said, well, most professors

• 13:36Speaker 03

  make me feel this way. You're just the only one that I feel comfortable enough sharing it with.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  And I thought, oh, my goodness. I guess that's good for me, but so bad for us collectively in terms of conversational safety and the ability to have these hard conversations.

• 14:06Shankar Vedantam?

  So there's so much going on in that story, Allison. And as you're telling the story, I'm putting myself in your shoes, sitting across from the student. The student basically says, effectively, you were being insensitive when you made this joke in class. And I can imagine you, at that moment, tensing up and getting a little anxious and getting a little worried and feeling a little aroused. There's a spotlight being trained on you, and you are being called out as someone who is an unkind, insensitive person.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  That's right. And we all feel these moments and there are these fleeting moments where you have high arousal and negative feelings. There's a math that scholars call the affective circumplex, but my students like to call it the wheel of feelings. And it's sort of high to low arousal on the Y axis and then negative to positive on the X axis. And that upper left quadrant is this high arousal, negative feelings, anger, defensiveness, anxiety. Your heart starts to race. You're feeling bad. And these feelings happen in conversation when something starts to not feel right. And it's a familiar feeling.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  And that's definitely how I was feeling in that moment, this arousal, my heart's racing, probably your stress hormones start to release in your body. And there are a number of ways that you can react to it. And I think we all grapple with, well, should I react defensively? Should I react angrily? Do I have the sort of self-control to continue engaging in this conversation in a way that's reasonable and productive?

• 15:49Shankar Vedantam?

  And I mean, I think the student did a very smart thing by coming and talking to you in the privacy of her office, because in some ways now, you're having a one-on-one conversation. If the student had brought this up in the class, for example, that could have made you feel even more defensive and even more put on the spot.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  In the class or, you know, online, on social media, we see this happen all the time. These, in my mind, really, there's, it's very rare to feel like any topic is too sensitive to discuss, but there are so many contexts that are too sensitive. I sometimes wonder, is there such a thing as a sensitive topic? Or is it all just sensitive contexts? And so it was so kind that the student came and met one-on-one, and also that they started the conversation by being so complimentary and saying, hey, I really love this class. I think you're doing such an amazing job teaching us. And it's because I feel so comfortable with you that I feel safe sharing this constructive feedback about this one moment.

• 16:55Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, the single most important lesson to learn when you are engaged in a difficult conversation. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 17:16Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. The mighty dollar. Once upon a time, it had a whole menu named after it. Now, no more. But $1 a day lets you add Progressive Renters Insurance to your auto insurance. Learn more at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates and other insurers. Average premium cost based on Progressive Home data from 2025. Product and prices may vary by state.

• 17:48Shankar Vedantam?

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• 18:32Shankar Vedantam?

  Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain.

• 18:46Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 18:51Shankar Vedantam?

  Think back to the last time you had a difficult conversation. Maybe it was with a manager or an employee. Maybe it was with a partner or a parent. What did it feel like in the moments before you had the conversation? Did you feel yourself getting tense? Did you feel the need to get a drink first? Or to avoid the conversation altogether?

• 19:14Shankar Vedantam?

  At Harvard Business School, behavioral scientist Alison Woodbrook says that handling difficult conversations starts with noticing how we respond to them. You cannot be an effective interlocutor with someone else when you are unaware of how you yourself are reacting. Alison got a chance to apply her research in her own life when a student came to her and complained that she had been insensitive in class.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  It's recognizing your own emotions. It's also trying to recognize what your goals are in that moment. So emotions are often automatic and you get into that upper-left quadrant, those high arousal negative feelings and there are these sort of parasympathetic nervous system signals that are happening that you can't control. But reflecting about what your goals are is so important. Are you trying to persuade other people to agree with you? Are you trying to continue to engage in this conversation? Are you trying to connect? Are you trying to learn from them? Are you trying to listen? What we've found in much of our research is that in these moments, when you're feeling these high arousal negative feelings,

• 20:21Speaker 03

  it's very natural to have goals to defend yourself and to persuade other people to agree with you. Like, "You need to understand me." So you start making statements to try and persuade them.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  But the more effective way to react in those moments is to focus on learning. Which is not intuitive. So you need to learn as much as you can about the other person's perspective. Why are they, why did they feel this way? Why did he feel, he clearly felt, you know, moved enough that he needed to come and give me this feedback. Tell me more about that. Like, what was that like for you? And how often do you feel this way? And how could I have said this differently? So, learning as much as you can about the other person's perspective is much more effective for making the conversation continue in a productive way. And ultimately, and this is sort of the ironic part, ultimately, to be more persuasive.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  Because the other person is going to see you as much more reasonable and measured.

