The Science Of Analysing Conversations - Elizabeth Stokoe

Elizabeth Stokoe is a Professor of Social Interaction at Loughborough University studying conversation analysis. The discussions we have usually seem to flow seamlessly. That's until you transcribe and scientifically analyse them to show up all the pauses, filler words, mistakes, stutters and half-finished sentences. Then, the fact that we can communicate at all seems to become a miracle. Expect to learn what not to say on a first date, why the word 'like' has taken such a hold over people's mouths, just how big of an impact language has on our behaviour, why the words that people say often are the most important contributor when determining of our opinion of them, what Elizabeth learned from hostage negotiations, whether our use of technology and smart speakers is changing our language and much more... Sponsors: Get 15% discount on the amazing 6 Minute Diary at https://bit.ly/diarywisdom (use code MW15) (USA - https://amzn.to/3b2fQbR and use 15MINUTES) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 2 weeks free access to Wondrium by going to https://www.wondrium.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Elizabeth's website - https://twitter.com/LizStokoe Follow Elizabeth on Twitter - https://twitter.com/LizStokoe Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #conversationanalysis #communication #psychology - 00:00 Intro 00:23 Why You Shouldn’t Ask People How They Are 06:46 How Humans Are Led by Language 12:13 Judging Someone Based on Conversation 19:41 Insights on Silence in Conversation 30:09 Uhm’s, Ah’s & ‘Like’ 38:14 Importance of Non-Verbal Communication 46:19 First Date Do’s & Don’ts 53:57 Studying Hostage Negotiations 1:09:25 Reverse-Engineering Normal Responses 1:15:44 Where to Find Elizabeth - Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Ums and ours are quite often thought of as errors that you want to get rid of. They're very commonly littered through our talk and it's quite difficult to totally erase them. But what they're doing is quite specific things. So sometimes they're doing, I'm thinking, I'm searching for a word. Sometimes they are showing difficulty in putting this thing together. They're showing an orientation to delicacy. They're doing lots of different things in talk.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  What's your problem with asking people, how are you?

• 0:29Speaker 00

  I have a problem with people, how they are. But it is a very interesting thing to examine as it unfolds in real conversations in real time in different settings.

• 0:39Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Hmm, so hi, how are you, fine, how are you is a really common way in which conversations start. It's a kind of no problem, very mundane, routine way in which conversations typically start between people who know each other fairly well.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  And those how are yous can sound like they're just filler talk, that they're not really doing anything very much, that people kind of lie in response. They say, fine, how are you, not, not, you know, my life is horrendous. They don't do it at that point in the conversation. And so the fact is, when you see loads of those conversations starting in that way, it can just look like nothing special is happening. But when, once you start to contrast those with other kinds of conversations and the very start of them, you can start to see that that apparently pointless filler talk is actually telling you a lot about the kind of interaction this is, that's about to happen. So for example, how do you convey, I'm in a rush, something's an emergency. You stop people doing those how are yous and you say immediately, oh, did, I just need to check, did you leave the oven on?

• 1:39Speaker 00

  I've got some nice examples where people immediately start a conversation, not with hi, how are you, but Chris, Liz, what, what's the deal? And you can immediately see, hey, there's no how are yous, they're about to have a huge argument. And then I've got an amazing example where a woman calls nine nine nine.

• 1:58Speaker 00

  And in order to convey to the dispatcher, somehow, my life is in danger.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  But I need you to hear that I'm talking to, I need the person who might be actually threatening my life in the house to sort of hear, oh, they're talking to a friend. Then you do those, you do those how are yous and you hope that the person on the other end of the phone kind of catches on, which they do pretty quickly to, oh, this person is pretending to have a conversation with a friend by doing that thing that always happens at the start of a call, which is quite amazing to see.

• 2:29Chris Williamson?

  Most calls that go to nine nine nine are not somebody asking how are you and taking their time with stuff.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah, so I've got some amazing data in which people are phoning up, having to convey to the person that they're talking to, I'm in danger, but they can't use those words because the person or the situation that they are in danger from is there as well. So how does that happen without using any of the words? People say things like, I'd like to order a pizza for delivery. How does the call taker hear that as a genuine request for help, especially since actually one of the tasks that the police call takers have to do is figure out from all of the potential nuisance calls that they actually do get that do sound a bit like that, how do you figure that out? But they can figure it out pretty quickly.

