We Need to Talk

Just because we’ve been doing something for a long time doesn’t mean we’re doing it right. One part of our lives where this may be particularly true is when we're talking with others. This week, we bring you the first of a two-part look at what makes someone skilled at socializing. Behavioral scientist Alison Wood Brooks explains why conversations are much more complex than most of us realize — and how to engage in a more meaningful back-and-forth with another person.

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. At various points in our lives, all of us turn to coaches and trainers. If you're a student athlete, you might need a coach to improve your tennis stroke or soccer footwork. If you need to take up a musical instrument in your 30s, you'll need the help of a piano teacher or guitar instructor. If you decide you want to learn a new language in your 50s, you sign up for classes with an expert in that language.

• 0:28Shankar Vedantam?

  But there are lots of domains in our lives where many of us never dream of recruiting the help of a coach. That's because we feel we are masters in those domains already. We don't need a coach to help us breathe, or walk, or talk. Or do we?

• 0:50Shankar Vedantam?

  Just because we've done something a long time doesn't mean we are doing it right. Just because we feel we are skilled at something doesn't mean we don't have plenty of room for improvement.

• 1:04Shankar Vedantam?

  Today on the show, we focus on a skill that seems so commonplace that many of us fail to see how difficult it is to do well. We're going to look at how we engage in conversation and the things we can do to get better at it. Learning to Talk, this week on Hidden Brain.

• 1:46Shankar Vedantam?

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• 2:09Shankar Vedantam?

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• 2:42Shankar Vedantam?

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• 3:16Shankar Vedantam?

  When discussing the children in our lives, we say they learn to talk at age one or two. For the late bloomers, maybe it's three or four. We make it sound as if learning to talk is something we master early and then practice without a problem as adults. But it turns out that most of us have a lot to learn when it comes to having conversations that are dynamic, engaging, and meaningful. Allison Woodbrooks is a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School. For many years now, she has studied the science of conversation. Allison Woodbrooks, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 3:55Shankar Vedantam?

  Allison, when you were younger, you went on a blind date that was memorable for all the wrong reasons. Can you paint me a picture of what your life was like at the time and who this mystery man was?

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Yes, I was living in New York City. And I was set up on a blind date by a friend. It might have been the only blind date that I've been on in my life. And it was with a man who had a job, a good job, a great job, in finance. He had gone to a good college. He'd played football in college. And I had seen photos of my friend had shown me photos of this guy and he was, you know, so handsome. So I was excited. I went and I met him downtown for dinner at this sort of busy, bustling, loud restaurant slash bar. And I settle into the table and off we go.

• 4:54Shankar Vedantam?

  So he in some ways is the real life version of that popular meme that's been going around, which says, I'm looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6'5", blue eyes.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. I don't know about the trust fund, but truly, everything else, this was this sort of Adonis of a man that so many women, I think, are hoping to meet. Yes.

• 5:23Shankar Vedantam?

  All right. So that's very optimistic and hopeful. So what happens when the dinner gets underway?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  So I settle into this table at this buzzy restaurant in New York City downtown. And I mean, across from me at this table is this beautiful man and I'm so excited. And we just launch into it, launch into conversation. Now, the whole point of a first date is to get to know each other. So I am pelting him with questions. Where is he from? What's his family like? What was his college like? What was it like to play football there? Tell me more about your football career. What's your job like now? Where do you live? Do you have lots of friends in the city? So I'm asking him lots of questions. And I realized that 10 minutes have gone by and he has not asked me a single thing about myself.

• 6:12Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  10 minutes.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  And I realize at this point that This has been a complete sort of absence of question asking in my direction. And at that point, you sort of have this out of body experience. And I'm floating over the table, looking down at this conversation game that's now afoot. And you start to play this little game where you're like, how many questions can I ask this person before they ask a single question back to me? Like, how far can I push this? And I think he doesn't really realize that I'm now playing this game. And he certainly doesn't realize how badly he's losing the game. And another 10 minutes go by.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  20 minutes, he has asked me nothing about myself. He has no idea that I'm devastated and really feeling sort of hurt. But he doesn't seem reciprocally interested in me.

• 7:18Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm assuming at this point, you're asking yourself how you can extricate yourself from the date.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely. How quickly can I get out of here? So I excuse myself to the restroom. And I sort of collect myself. You know, I'm looking in the mirror, maybe touch up my lipstick. And I'm thinking, what do I do now? And this really decisive feeling washes over me. I just gotta go. I gotta get out of here. There's just no way that I have a future with someone who can go 20 minutes without asking me a question, right? I need someone who's interested in me and my perspective and my feelings and my life. And so I make my way back to the table, having made this decision. I say, thank you so much for meeting me for dinner. I have to go.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  And I collect my things and I leave.