• 21:32Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, in some ways, this is such a profound insight, Alison. Because when I think about the difficult conversations, either that I've had or that I need to have, I do think I have approached those conversations with a mindset of, how do I convince this other person about this thing that I know is right? I know it's right, they don't know it's right. My job is to persuade them that in some ways they are wrong. And in some ways, you're saying that is the wrong way to go about it. That the approach, the orientation of persuasion, in some ways, sets us on the wrong track when it comes to having these difficult conversations.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  That's right. And you're not alone. Almost everyone has that instinct. It's a deeply held human instinct to feel like you're right and you want to persuade other people to see your point of view and to persuade them to agree with you. It's just not an effective mindset or effective behaviors in the context of a live, unfolding dialogue. Because it's impossible, it's so difficult to be on the receiving end of that, that it's hard to continue to listen and engage in the ways that you need to, to even keep a conversation going.

• 22:47Shankar Vedantam?

  So some time ago, Alison, we featured your colleague Julia Minson on Hidden Brain. She has studied the effects of something called conversational receptiveness, which is closely linked to this idea of turning a difficult conversation from an exercise in persuasion to an exercise in learning. What is conversational receptiveness, Alison?

• 23:07Speaker 03

  Julia Minson's work, Hannah Collins, Mikey Omen, this work is incredible and groundbreaking on receptiveness. They define receptiveness, especially in conversation, as openness to opposing viewpoints. And the ability to engage receptively live in a live conversation is an incredible skill that we can all work on and is counterintuitive to most people.

• 23:31Shankar Vedantam?

  Can you talk about some of the elements of conversational receptiveness? Julia Minson and others talk about starting with the role of acknowledgement, that to actually acknowledge what it is that the other person is saying to you.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  That's right. And acknowledgement is a very simple thing. It's almost like just repeating back what you've heard from someone. I hear you saying this, right? Is that correct? I hear you asking this question about receptiveness, Shankar. Is that, am I hearing you right? It's sort of this acknowledgement of like, I'm listening to you and I'm understanding what you're saying. The sort of next bump up from acknowledgement is affirmation. So you take what another person has said and you attach a positive affirmation to it. So I say, I hear what you're saying and also I appreciate it. It makes sense that you would feel that way about this thing. That's great. You're such a reasonable person.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  So this sort of affirmation, I love how you said, I love how you asked this question. It's a great one. And so you attach this positive attribution and affirmation onto your acknowledgement. Now, all of this is completely independent from agreement, right? You are not necessarily going to go on and agree with what they've said. They're just making the point that linguistically... It's so important to start from a place of saying, I hear what you're saying, I understand it, I like it, I think it's reasonable that you feel that way. Tell me more about it. And just maintaining a tone that your partner is going to be able to continue to engage with,

• 25:10Speaker 03

  whether you go on to agree or disagree later in the conversation. Another way to think of it would be like validation. You need to validate their feelings, even if you're not going to agree with their beliefs.

• 25:25Shankar Vedantam?

  One of the things that we often do when we're having difficult conversations is that we fixate on the areas of disagreement that we have with someone else. And that's understandable. That's what makes a difficult conversation difficult. But what are we missing when we do that, Alison?

• 25:41Speaker 03

  It's wild. This has been very eye opening for me. When you're in a conversation, as soon as you stumble across even any sort of difference, when you realize, oh, this person feels differently than me, or they have a belief that's different than mine, or they have a piece of their identity that's very different. It's our instinct is to focus so strongly on that disagreement or that difference that we almost completely forget about the 99% of other things that we have in common and agree about. I mean, really, like, everyone wants to feel loved. Everyone wants to feel safe. Everyone wants to feel adored and admired. Everyone likes ice cream.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  Everybody likes being in a warm room, right? Like, there's so many things that we all agree about. And for whatever reason, all of those things sort of go out the window and we fixate on these little moments of disagreement and difference.

• 26:42Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah, and this is not to say that the areas of disagreement are not real. They are real, but it may be that it's actually 15% of the painting as opposed to 85% of the painting.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  That's right, and we forget about the rest of the painting.

• 27:04Shankar Vedantam?

  One of the other ideas that Julia Minson and others talk about is that when we are proposing our ideas, so when it's our turn to speak, to hedge those ideas a little bit, to not speak in overly declarative language or confident language, to basically say, "I think," or, "Here's something to think about." What does that do in a difficult conversation, Alison?