• 3:18Chris Williamson?

  What is a better question to ask somebody than hi, how are you?

• 3:24Speaker 00

  It depends what you want to do. So it's not that it's a bad question, it's just that if it's there at the start of a conversation, then probably it means that there's nothing urgent, nothing pressing, nothing, no conflict about to happen. It can also be exploited by people. So I've also studied cold call sales where you can see people saying things like, hi, how are you? And because generally we can recognize someone's voice when they do that kind of thing. If you don't recognize the voice, you're immediately on your guard because you're like, I don't recognize the voice even from the start of this conversation. And so then what happens is that you don't get fine, how are you? You might get fine and then nothing.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  And if a salesperson's any good, they're hearing, oh, this person doesn't want to do small talk with me and they just cut to the chase. Whereas I've got some really cringe-worthy calls where people still say, oh, and how's the weather? And you're like, this person's going, uh, listen to me, I don't really want to have this conversation with you. So the how, the presence or not of how are you's are just very interesting at the start. Right from the opening, sort of few seconds of a conversation, you can tell a lot.

• 4:30Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever looked at those pre-recorded sales calls where it's, hi, how are you? Silence? Yes, is duh, duh, duh, duh, duh in today? And that sort of, they've obviously tried to create a single-sided conversation with sufficient breaks in between as to hook someone in. I can't believe that that's ever worked.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  I can't believe it either because people are really quick at figuring out that this isn't a a human voice at the right pace, at the right pitch, even voices that are, you know, generated through some kind of algorithm or that, or they're just, or actors are used to kind of put into some kind of chatbot. You can tell pretty quickly. I don't know if there's, there's a really nice case called Lenny the Chat, Lenny the Chatbot. And Lenny the Chatbot was developed by somebody who basically wanted to stop or just trap cold callers to his home on a loop of their own kind of making. So, so someone would phone the house and Lenny the Chatbot would answer.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  And Lenny the Chatbot didn't have any kind of algorithms or anything. It was just something like 16 phrases pre-recorded and then shuffled. And it sounded like the voice of an elderly Australian man. And so the person, the cold caller, did think that they were talking to an elderly Australian man. And they tried to make sense of what this guy was saying to them. And so, you know, how long could Lenny the Chatbot keep someone in a conversation? So that was, that was very nice. And people can go and there's endless recordings on YouTube. You can go and see how Lenny manages to keep people on, on the line. And people are trying to get out, but they're like, oh, I can't really leave him now because he's, he sounds just like this old gentleman and. Yeah.

• 6:09Chris Williamson?

  It seems like there's a particular satisfaction on the internet for watching scammers. Not saying that cold calling is the same as scamming, but some people put it into a similar bucket. There's entire YouTube channels dedicated to really sophisticated computer white hat hackers that reverse the scammer cold calls and they tell them stuff like, I know the address of the building that they're calling from, where they are, and they sometimes do other stuff to them, play around with their computer. So that's, it doesn't surprise me that Lenny the chatbot is, he's like the nerfed version. He's like the kiddies version of that. So given the fact that you do conversational analysis for a living, just how much are humans pushed and pulled around by language?

• 6:56Speaker 00

  A lot, which makes it sound bad in a way, like we're kind of manipulating each other all the time, but everything gets done really through interaction, even if we're not just talking about words, we're talking about gestures and gaze and all the embodied things that go along with with words. And it's the thing that kind of drives everything. We, we ask, we invite, we offer, we get help, we do a lot of things in everyday social life and our workplace lives through social interaction. And without being aware sometimes, and but also of course, sometimes really being aware, if you have that bristle, bristly feeling that someone's doing something that you're