• 8:12Shankar Vedantam?

  Did you ever hear from him again?

• 8:15Speaker 01

  I did. He texted me later that night and he said, "You're beautiful. I had a great time. I want to see you again." Which, by the way, still, there is no question.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  I mean, it's like, fine, lovely, but he's still, there's no question of, "Are you okay? How are you doing? Did you get home safely? Is everything all right?" No question. I mean, it was really quite wild. And, you know, I'm a bit of a people pleaser. I don't usually, I'm not usually overly direct with people, but this moment felt like he really could benefit from some feedback. I mean, his future girlfriend, who's looking for a man with blue eyes and a job in finance and 6'5" is going to find this guy. And I want him to be able to make that person happy. And so I text him back and I just say,

• 9:16Speaker 01

  "I just want you to know, I left because you didn't ask me anything about myself. And it really made me feel like you weren't interested in me. I'm really grateful that you met up with me and I wish you the best."

• 9:38Shankar Vedantam?

  There was another instance in your life, Allison, that illustrated in some ways the nature of conversational pitfalls. You went out for dinner with a good friend of yours. There was something you had been working up the nerve to tell her. Who was this friend and what had you wanted to tell her?

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. This was a dear friend of mine. We had been friends for a very long time, coming up on 10 years. And she was dating a guy who was great, but I just wasn't sure they were a good fit for each other. And I knew that they were starting to think about getting engaged and maybe married. And probably for over a year, I had just been sort of... Feeling kind of worried about her, like, is this the right person for you? She was so spectacular and I just felt like maybe he wasn't right for her. And so I'd been grappling with this idea, you know, should I raise this with her? Should we talk about it?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Is our friendship strong enough that we could handle a topic like this? Is it my place to even raise a topic like this, even with someone that I'm so close to?

• 10:48Shankar Vedantam?

  So, did you raise it at the dinner?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we were at this sort of trendy restaurant downtown. And there was music thumping and we were eating delicious foods and having cocktails. And I worked up the, finally mustered the courage to tell her what had been on my mind. And I could tell that she was both intrigued and interested in what I was telling her. And she engaged with me on it so nicely. But, you know, as so many hard conversations, hard topics become more difficult over time, I realized that she'd heard me, she was maybe getting a little bit emotional. And so I didn't want to push it. And I switched topics and we moved on.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  So after this dinner, I felt so proud that I had worked up the courage to be direct and honest with my friend and proud of her for being so receptive to my perspective. And it just, I felt like the conversation had gone really well. So, fast forward two days and a text message pops up on my phone from my friend. And immediately, I'm so curious, I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, has she, did I, did I change her mind? Had she been thinking about this? Is she ready to open up about, maybe she's been wondering about this guy too? And maybe they, she kind of knows they're not a good fit for each other.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  And she's going to say, thank you so much for empowering me to really say this out loud. I was, I was excited to see how she was going to react. And I opened my phone, I opened the text message, and what do I see? I see a photo. It's very clearly her hand. It's the same bright red nail polish she'd been wearing at our dinner just two nights before. And a beautiful diamond ring on her ring finger. Her boyfriend had proposed and she had said yes.

• 12:54Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow, so when you had that conversation with her at dinner, she wasn't being reticent because she was thinking deeply about what you were saying. She was probably saying, I don't know how to tell Alison that, in fact, my boyfriend has proposed or is about to propose.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  That's right, and that she had already helped him pick out the ring.

• 13:14Shankar Vedantam?

  Oh, wow.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  She, I think she was grappling with a lot of feelings in that moment. She, she didn't want to embarrass me, she didn't want to hurt me. She didn't, maybe, maybe I made her feel embarrassed that she was ready to go forward with this huge step in her life.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Or maybe, and this, maybe she didn't really hear me. You know, I kind of mentioned it quickly and I didn't go, I didn't want to make it a dramatic thing and we moved on quickly. So maybe she wasn't even really able to process what I was saying. I don't know, because we, we never talked about it again.

• 13:56Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah, I mean, you must have felt terrible, Alison, at telling her to break up with her boyfriend, you know, moments before he proposed a marriage to her.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  I felt horrible. I felt like, I felt like such a terrible friend and such a terrible person and

• 14:13Speaker 01

  like I hadn't fulfilled my duty as a good friend to be excited and supportive and, and sort of there for her. I worried so much that my feedback had tarnished the moment when he got down on one knee and said, will you marry me? I mean, I worried that I popped into her head if, if for even a split second she was thinking, maybe I shouldn't do this because my friend doesn't believe in it. Like, I, I, I still to this day feel guilty if that was, if I popped into her head at all in that, in that beautiful moment.