• 27:27Speaker 03

  It goes back to this idea of our instinct says to, "That I'm right and I'm going to prove to you that I'm right, and to do that, I need to say it in such a compelling and strong way that you can't possibly deny that I'm right."

• 27:41Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  We forget that it's really hard to be on the receiving end of that, to be the listener and to be receiving such like strong statement, righteous sort of language. And so this point about qualifying your language, expressing the points that you're uncertain about, like, I actually was wondering if this, or "I think, I'm pretty sure this," or "I wonder about this," those qualifications, that qualifying language, goes against our instincts to be strong and resolute and decisive, but being on the receiving end of it, it makes that person sound so much more reasonable and realistic, and it's so much easier to engage with them.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  So you're probably detecting a theme here, which is, all of this stuff goes towards the goal of being able to continue talking to each other in a way that's productive and, dare I say, enjoyable. Because if we go along with our instincts to prove to people that we're right, it's very hard to continue to have that conversation, and it's going to spiral into a place that's not enjoyable.

• 29:01Shankar Vedantam?

  You know, I was talking to another guest on Hidden Brains some time ago, and he used to be a champion, you know, debater in high school. And of course, when you're having a debate, you know, you present your strongest argument, and the other person presents their strongest argument, and then a judge decides whose argument is the best. And he was pointing out that in many ways, we conduct difficult conversations the same way, which is we try and prosecute our argument and expect the other person is going to prosecute their argument. And then imagine that there is some kind of imaginary judge who's going to come in and give us the prize for coming up with the better argument. But of course, in real life, there is no judge. There is no third party to adjudicate and say, your argument was better than the other person's argument.

• 29:45Shankar Vedantam?

  Your goal, in fact, is to get across to the other person and to sort of find common ground with the other person. And that's very hard to do when you're trying to beat the other person into a pulp.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. And there's this sort of thought experiment that I like to do, that I think of as my way, your way, the right way. For almost any task, or any topic, or any issue, let's just call it loading the dishwasher. I have my way of loading the dishwasher. You have your way of loading the dishwasher. But probably neither of our ways of loading the dishwasher is the objectively correct or optimal way of loading the dishwasher. And so nitpicking with each other and arguing about, well, my way is the best way, and then you say, well, my way is the best way. It's all so silly, especially when neither of you knows the sort of ground-truth, objective reality of what's the best way.

• 30:39Shankar Vedantam?

  When the emotions we are feeling are unhelpfully negative, you say, Alison, that we should reframe them in a more positive light. Can you explain what you mean by that? What do you mean by reframing a negative emotion in a positive light?

• 30:55Speaker 03

  When we feel negative emotions, which we all do a lot of the time, we have a lot more control over how we experience that emotion than we would think. So I'll give the example of anxiety. When we feel anxious, it's a high arousal emotion. It's very negative. Our instinct tells us to try and calm down, try and get rid of that emotion. People go to great lengths to try and calm down when they're feeling anxious. But calming down requires a sort of two-step move. You have to reduce your physiological arousal. So your racing heart, your sweaty palms, your cortisol in your body, those things are really hard to control. You actually don't have a lot of executive control over those things.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  And you're trying to move from negative emotion to positive. So it's this two-step thing that turns out very hard to do, if not impossible. The idea of reframing is let's focus on the part of it that we do have more control over, and that's our appraisal of negative versus positive. So if you're feeling anxious, what if we stay in high arousal world and you just say to yourself, you know what? I'm excited. Just that small flip helps move you from negative valence anxiety to positive valence excitement.

• 32:13Shankar Vedantam?

  So you can see, for example, distress as passion, for example, as a way of reframing or reappraising the distress that you're experiencing.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. So I have worked with Lizzie Bailey Wolf about this. Often people say, I'm stressed, I'm so distressed. But you can reframe that for your own benefit in saying, no, no, this is just a signal that I care about it, that I'm passionate. And actually saying it out loud is really compelling to the people around you as well.

• 32:40Shankar Vedantam?

  So in some ways, what I understand you saying, Alison, is that the goal here is not so much to change the emotion itself, but to shift your interpretation of the emotion.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  That's right. Psychologists call this reappraisal. You're shifting the appraisal, not how you're feeling it physiologically, but just how you're thinking about and interpreting that feeling.

• 33:02Shankar Vedantam?