• 7:40Speaker 00

  finding difficult, but you can't pin it down, sometimes they're the kinds of things that for me as a conversation analyst, I can transcribe and try to unpack what it feels like when you're really pushing for service, when you like, for example, I've studied people calling their GP receptions. And what does it feel like when you, when somehow you're not being offered things that is probably the person's job to offer you that thing? What does, and if, because we all feel that sense of like, God, I feel like a burden. I feel like I'm really pushing you to, to, to give me some service and you can sort of start to unpack that. So a really nice example is going into a cafe, getting your coffee or your tea and saying, do you have wifi? Yes, we do.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  So it can customers use it? Yes, they can. This is this is real. This is a field note sort of scribbled down hastily after going into a cafe.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  And then eventually the cafe, very sort of, you know, cool cafe staff owner just sort of points at the code which is painted in this very arty hipster way, right? It's like 12 foot high on the wall and you get the code. And so you really feel like, God, I really had to drag that out of you as though somehow you didn't understand that you have wifi wasn't a request for the code as well as it's not just a yes no question. Whereas, you know, the the much nicer experience, which is also real, also scribbled down as a field note was going into cafe, as your tea comes across the desk, the cafe staff member says, oh, by the way, if you need the wifi, here's the code. And what's so nice about that is you feel really great about that person, the cafe, and it didn't

• 9:15Speaker 00

  involve things like, hey, what's your name? It didn't involve all of those more scripted sounding things that seem to have found their way into some types of service encounter. It's actually about, maybe you need this thing, and here it is, you don't even have to ask for it.

• 9:31Chris Williamson?

  It's cutting off at the knees as well, the amount of back and forth that's needed between the person that's serving, presuming that they need to be efficient and not waste their time having a five minute conversation about the wifi code, just presuming that, look, if you need the code, it's up on, it's 12 feet on the wall painted on a piece of driftwood or whatever. And that that helps. Yeah. Another thing as well, I've noticed, it seems like brevity, or at least appreciating people's time, especially in the modern world, because everyone's so distracted by their devices that there are time to actually do the things that they need to do now has become completely condensed down. I think that just trying to do things in the minimum amount of time, for instance, if if you're

• 10:14Chris Williamson?

  doing outreach to people, my advice has always been that the message should be readable within the space of about 20 seconds, especially if the person that you're trying to reach out to is someone that's of high repute, right? Like, they are very, very busy. And if you send them a huge essay that they've got to go through, I think that your chances tend to decrease. And that's kind of the same for, even my mum, my mum's a perfectly pleasant person, but she doesn't want to spend forever talking to the checkout cashier at the local shop.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I think the cafe example that I just gave is a nice example of how quickly you can make someone feel a bit warm towards you whilst getting needs, potential needs met, but it's very, very short and very, very efficient. I've also done some work when people are phoning the vet. So this is a nice example of actually listening for what people want in this moment as well and whether or not you're able to do that. So case one, someone phones up and says, how much does it cost to get injections done for my new puppy? And the vet receptionist, trying to build rapport or I don't know, you know, just sound lovely on the phone is like, oh, what's your puppy called? And there's this

• 11:22Speaker 00

  little delay. And in my world, delays of like naught point seven seconds is quite large. And you might get Victor. Now that's someone who doesn't want to have a long conversation about the new puppy. But, but the call taker isn't really, she's just going for it. And you're like, oh, and is it your first puppy? Yeah. Like you should be able to hear by now, they just want the price. And in fact, in this particular call, it's almost like the sort of Star Wars credit that this, this sales, well, it's not even a salesperson, the receptionist goes on and on and on, what we can do for you is, and, and in the end, it's, you know, it's going nowhere. Whereas actually, you know, maybe at that point where you say, oh, what's your puppy called? And the person's like, oh, well, you know, we, some people are dying to talk about their new puppy. So can you be nimble enough and

• 12:06Speaker 00

  listen enough to actually think, right, this is someone to do that with because they're dying to do it. This is someone who just wants the information.