• 14:51Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering if your own worries and concerns about bringing up the topic with her and the fact that she was so anxious about it and so focused on how you were feeling about it, is it possible that that kept you from seeing the cues that might have actually told you something different about the situation?

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely. In searching in her eyes that became misty during that conversation, I saw someone who was listening to me and engaging with me so receptively on this difficult topic. I didn't see, oh, gosh, she's struggling. She's struggling to share with me this reality that they are getting engaged imminently. And I think I was too focused on my own perspective and working up the sort of courage to deliver this feedback and not focused enough on how she was receiving it.

• 15:52Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, why conversations are much more complex than most of us realize, and how to get better at them. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 16:20Shankar Vedantam?

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• 16:51Shankar Vedantam?

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• 17:36Shankar Vedantam?

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• 17:47Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Most of us engage in conversation all day, every day, with partners, children, friends, coworkers, neighbors. Yet, despite all this constant practice, we're not as skilled at talking to others as we might expect. We miss cues, misunderstand what others are saying, and get stymied by moments of awkwardness or tension. At Harvard Business School, Alison Woodbrook studies the science of conversation, what makes talking with one person a joy and talking with another person a chore or a bore. Alison, when you start to dissect a conversation like a scientist, you realize that it's more complicated than we realize.

• 18:31Shankar Vedantam?

  You call it a complex coordination game with trapdoors and challenges hidden inside a maze of decisions. What do you mean by this?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Oh, it is such a complicated coordination game. We are making hundreds of micro decisions at every moment of every conversation. And we have to coordinate those micro decisions about what we say and how we say it with another human mind. And then, when we're in a group with many other human minds, who are all making their own micro decisions at every moment of every conversation. So when you start to sort of study the science of it and look at these micro moments and these micro decisions, you also realize that it's a miracle that human beings have figured out how to talk at all, really.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  To coordinate their turn-taking, to speak and listen, to share understanding through their words and their gestures is miraculous.

• 19:41Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, in certain moments, I suppose it's possible to communicate to the other person, you know, "I think the conversation's going off the rails. I'm feeling sad. Can we talk about something else? You know, you shouldn't be telling me to break up with my boyfriend. In fact, I'm about to get married to him." But in many situations, that's inappropriate to do. So talk about this added complexity. It's not just that we have these, you know, huge complexity of different things that are happening, but we can't actually openly talk about them.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  That's right. We cannot possibly communicate about all of these micro decisions. We cannot be... The irony of it is that even while we're talking to each other, we can't actually communicate directly about all of these things. Not only for feasibility concerns, we don't have enough time to communicate about all these decisions, but also we have this expectation of sort of naturalness.

• 20:30Shankar Vedantam?

  Yes.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  A good conversation needs to feel like you've alighted on delightful topics without talking about it, that you understand each other's minds without communicating directly about it. That's sort of where the magic lives. And too much direct communication can quickly undermine that magic.

• 20:56Shankar Vedantam?

  You say one reason people may be less skillful than they could be at conversation is that they rarely get feedback on their conversational missteps and bad habits. I'm thinking back to your blind date. You know, I imagine this man had gone on other dates before he went on a date with you, and other women may have felt exactly the same way that you did, but no one told him.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  That's right. In many ways, he finally met the right woman to give him feedback that would be so valuable for him, but in other ways, some would say that he went on a date with the wrong woman, messed with the wrong girl. That's right. It's so rare to get certainly direct feedback about, you know, "Oh, that joke was really funny," or "I really loved when you gave me that compliment," or "Hey, you've asked me 16 questions so far. Good for you."

• 21:43Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Or "Hey, that thing that you said, I didn't quite understand it," or "Hey, when you said this, it really hurt my feelings." We just don't have time to communicate in that way and give live feedback like that. And it just goes against all of the norms of human-to-human communication.

• 21:59Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm wondering if the problem is actually compounded when it comes to our acquaintances. You know, when we have a close friend, or a relative, or a partner, you know, maybe we do sit down and have a conversation with them about something that's bothering us. But I can think of many acquaintances, you know, who say and do things that rub other people the wrong way, that rub me the wrong way. I never say anything, nobody else says anything, and the person goes through life blithely believing that everything they're saying and doing is fine. And of course, you know, I suppose it would be inappropriate for us to go up to every acquaintance and say, "Can I give you feedback on the way you're talking to people?" That would seem very odd. But at the same time, it means that most of us are left in the dark about how we are behaving.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. And I think every once in a while, you encounter someone who is courageous enough and kind enough to actually tell you that, "Hey, I really admired when you did this thing," or "It really hurt me when you did this." But it takes such an incredible array of sort of stars to align, and a very skilled person to be able to deliver feedback in a way that doesn't feel overly personal, overly threatening. It also requires a really sturdy relationship. You have to really trust each other in order to be able to say something so vulnerable to someone.