  You have a colleague Cynthia who has a very effective way of reframing emotion when a discussion gets too heated. What is her technique, Alison?

• 33:11Speaker 03

  My colleague Cynthia is amazing. She's an incredible teacher and I love watching her teach because she constantly keeps her, her sort of hand on the dial, the sort of temperature knob of the mood of the classroom. And when she feels like things are getting too down or sad or angry, she calls it out. She says, I'm not loving the emotional vibe in here. Let's hit the refresh button. And she does, even just by labeling it and saying, let's hit the refresh button, it really helps so much.

• 33:43Shankar Vedantam?

  So in other words, just like we can call attention to what's happening inside our minds and label it and say, you know, I'm feeling defensive, I'm feeling upset, I'm feeling called out, I'm feeling threatened. What she is doing is saying, we can call attention to what's happening in the conversation. Notice where we are in the chat.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  That's right. It's what makes levity so powerful as well. You notice if people are getting bored or disengaged from the conversation. It's so important in those moments to realize the emotional timbre and to do something about it. Switch topics, make a joke, smile, give someone a compliment. Just to lift the mood is incredibly powerful.

• 34:24Shankar Vedantam?

  One error we make in difficult conversations is we sometimes try to see things from the perspective of the other person, which on the surface seems like a good thing. But the problem is, when we do this, we imagine how we would think and what we would do in their circumstances. Talk about what happens when we do this, Alison.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  It's such a well-meaning instinct, but unfortunately, the human mind is so egocentric. So we try to imagine what another person would be thinking and feeling, but we use our own thoughts and feelings as a sort of proxy, as a, as a, as a guess. This is what helps us guess how other people are thinking and feeling. We're relying on our own point of view. And unfortunately, no two people are exactly alike. Even my twin sister Sarah and I are not exactly alike. And most people are just incredibly different from each other. And we underestimate how different other people are from us. So very famously, psychologists have found that people are just really,

• 35:25Speaker 03

  it's very challenging to take another person's perspective. The most direct way to take another person's perspective isn't to guess, but to ask them for it, to ask questions and actually hear from their own mouth what's going on in their mind.

• 35:49Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, why seemingly innocuous comments can deeply hurt another person, and a magic key to disarming someone who was very angry with you. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 36:18Speaker 04

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• 36:47Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Mazda. Being safer on the road starts with the person behind the wheel. That's Mazda's philosophy when designing every vehicle. Their proactive safety features help keep you more aware, connected, and engaged during every drive, which means your car does more than help protect you. It helps make you a safer driver, which helps protect everyone. That's why Mazda has been named Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. To learn more, visit MazdaUSA.com. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services.

• 37:21Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. Science consistently tells us, learning starts with motivation. That's why SNHU offers over 200 flexible, affordable, online programs to help you get where you want to go. Take classes that spark your curiosity, shape your skill set, and prepare you for what's next. A degree can help move you forward, no matter what motivates you. Start yours at SNHU.edu/brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you ever noticed that when you're having a difficult conversation, or even a conversation

• 38:02Shankar Vedantam?

  that wasn't supposed to be difficult, something you say can set off another person and send the conversation haywire? You are not trying to give offense, but the other person is deeply offended. At Harvard Business School, Alison Woodbrook says she teaches her students an exercise to avoid such landmines.

• 38:20Speaker 03

  My students find it helpful to use a model to think about why these difficult moments pop up in conversations, sometimes unexpectedly, often unexpectedly. And we use a model that we call the layers of the earth. Above the surface of the earth, this is the content of the conversation. So the words that we're saying to each other, the sound, the way we sound to each other, are nonverbal cues, all the things that are observable above the surface. Right at the surface of the earth are our emotions, and sometimes parts of our emotions are observable. You can tell when I'm getting angry, or anxious, or upset. And sometimes they're hidden beneath the surface of the earth.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  Right below that layer are our motives, or our goals. And, you know, maybe sometimes I want to seek your advice, but you don't want to give it. Or, I want to persuade you, but you are not ready to be persuaded. When we have incongruous motives, it's another way that difficult moments can erupt. And then at the very core of the earth, of course, are our differences in our identities.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  And anytime conversation shoots down to the hot magma of our identity, things are going to feel really hot and heated and difficult. And even sort of easy conversations have a way of shooting down to that hot magma core of our identities in sort of unexpected ways. And my students talk about this a lot, like, you know, you can even innocuous question like, oh, where did you get your glasses? Or, hey, I love your haircut can feel sort of deeply threatening to people if they're imagining that this question is going to lead to something very sensitive about their identity, or where they're from, or their race, or their gender, or their, you know, sexual orientation.