• 12:12Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting thinking about the fact that people's words are one of the most direct insights that we have into their nature as a person. So yeah, actions are important or whatever, you know, like someone saying, I hope the funeral was good whilst not being there, isn't quite the same, but. Someone's words and the way that they put them across to you when we're talking about someone and saying that they're rude or abrupt or nice or kind or caring or whatever, that forms a massive amount of our interpretation of that person and their personality overall.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So I have this thing, it's not a serious thing, I should say, but I call it like the Conversation Analytic Personality Diagnostic, which is not a serious personality tool. But the point is that when you're in an interaction, a conversation with somebody, you don't sort of give them a questionnaire, check what kind of personality they are on some scale, if you believe in that kind of thing. And then on the basis of what they score, they're an extrovert, an introvert, whatever they are, you then take the next turn. You have to be much faster than that all the time. And so exactly that, you're kind of, on what basis would you say someone is rude, or they seem warm, or they were, it's basically what they do. And of course, a lot of what you do is what you say.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  So we do have this sense of, you know, you can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk? And actions speak louder than words. But in my world, again, you know, a lot of what we do is what we say, they're the same sorts of things. So what is being offensive? A lot of the time, it's not, you know, you don't do being offensive by punching somebody. I mean, that would be offensive, but you'd be offensive through your words. So what you do is basically what a lot of people are using almost all the time to decide what kind of person you are.

• 13:59Chris Williamson?

  I like that reversal of the age-old wisdom of it's not about what you say, it's about what you do. But yeah, you're right. For the most part, people aren't doing things, they're saying things. And if the broadest area under the curve is people just talking about stuff, making sure that you talk about things in an appropriate manner to get the kind of response that you're looking for and to have the sort of impact that you hope for is really, really important.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So how do you, for example, I've got this, one of my categories is the idea of the first mover. So parents can often be first movers, and by that, I just mean that they take a problematic first turn and then you can get trapped immediately in a conflict. So things like... Oh, I don't really like that jumper. It's like, wow, you know, if I said that to you, mum, dad, you'd be like, oh, I'm so offended, you know, and you and if you call them out on it, they're like, oh, I was just joking. So so, you know, people can be quite challenging in their opening gambits. And then somehow, if you call them out on it, you're the problem by being offended rather than the person actually being offensive in the first in the first instance.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Um. So again, you know, lots of examples of that in email as well. You know, people will write you an email that that somehow is you immediately feel annoyed, but you can't say anything because strangely enough, the sort of constraints around the way we interact with each other mean that it's actually quite hard to to just maybe be as direct back. You have to let a lot. We let a lot of things slide, don't we all, you know, because otherwise you'd you'd just be angry all the time.

• 15:28Chris Williamson?

  Is there something about that? Is there something about the convention that when somebody sort of is that first mover and maybe decides to take a left turn out of the conversation to say something that's a bit that's got a bit of snidey topspin?

• 15:39Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 15:41Chris Williamson?

  There is something that when you break the fourth wall and you go, hang on a second, that's that's a bit. That's a bit unfair, isn't it? And especially if you do it in a group and there's other people listening as well. It's like the record needle scratching and everyone's like, ah.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:55Chris Williamson?

  In a way that the first mover being a dick didn't. That's so strange.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, people's, you know, some people's entitlement to take that first turn on the basis that quite often people won't won't challenge them on it. Um, because it's difficult to, it's really difficult to. So everything from, um, so again, going back to the patients calling their doctors, those kinds of conversations, right? Sometimes at the end of those conversations, they they end in a very orderly way. So in that, hi, how are you? Fine. How are you? The ends of conversations. When somebody is calling up as a service user, the service provider provides a service and then the service user, it's up to the service user to kind of say, right, this is over. And they say, thanks, or thanks very much. And then the service provider will say, thanks, and then bye bye. So it goes, thanks, thanks, bye, bye.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  Really, really, really commonly. Now, in my lots of analysis of all of these patients calling their GPs, occasionally what will happen is that the the service provider, the receptionist, will have, you know, said something or other and said, yeah, your prescription will be here. And then they'll say, thanks. And they are trying to end the call, but it's not really their place to go first. And what happens very typically after that is then the patient has to sort of jump back into the conversation and say, oh, oh, oh, but so, so who am I seeing? So, so when? And so you've got the burden on the patient to get maybe the confirmation that they were after, but also push past the receptionist trying to end the call. And basically what you see in in those moments is just the, just the pain,