• 23:19Shankar Vedantam?

  Let's look at some of the trap doors that undermine conversation. One is that we get stuck in a kind of purgatory of small talk. You entered one such conversational doom loop on a recent Halloween. Tell me what happened, Alison.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Yes, even a professor of conversation is not immune from the perils of small talk. About once a week, I would say, I have a conversation where I think, wow, I really messed up small talk there. This conversation, we were taking our three children out trick or treating. It was an unseasonably warm night. It was beautiful. We have a wonderful, flat neighborhood where we walk around and the kids trick or treat and get candy. And we joined up with a number of other families to go together. And we knew most of the other families, but there were two families we had not met before. So at some point, as we're walking around on this beautiful night, watching our adorable kids pick up enormous candy bars,

• 24:19Speaker 01

  I strike up of a conversation with one of the neighbors, one of these family members that I didn't know before. And it was a man from Ohio. I overheard him saying that he was from Ohio. And so as the two of us became isolated, I quickly started asking questions about Ohio. Where are you from in Ohio? Did you go to Ohio State? Oh, I've been to German Village. It's such a quaint part of Columbus. So I'm using all of my Ohio knowledge to kind of find a way into this conversation. My husband's from Michigan, so I start talking about Big Ten football or the rivalry between Ohio State and Michigan. And I'm really going for it.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  But really, no matter what I say about Ohio, it doesn't seem like we can find a way out of it. We're sort of stuck.

• 25:12Shankar Vedantam?

  You're trapped in Ohio.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  We're trapped in Ohio. He's not really giving me a lot in response to my questions. And I chalked it up to a sort of small talk failure. And I said, you know what? I think I'm going to try again with this guy later in the night.

• 25:36Shankar Vedantam?

  So in some ways, what I'm hearing, Alison, is that this guy might have been a milder version of the blind date you went on, you know, many years earlier. He also was not very curious about what was going on in your life. He also was someone who was not asking you many questions. I understand that the value that you place on question asking stems from a backstory involving your mom.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely. My mom is an amazing sort of intuitive psychologist. And when I was young, probably starting in late middle school, but definitely high school, we would drive home from social engagements and she would often ask us, hey, did you talk to anybody who was a really good question asker? And I'm grateful to my mom for that. It made me sort of pique my interest in interpersonal dynamics.

• 26:28Shankar Vedantam?

  You've gotten to know a professional matchmaker named Rachel Greenwald, and she has a great term for people who lack conversational curiosity. Tell me about her, Alison.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Yes, Rachel Greenwald, I think she's amazing. She's sort of the grand poobah of professional matchmakers. She started out her career as a matchmaker and then she had so much success that she started training other matchmakers.

• 26:51Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  To do this job. And she said to me, we have a phrase for people who don't ask questions. When you think of people who ask zero questions, especially on a date, we call them ZQs, zero questioners. And there's this quote, she says, you know, they say curiosity killed the cat, but on a date, curiosity does not kill the date. In fact, the ZQ kills the date.

• 27:19Shankar Vedantam?

  So you have IQ, you have EQ, and now you have ZQ.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 27:30Shankar Vedantam?

  So there's a more insidious form of the same problem. And here, the person does ask questions, but the questions do not stem from curiosity about the other person. You call this boomer asking. What is boomer asking, Allison?

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Boomer asking is not people over 50 who ask questions. It is. It is. It's named after the arc of a boomerang. And so imagine you're throwing a boomerang, and the boomerang has this arc that goes out and then comes around and comes right back to you. And the structure of boomer asking is you ask a question to your partner. You let them answer the question, but then you bring the focus of the conversation right back to yourself. So it would be as if I said to you, Shankar, how was your weekend?

• 28:19Shankar Vedantam?

  And I say, oh, the weekend was fun. You know, we went to a nice restaurant and went for a walk in the park.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I actually went skydiving with Harry Styles, and it was terrific.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  So you let your partner answer, but then you almost ignore what they share with you, and you bring the focus right back to yourself. It makes your partner feel like you weren't interested in their answer in the first place. You were just asking as a way to set up your own disclosure. It's a sort of thinly veiled way to hide your own selfishness, your own egocentrism.