• 40:16Speaker 03

  And so what we talk about in my class is becoming a little bit more aware of differences at every layer of the earth. So at the, at the surface, where are words? Are we literally using the same, the right words? Are we understanding each other and what we mean when we're using certain words? And often, moments of difficulty come from like, oh, we're just misunderstanding each other. We're using the same word to mean different things, or we're not talking about the same thing. Often, these differences in our emotions cause problems. I want to go have fun. You're, you actually want to have a deep conversation. We have different motives, and then, of course, differences in our identities. And I think most of the most difficult moments in conversation

• 40:57Speaker 03

  come from the moments when you poke an invisible barb into somebody's identity. And sometimes you realize when it's happened, and sometimes you don't. It goes back to the story of this LGBTQ student who came and talked to me about making an insensitive comment, a heteronormative comment in class. I poked an invisible barb into an important part of who he is, and he didn't feel seen and acknowledged and valued and worthy of care. And so anytime that we make our conversation partner feel like they're, we don't understand them, we don't see them, and we are not making them feel worthy of care, it's going to cause problems.

• 41:49Shankar Vedantam?

  When you were a college student, Allison, you and your fellow students found yourselves in opposition to an administrator. The students saw this administrator as an enforcer and they thought that she was heavy-handed. They often clashed with her. You decided to try another approach. Can you tell me what happened?

• 42:07Speaker 03

  So I was a member of a of a club, a social club, when I was an undergrad. And there was a woman there whose full-time job it was to take care of this this beautiful property and to keep all of the students who hung out there and ate their meals there, to keep them safe. And historically, the student members of the club had this really confrontational, sort of oppositional relationship with this house manager. And I remember watching this oppositional dynamic unfold, and it really made me feel not only uncomfortable, but also I started to feel like this isn't serving the students well either, because it puts her in this enforcer position, in this oppositional

• 42:52Speaker 03

  position. She's not going to give us the things that we want. And so I, when I became the sort of vice president of this club, I, I thought, I'm going to try and convince my fellow students, the fellow leaders of the club, and this woman, let's, let's reposition ourselves as allies. Like, why don't we try and work together? And so first, I had to convince the other students that this was a good approach. That was not easy, because there was a lot of animosity between the students and this house manager. But then, the really hard conversation was facing, facing this woman myself. And I remember it very vividly. It was at her, it was in her office, in private, sort of

• 43:35Speaker 03

  woman on woman. I had, was the first woman who had ever been an officer in this club. And I went and met with her one-on-one. And she was so gracious and so grateful when I apologized for the behavior of all of the students historically, and how unkind they had been, and how, why this animosity had erupted between the students and this house manager. I just said, I'm so sorry. Like, I, we don't want you to feel that way. We want to work together. We want to be on the same team here.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  And she just said, "Thank you so much. Thank you so much for saying this. This sounds so amazing." And we both cried and she was so grateful. And it really felt like this turning point in the dynamic, which did prove out to be really great for us going forward. It really worked out well. She gave the club so much more of what we actually wanted. And then what was really moving, it ended up being one of the most meaningful sort of conversations of my life. That was, you know, 15 years ago. And that was an inflection point for the club going forward. The students then developed a new norm of being friends with this woman and being on good terms.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  And it continued on for the next 15 years. And I saw her at my 15th college reunion and she looked great. She looked so healthy and happy. And she pulled me aside and she said, "I just can never thank you enough for having that conversation with me and making this change. It changed the club for the better and it changed my life." And it meant so much to me.

• 45:31Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow, that's an amazing story, Alison. And it's really testament to what happens when we handle difficult conversations well, that there is a huge payoff here, a huge psychological payoff here.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. And don't get me wrong, it was scary to have that conversation. It felt like she didn't like the students. She was mad at us all the time. We were always in trouble. And there was so much historical animosity that I was trying to sort of undo and shake up. And it was, it took a lot of chutzpah, or a lot of courage to go in there and try and sort of work through it. It wasn't easy.

• 46:09Shankar Vedantam?

  One of the incredibly difficult and incredibly powerful things that you did was that you apologized to her for the way that she had been treated in the past. And I think for people who are, who feel like they have been wronged, or people who are in opposition, there's often a sense of, you know, sort of burning injustice. You know, I'm just an administrator, I'm here trying to keep the students safe. You know, all they have is ill will toward me, they treat me so badly, no one recognizes what I've done. And so you have this narrative in your head of all the ways in which the world has been unkind to you. And of course, the world doesn't constantly come and admit that. But when someone actually walks in the door and says, "I'm sorry," it has a transformative effect on you.