• 17:28Speaker 00

  the painfulness of withholding a thank you. So the next time you're unhappy on a telephone call, try not saying thank you at the end. Try, try to not say thank you first. And then if, when the receptionist or the service provider says thanks to end the call, try not saying thank you. You'll feel really horrible. So from, from, from that sense of like, it's very difficult to just not say thank you at the end of a call, all the way through to how do you, how do you be an ally? How do you speak up if someone is being sexist, racist, whatever the ism prejudice might be. And one of the, one of the interesting things, again, I've done a lot of work on what counts as an ism, which is different for different people. And then what do you do in response? And of course, people will say what they would say in response to somebody being racist in a room.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  But actually, there's a whole range of things that people do, and some of them are very tiny. So some of them are things like, if you're in a meeting and someone says something that is problematic in whatever way, you may not say anything in that room because you, you're not the chair, you've, you're, you're junior, you can't, it's difficult. But what you might do is actually just look at for a moment at someone, catch the eye of someone else in the room and know that they're seeing things in the same way that you are. So maybe you deal with it later. Um. So so all the way through to doing a direct challenge and then seeing that ripple effect into the interaction. Um. And actually, one of the one of the most effective things that you can do when somebody is being problematic in lots of different ways is to just wait. Because actually, people will quite often back off their own thing, or they'll they'll

• 18:56Speaker 00

  do what we call self-repair. They'll they'll sort of notice that people haven't immediately come back with it. Mm hmm. And they'll inspect their own thing and say, oh, but I didn't mean X, or of course, I didn't mean that other thing. So and then, again, you know, every every single time in conversation, you're deciding to say something or not say something, say something or not say something. And it's running past, you know, the conversation's running really quickly. So it's it's one of the things that is really, I think, useful for people. And I quite often use these sorts of materials in in workshops is actually see these sequences unfold, where someone said something, everyone in the room saying, oh, my God, I can't believe they said that. And this is what I would do. And then you see how it actually unfolds. And sometimes, there's quite a gap between what people imagine they would do, and what actually happens.

• 19:41Chris Williamson?

  What are the interesting insights that you've learned around silences and stuff in conversations? That's something that on the podcast, I had to get used to very early on, that there was a famous clip, actually, I'm not sure whether you saw it, but you'd be fascinated. You can go back and watch it. Elon Musk went on Lex Friedman's podcast about six months ago, and a clip went around the internet and did about a million plays. And it was a thirty one second pause after Lex asked a question and before Elon did. And after a while, it becomes comical. They're just sat in silence. But Elon, he's asked, how long is it going to be until we get to Mars? And Elon sits and thinks and thinks and thinks and thinks. But that ability to sit with silence is something that new podcasters

• 20:24Chris Williamson?

  really struggle with. And generally, people overall do. So why is silence so uncomfortable? And what are some of the interesting things that you've learned from studying silence in conversations?

• 20:35Speaker 00

  So my field of conversation analysis is right from the start is sort of been, you know, running for fifty years of, so the thousands and thousands and thousands of conversations in all settings you can imagine have been recorded, transcribed, and we use a very technical system to transcribe which will, you know, pinpoint exactly how long any silence, any gap or pause is. And turns those, hi, how are you, fine, how are you, you know, you're looking at about a hundred to two hundred milliseconds, so that's quite a pace of interaction. Um, one of the founders of the field um said that a silence of one point nought, you know, like a complete, a whole second is is starting to be quite a delay.

• 21:15Speaker 00

  And you can even see that when, uh, you you know, so as soon as you see a conversation where there's a two second delay or three second delay, they're quite big delays. Now, of course, depending on whether you are, you can see it, so though you're co-present or you're on the phone, or you're writing, which is different on on something like, you know, WhatsApp, but those silences can sometimes be clear about what they're doing. So silence isn't typically an inert thing. You can show someone that you're thinking.

• 21:41Chris Williamson?