• 29:04Shankar Vedantam?

  There's another trapdoor in conversations that might be familiar to many people. I want to play you a clip from the 1993 movie Wayne's World 2, where Wayne and Garth are being interviewed by a radio host about a big concert they are excited about.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  All right, our special guests right now, Wayne Campbell, Garth Elgar. Wayne's World, Wayne's World. All right. Talking about Wayne's stock. Very exciting, big event. Everybody's excited, huh?

• 29:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's gonna be a big concert at Adley Stevenson Park.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  It's just gonna be a big party, you know? We've got some great bands coming.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  Like Aerosmith?

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  I just want to remind everybody that there's still plenty of tickets left.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 29:40Speaker 04

  But that's no reason to wait till the last minute.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  Because it's just a chance for the city of Aurora

• 29:47Speaker 04

  to do something.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 29:51Speaker 03

  Fun.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  And to put the city on the map.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 29:55Speaker 04

  It's a lot of work.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Oh, well, work is hard.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  You're not really listening to me, are you?

• 30:02Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  I mean, I could say anything right now, like you're a complete tool.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 30:06Speaker 04

  But you wouldn't hear it.

• 30:08Shankar Vedantam?

  So, Alison, how often is it that people in conversation fail to listen to one another?

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Oh, Shankar, this happens all the time. I think the reason this clip is so funny to us is because it's so relatable. We have done research recently to show that people's minds are wandering 24% of the time during conversation.

• 30:29Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  And this was based on their own self-reports. So, we interrupted them every five minutes in a conversation and asked them, were you listening attentively to your partner or was your mind wandering? And 24% of the time, they say, actually, my mind was wandering. I wasn't listening to my partner. We suspect this is an underestimate because people know that it's sort of embarrassing to not be listening to their partner. You see this happen during video calls or like on Zoom. People are smiling and nodding at the camera even while they're like to the side texting their friend or making a grocery list. Because there are these norms of politeness, right? We know that we should make our partners feel like we're listening to them.

• 31:19Shankar Vedantam?

  For most of us, talking doesn't seem hard. We open our mouths and words come out. But as we go through life, it is usually the case that the people around us are not telling us when they find us boring or irritating or just plain offensive.

• 31:35Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how to make our conversations more engaging. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 31:58Shankar Vedantam?

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• 32:43Shankar Vedantam?

  Based on the rules you set up, of course. Blocking bad actors, welcoming good customers. Keeping more of your revenue, your revenue. Learn more about fighting fraud with Stripe at stripe.com/radar. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. The brain isn't fixed, it's flexible. That means we're always capable of transformation. A master's degree from SNHU can help you build the skills to become whoever you want: a leader, career changer, dream chaser. With no set class times and low online tuition, SNHU makes grad school possible. Because it's never too late to learn something new.

• 33:25Shankar Vedantam?

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• 34:06Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 34:10Shankar Vedantam?

  I have a vivid memory of a great conversation right before the COVID pandemic struck. I was sitting in a New Orleans restaurant with four researchers who were in town to attend a psychology conference. The conversation felt like a rapid-fire game of ping-pong. It felt effortless. It was glorious.

• 34:29Shankar Vedantam?

  At Harvard Business School, Alison Woodbrook studies how we can all have many more memorable conversations. She's the author of Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. Alison, I have a strong belief that authentic conversations must just emerge naturally, and I suspect many listeners have the same belief. You say this is a mistake.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  That's right. We often talk about this idea of the myth of naturalness. So many of my students and so many people believe that good conversationalists are born, that they are extroverted and gregarious and charismatic, and that's just how they are. It's their personality. But so much of the work that I've done over the last 15 years suggests that many, many things about conversation are very learnable, even for the most introverted, shy, awkward people who really think that they weren't born charismatic. These things can be learned as well. And one of the most valuable things that we've learned in our research and in my class is this idea of topic preparation.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Topic preparation is literally just thinking about what are possible things that we could talk about before the conversation begins. It's not complex. And many people find this idea of preparing for a conversation, especially for people that we're close to outside of work, to be very aversive. You sort of have this instinct that I shouldn't need to prepare for a conversation with someone that I'm close to. We'll get together, and I'll know exactly what to talk about, or we'll have many things to talk about. And many of my students feel this way, too. They're sort of like, why are you making me prepare for a casual conversation?

• 36:12Shankar Vedantam?