• 46:54Shankar Vedantam?

  Can you talk a little bit about the power of apologies in the course of having difficult conversations?

• 47:00Speaker 03

  I think as a conversation researcher, as a human being, apologies are one of the most powerful tools we have in our conversational toolkit. They are so remarkably powerful. And they're, and they're quick, right? Like they, it doesn't take that many turns of a conversation to deliver an apology. And they're just, they can do so much good. And even though they're so powerful, many people are reluctant to give them.

• 47:30Shankar Vedantam?

  Talk a little bit about that. Why do you think that is, Alison? Given how powerful they are, why are we so reluctant to deploy them?

• 47:37Speaker 03

  Apologizing requires that you make yourself vulnerable to the other person. It feels like it requires you to humble yourself. It can feel like you are admitting that you were wrong in some way. And it makes yourself vulnerable to the other person because they could exploit that and say, "Oh, yes, you were wrong, I was right." And that just takes an incredible amount of humility. But in practice, when you go through with it and you apologize, it doesn't necessarily equate to an admission of blame-worthiness. It just feels so good for the other person to be on the receiving end of it, that it makes the conversation and the relationship so much better.

• 48:21Shankar Vedantam?

  I want you to tell me the story of when your son Kevin was a toddler. I understand to the extent that he could talk, you had a series of very difficult conversations. Tell me how those went and what happened, Allison.

• 48:34Speaker 03

  Oh, my sweet Kevin. So Kevin's nine now, but back when he was, and he's a terrific kid. Back when he was a toddler, he was a late talker. He was really frustrated and he had so many big ideas and he couldn't express them. And so he would get really angry and mad and yell and scream and sort of flop around. And one day during one of these sort of tantrums, he reared his head back and he, and he sort of butted his head right into my face and he, and he broke my nose.

• 49:10Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  And it was so painful and so physically painful, of course, but also emotionally painful. Like as a mother, how, how do I have this child who's capable of like hurting me in this way? And how do I teach him to not be this way? And I just remember I plopped him down and I ran over to the mirror to see if my face was okay. And it was a really dramatic moment that, it was really hard and, and he was so young. It was hard to decide how to react in that moment.

• 49:41Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that you came back to this incident some years later, Allison. Can you tell me what happened?

• 49:52Speaker 03

  That's right. I, it became infamous in our family, the nose breaking incident with toddler Kevin. And so over time, he heard me and my husband talk about this moment. We told it to him as a story and, you know, he learned to talk, he learned to regulate his emotions and he, he sort of come, came to find this story like intriguing, like he couldn't believe that he would have behaved that way. And one night, he was probably seven or eight years old and we were reading together and he was reading one of his favorite books at the time, you know, Diary of a Wimpy Kid. A lot of kids love this series. And the main character in the story.

• 50:35Speaker 03

  Typically can be sort of thoughtless and can be kind of cruel to his best friend. But there was a part of the book where Greg apologized to his best friend. And it was a rare moment. It was a very sort of kind moment for the character in the book. And in that moment, Kevin stopped reading and he looked up at me and he said, Mom, he said, yeah, and he said, do you remember when I broke your nose when I was a toddler? And I said, oof, yes, I do remember, Kevin. I don't think I'll ever forget. And he looked at me right in the eyes and he said, Mommy, I'm so sorry. So sorry that I did that to you. And my heart just sort of burst.

• 51:20Speaker 03

  In the way that I had cried so much when he first had broken my nose, now I was, I was crying again, but this time out of pride. It was such a meaningful moment to see how he had grown from being this toddler, struggling so much with language and his emotions. And in such a short time, maybe five years later, was in this place where he was able to own that and apologize and empathize and recognize my pain was just incredible.

• 52:03Shankar Vedantam?

  Allison Woodbrooks is a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School. She's the author of Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. Allison, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 52:17Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 52:28Shankar Vedantam?

  Do you have follow up questions for Allison that you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience? If so, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at [email protected]. That email address again is [email protected]. Use the subject line Conversation.

• 52:50Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Burns, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. For more Hidden Brain, be sure to subscribe to our free newsletter. In each issue, we'll bring you more ideas about human behavior, plus a brain teaser and a moment of joy. You can sign up at news.hidenbrain.org. That's N-E-W-S dot hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

• 53:56Speaker 05

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