  Like Elon did.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, and but even so, you know, there's there's a sort of, there's a, there's a point in time where that just gets too long. And I would say, you know, thirty one seconds or something is is a massive outlier for interaction. So that the longest silence that I have got in any of my data is police interview with a suspect. It's eleven point two seconds. The police have asked a question that's really difficult for the suspect to answer because almost anything is going to be incriminating. And in the end, after eleven point two seconds, the suspect says, I really can't deal with that question, actually. And so they they, you know, in the end it doesn't work, but. And it's interesting that you mentioned this because just just today, um, I was talking with a colleague about

• 22:23Speaker 00

  another really famous clip that you can go and look online, which was Charlie State interviewing Lady Gaga about seven, six or seven years ago. And it's something like, um, he's asking her about Trump and she says she won't talk about it. And then there's this long silence and it's very, it's very awkward to look at. And what's quite interesting is a, a, a year later, I happened to be doing a talk and it happened to be that the event was sort of hosted by Charlie State and he asked the same question about these silences. And then he, he told this little story that that silence was actually sixteen seconds long and before they broadcast it, they cut it. Because it was so painful for viewers, they didn't want the viewers to have to sit through sixteen seconds worth.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  So those long silences are a real breach and, and I suppose the fact that we see them as, we can immediately pick up on that being a breach of, of the sort of normal typical pace at which interaction occurs. You know, we wouldn't say it's a breach if we didn't sort of tacitly know somehow, you know, about a sil- about a second is already getting quite long, so. Six is huge and, you know, eleven is massive and thirty one is, you know.

• 23:32Speaker 00

  That's a long, long painful silence.

• 23:34Chris Williamson?

  Why is it painful? What is it about the rhythm of conversation and the breaking of that rhythm that makes us feel like that?

• 23:43Chris Williamson?

  Nails on chalkboard thing?

• 23:45Speaker 00

  I, I think it's, it's, I mean, I don't, the, the, the why is difficult, but what I can say is that.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  That what we see in interaction when we record it and transcribe it is simply that those lengths of delays don't happen, so they're not in our daily experience. So just for, as a basic thing, we're not used to regularly experiencing those length of delays because they just don't really happen. So it's like, what's going on immediately? This is really strange. It feels strange because it is strange. Quite simply empirically, you know, when you look at the data, it is just weird. Yeah, and unusual. And the other thing is that we, you know, we tend to. Uh, want to fill silences as well, so. We, we, we're, we're constantly inspecting everything that everyone says to us as an analysis of what we did previously.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  So if I ask you a question and you don't answer for thirty one seconds, I'm think, I'm, you're starting to think. Do I need to redesign the question? Was the question not clear? Because typically a silence. You know, it will, it will initiate what we call repair of some kind. So it might be that I ask you a question, there's a silence and I immediately redesign the question. Or I issue an invitation and there's a silence. And so I immediately say, what, so a concrete example, you know, you ask someone, do you want to come for dinner Friday? There's a silence. So we're so tuned into it that we immediately pick up that they're not going to respond within those sort of split seconds. And we say, or Saturday.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  So we're very attuned to how our interlocutors are responding to the actions that we are producing as they come out. And that's why, like, you're, you're nodding as I'm saying these things. So you, you know, I almost don't have to finish this. And you know where I'm going with this action. And that's how we're able to actually be so fast. And that, you know, so you're, we're preparing our responses, you know, so that they're precision time within 10th of a second. How do we manage to do that? It's, it's because of the sort of familiarity with a lot of actions that we're actually doing in our interactions, which makes anything a delay. And, you know, a classic, another one is, you know, saying, I love you, you know, that you've got to be like really rapidly coming back. You know, any kind of delay.

• 25:55Chris Williamson?

  Thirty one second delay on.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  Does my, does my bum look big in this? That has to be quick. Two seconds is, is a problem.

• 26:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Another thing that you see amongst, and this is me reflecting on me a long time ago. Uh, new podcasters especially is that they'll ask a question and then they'll give the guest a menu of options that they can choose from. So Liz, you know, why did you get into studying conversational analysis? Was this something that you did as a kid or was, you know, was it? And to me, what I used to feel was sort of this visceral discomfort around asking a question and not having the confidence that the question was sufficiently interesting that I could just sit and just let the other person.

• 26:41Chris Williamson?