  And in some ways, we do this, to some extent, in work settings, right? So we can have a meeting, for example, and there's an agenda that's circulated before the meeting, saying, here's what we're going to talk about. But that seems OK in work settings in ways that it seems difficult to do in personal settings.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's slightly more normative, more common in work settings, where it's more common to have an agenda ahead of time, or at least somebody has thought about it. Although, you might be surprised by how rare it is, even in work settings. I was working with Google a few years ago, who had this huge campaign within Google. And the only goal was to get people to think ahead about their meetings, even a little bit. Like, they had such a problem with people just showing up and not thinking ahead, that they started this huge campaign. So even at work, I think there is sort of a resistance to topic prep, or at least a lack of making time to think ahead about our conversations.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  And certainly, in casual conversations, people feel like they don't need to, and so they don't.

• 37:19Shankar Vedantam?

  So you have found that topic preparation can be helpful, even when we're talking with someone who is close to us. You recently met up with a very good friend of yours, and she had an unusual proposition for you that involved the singer Whitney Houston?

• 37:34Speaker 01

  That's right. This story is surprisingly sort of tender and important to me. It is a friend that I'd spent many years singing in a band with. She's this talented, wonderful friend. And we had both started having children. And after she had her first child, she became sick. And it was devastating. And meanwhile, I had my own baby, so I wasn't even available to go and visit her very often.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  And so, this conversation when we got together felt so momentous. It felt like we needed to catch up on so many things about this incredibly difficult period of her life. And brilliant woman that she is, not only had she prepared topics and really thought carefully about all the things we needed to catch up on together in our limited time together, but she had given each topic a Whitney Houston song title. She's, and I, it really, it almost makes me cry thinking of it. It was so thoughtful and so fun in such sort of dire circumstances. And so she had prepped topics like Whitney Houston's song, Higher Love.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  She said, "When was the last time you took your baby on an airplane and how terrible was it?" Or the Whitney Houston song, Run to You. I think it's Run to You, Run to Me? And she said, you know, "Are you still running, right? Like, what's your running regimen these days?" Yeah. And so she had just, it was just so thoughtful and so like her to make, to prep topics at all and to show me that she was thinking about us even when we were apart. And then to bump it up even another notch and give them these Whitney Houston song titles.

• 39:29Shankar Vedantam?

  And I'm wondering, were you singing along when, when each topic changed and each new song had to be played or came up?

• 39:37Speaker 01

  We did play some of the songs and she is the most miraculous, beautiful singer. Due to her sickness, she wasn't able to sing, but I do have an incredible video that I will save and cherish forever where she's lip syncing along with this Whitney Houston song. And it's just divine. One of the greatest moments of my life.

• 40:11Shankar Vedantam?

  So no matter how well we've planned and chosen our topic, eventually, you know, conversation subjects can run out of juice. Your research has found that switching topics frequently can make for better conversation.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we ran these studies and we wanted to find out what's better. Should we stay on one topic and try and get very deep? Or is it better to switch topics frequently? The best conversationalists do switch topics more frequently. But as soon as they land on a new topic, they get deep on it quite quickly by asking a lot of questions. And so they're actually doing both. It's not a trade off between depth and breadth. It's like you should be aiming to do both. And you should be keeping your hand on the sort of temperature gauge of the conversation. As soon as a topic seems like it's running out of juice, you should be unafraid and confident and switch to something else to keep the conversation fun and interesting and fizzing along.

• 41:11Shankar Vedantam?

  And what if you feel like the conversation is fizzling out, but you're worried that maybe other people find the conversation really interesting? And so you're hesitant to jump in and change the topic?

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is a very common feeling. We worry about being rude. I think politeness is a major reason that we sort of hesitate and hold back on switching topics. Our fears of being rude, what we find in our research, are overblown. One of the beautiful things about conversation is that you can always come back to the topic. You can come back to the topic later in the conversation. You can come back to it later in your relationship in a different conversation. The bigger risk is staying too long and stagnating.

• 42:00Shankar Vedantam?

  So you've created a tool called the Topic Pyramid to help people map out where they are in conversations and where to take conversations. What is the Topic Pyramid, Alison?

• 42:12Speaker 01

  The Topic Pyramid is a tool that I realized that my students needed so badly, and I think everyone needs so badly. There are three levels to the pyramid.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  At the base of the pyramid, this is where small talk lives. These are topics that you could talk about with anyone. So how is the, what about this weather? How was your weekend? What are you excited about? You know, what's going on at the weekend coming up? Those sort of well-trodden, well-known small talk topics. It's totally okay to be at the bottom of the pyramid. In fact, many conversations have to start there. It's this well-trodden ground, especially with strangers or with people you haven't seen in a long time. You have to start there. That's part of the norm of conversation. The mistake is staying at the base of the pyramid too long and letting it stagnate and become dull. And that's when these alarm bells go off in your mind

• 43:08Speaker 01

  where you say, oh my, we gotta get out of this. We gotta get to something more meaningful. So the second tier of the pyramid is what we call medium talk or tailored talk, where you're moving towards a topic that is more interesting, more personal, and closer maybe to what your partner has in terms of interests and expertise. So it's becoming more personalized. The third, the top tier of the pyramid, is deep talk. Deep talk is what friends and family members and work besties, this is what we're all hungry for, the type of conversation to have with people we're very close to.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  It's a sort of unique place of shared reality where maybe only the two of you could be talking about this topic in this, in this way. And so not every conversation needs to get to the peak. That's not always the goal. When your neighbor's just taking out their trash, you don't need to get to the peak of the pyramid necessarily. The key here is fostering a little bit more of an awareness of where you are in the pyramid and making sure that you don't get stuck at the base of the pyramid for too long.

• 44:23Shankar Vedantam?

  We talked about the importance of asking questions. One of the things that you and others have found is the importance of asking open-ended questions. Describe what these questions are, Allison, and why they have such a powerful effect in conversations.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  That's right. Our work suggests that asking more questions is like the sort of baseline best thing that you can do in your life to get better at question-asking, just ask more. But there's a lot of nuance in the types of questions that are better and worse in certain circumstances. So, open-ended questions, invite your partner to share, right? These are questions are like, what's on your mind? Or what was your morning like? What are you excited about lately? These questions that are born of curiosity that invite your partner to share their perspective with you. Whereas closed-ended questions, as many of us know, usually have a very distinct answer.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  So, do you like how this conversation is going? Did you sleep well last night? These sort of yes/no questions are very closed. And so, in our research, what we found is open-ended questions are so powerful because your partner answers in more than twice the word count compared to closed-ended questions. This is powerful in any conversation, but particularly in conflictual conversations or when you're negotiating and where learning information about your counterpart is so pivotal. Asking an open-ended question like, what do you care about? Or what's important to you here? You're going to learn so much more information about their perspective and their needs

• 46:01Speaker 01

  and their motives and their positions than, will you accept this offer?

• 46:05Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, you've actually studied negotiations. And of course, negotiations in some ways are one particular form of conversation. And you find that negotiators, in fact, do not ask enough open-ended questions?

• 46:24Speaker 01

  That's right. When we studied question-asking among negotiators, what we found is that only 9% of turns across hundreds of conversations included open-ended questions. And this is a huge mistake. Open-ended questions are the most direct pathway to extract information from your counterpart because they're going to answer you in a much more open-ended way.

• 46:49Shankar Vedantam?

  You've also found that it's very powerful to ask follow-up questions. Why is this a good idea, Alice? And besides the fact that it's just more questions, asking a follow-up question that's connected to a previous question and answer, why is that so powerful?

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Follow-up questions are superheroes. They are amazing. When we studied 1,100 speed dates, so people going on these four-minute speed dates, what we found is that people who asked more questions were more likely to get second dates, so their partners were more likely to say yes to them. So much so that if you ask just one more question on each of your 20 dates, you would convert one more of your dates into a yes.

• 47:31Shankar Vedantam?

  Wow.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  One question on each date. And what we found when we dove into the actual language that people were using and the types of questions people were asking, we realized that this effect was driven almost entirely by follow-up questions. So follow-up questions, follow-up on anything that your partner has said previously. The reason they're so powerful is because they're an undeniable indicator that you have listened to your partner, right? You ask them a question, you let them answer, and you heard their answer, and you want to know more. So people who study intimate and close relationships call this responsiveness. So follow-up questions show that you are being responsive to your partner and that you're curious to know more.

• 48:23Shankar Vedantam?

  I want to play you a bit of tape featuring two people having a conversation. This is the late-night host Stephen Colbert and the news anchor Anderson Cooper. Both these men, of course, are gifted communicators, but both also experienced the loss of people close to them, and they're talking here about the nature of grief.

• 48:41Speaker 05

  I think when you meet someone who's had a loss, you have two options. One is to say, "I'm sorry for your loss," which is a perfectly lovely thing to do, but if you can share your experience, then they're not alone.

• 48:56Speaker 06

  Well, it's always interesting to me how when you, you know, I bring it up, meeting somebody for the first time, and they say, "Oh, I'm sorry to bring it up," you know, and as if, what they don't realize is...

• 49:08Speaker 05

  It's as if you want to forget the person who died.

• 49:09Speaker 06

  I'm thinking about it all the time.

• 49:11Speaker 05

  Constantly.

• 49:12Speaker 06

  I mean, it is, as you said...

• 49:13Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 49:14Speaker 06

  It is, you know, it's one of my arms. I mean, it is an extension of who I am.

• 49:17Speaker 05

  And, you know, quite possibly...

• 49:18Speaker 06

  For the rest of your life. Oh, without a doubt.

• 49:20Shankar Vedantam?

  Alison, what do you hear when you listen to this conversation?

• 49:23Speaker 01

  This is a beautiful conversation. You can hear their mutual engagement. And Anderson Cooper is sharing a story about his own loss, his own grief. But it feels like Stephen Colbert is helping him tell this story. And it's a phenomenon that psychologists call co-narration, where someone is listening so intently and they're working in tandem in the conversation so well that they're finishing each other's sentences. It's like your conversation partner is helping you deliver the story. They're co-narrating the story with you.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  And it's a signal of excellent, involved, attentive listening and trust and relationship closeness. And it's wonderful to listen to.

• 50:15Shankar Vedantam?

  I mean, you could also see, of course, that they are talking over each other. And many of us, I think, were raised to believe that it's rude to interrupt another person. But in some ways, as I listen to this, I'm not hearing rudeness at all. I am hearing, as you say, co-creation of the story that Anderson Cooper is telling Stephen Colbert.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  It's very important to think about interruptions in two different ways. The first way is on-topic interruption. Here we hear Colbert and Cooper. They are very much in the midst of a deep and meaningful topic, and they are not going anywhere. Stephen Colbert is not trying to change the subject. In fact, he is going deeper and deeper with Anderson on this topic. So it's really, they're finishing each other's sentences, but they're also on-topic interruptions, as opposed to the type of interruptions that nobody likes, which are off-topic interruptions. It's that you're switching, you're sort of ignoring what someone is saying, and you're switching to something completely new. And that feels so abrupt, so rude, and often sort of hurtful and annoying.

• 51:29Shankar Vedantam?

  There is another conversational move that can bring us closer to others. And you saw this when you and a friend went to a party hosted by another friend named Dave. Can you tell me that story, Allison?

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Yes, this was back in college. This character, we'll call Dave, was well-known for being very charming. And a girlfriend and I went to this party and Dave was greeting everyone at the door. And we walk into the party and Dave turns to me and he says, Allison, you're so beautiful. So you look so beautiful tonight, so beautiful. Welcome, come on in, come on in. And then he turns to my girlfriend and says, oh, Claire, you look so beautiful, so beautiful tonight, unbelievable. And we sort of, we say, thank you, Dave, thank you so much. And we walk off into the party.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  And as more people are arriving at the door, you hear him going through this sort of flattery shtick over and over. Every person that comes in, oh, you're so beautiful. It's not even, it's not even constrained to just the women, right? To the men, oh, you look so handsome, you look so great tonight. To all, everyone who walks through is getting this, the Dave flattery treatment. And it was a real epiphany moment for me. You know, I had known him a long time. I knew that he was sort of smarmy. I had this shtick. And at the same time, I reflected and I realized, you know what, though? It really did make me feel a lot better. It made me feel welcome at this party. It made me feel confident as I went into the party with my, with my friend.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  And the most amazing thing, later that night, the, the friend that I had walked to the party with, I saw her kissing Dave later in the night. And it seemed like his, his sort of flattery, however insincere it obviously was, had worked its magic on my, on my very smart friend.

• 53:28Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah. And of course, one of the powerful things about flattery is that the person being flattered doesn't see it as flattery. They see it as, finally, the world is acknowledging what I have long known to be true.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  Thank you for acknowledging how great I look tonight. That's how it feels. Like, thank you so much for noticing, yes.

• 53:56Shankar 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.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  It's been so fun. Thank you.

• 54:14Shankar Vedantam?

  Next week on the program, we bring Allison back to discuss a very specific type of conversation. These are the conversations we dread having, the ones we put off, the ones that often end in tears and hurt feelings.

• 54:28Shankar Vedantam?

  If there's a difficult conversation you know you need to have with someone, you'll want to listen to this episode first.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 54:51Shankar 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."

• 55:16Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Powell, Kristen Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 55:35Shankar Vedantam?

  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.hiddenbrain.org. That's N-E-W-S.hiddenbrain.org.

• 55:58Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

• 56:18Speaker 07

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• 57:02Speaker 07

  or color changes in fingers and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-NURTEC, or visit Nurtec.com. All right, back to your podcast, playlist, or whatever's keeping you going today.

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