  Marinate in the question because sometimes it's a difficult question. Sometimes it's maybe a question that they don't often think about or haven't heard before. But then by giving this sort of menu of options, I start to lead them toward. And it's a really dumb idea for podcasters to do because what you're doing is you're you're offering, especially if it's an open question, you're offering the guest the opportunity to pick from every single potential question on the planet. And then if you give them two options, they have to either pick one or the other, say why it's not the first or the second one, or somehow break the convention that you've already constrained over them and go, well, actually, it's neither. And very rarely will you ever hear someone say it's neither. Most of the time, the guest, unless they're super disagreeable, is just going to kind

• 27:24Chris Williamson?

  of take one of your suggested answers for them and then rework that into what they would have said in any case. But it's it's it's mostly, in my experience, it's mostly about the comfort of question, stop, silence.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it's interesting that you raise that because there are, you see that in particular settings where it's both surprising and really matters and is consequential. So if you've got a list of questions that you're going to ask somebody, in some settings, your list of questions is quite formal. It's a diagnostic instrument, for example, or it's a it's a police interview, or it's somehow a regulated kind of conversation where there's guidance and some standard things. It's a standardized survey. You're meant to ask the same question in the same way over and over again. What researchers in my field show is that it's actually really difficult to, first

• 28:18Speaker 00

  of all, ask a question that is even an open, you know, a WH kind of open-ended sort of question, or a or a yes, no kind of question, which, again, a bit like, you know, do you have wifi? That isn't a yes, no question. That requires a bit more. So so open and, you know, this idea of open and close is a little bit of a myth, but just sticking to this idea that you can just, let's say, read out a list of questions without embellishing them, without going halfway through, without tweaking them slightly. And so people are very surprised when they see what they imagine is a standardized instrument, standardized experimental instructions in a laboratory, standardized police interview, whatever it might be. And then.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  You just imagine that that's how they that's how they work then. There is the law, there is a script, there is a list of questions. But it's remarkable how the reality of those interactions just doesn't look like that. And so you can imagine situations where this is becomes really problematic. So if it's, for example, I've done some research on this with colleagues in Norway, we were looking at how teachers basically do oral communication assessments. And they're meant to ask a question, the same kinds of questions to all the pupils. But sometimes they do exactly what you say, they ask a multiple unit question. And then the pupil's like, well, which bit of that shall I address? Typically, you address the last bit first and then you may or may not go back to the first bit.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  But it's but it seems just quite difficult to just stick with this one question without doing a bit more work. It's the same in diagnoses. So, you know, a psychiatric consultation is meant to be a standardized question. It'll get a bit of embellishment. Not for what for what reason? It's there's some interactional imperative that makes us makes it very difficult to sound like a form, even if you're a police officer in the situation where the law says, say it like this. It doesn't quite look like that.

• 30:09Chris Williamson?

  What are ums and ahs and you knows used for?

• 30:16Speaker 00

  Umms and ahs and you knows and okays, they're all different sorts of things. So they they're not interchangeable in in in a conversation. Umms and ahs are quite often thought of as errors that you want to get rid of. So like that one now, they can but they can they can they're very commonly littered through our our talk and it's quite difficult to totally erase them. And but what they're doing is quite specific things. So sometimes they're doing, I'm thinking, I'm searching for a word. Sometimes they are showing difficulty in putting this thing together. They're showing an orientation to delicacy. So they're doing lots of different things in in talk.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  People are critical of others who say um and are. But when you see a transcript, when people see a conversation analyst transcript for the first time, they're quite shocked at how messy it all looks, but that is how we talk. Um, so yeah, but they're, but they're doing specific things. And I would just say one thing about ums and ours, which is maybe interesting. I said, talked a bit earlier about people phoning the vet. So I compared real pet owners telephoning the vet with mystery shoppers who don't really have a pet, but are phoning up vet practices to report back on how good the service is. So, and you know, these mystery shoppers, they have quite a lot of power in a way, because what they're doing is going back to the organisation to say how good people are at answering the phone.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  And so my question is, how good is a mystery shopper at passing as an, as a, as a pet owner? Because no one's done that research. So we're just taking it for granted that this mystery shopper can, can pass as a, as a real pet owner. And the thing is, from a distance, they, they totally can. But when you start to look at lots of calls, you see how different they are. So a, a very gross difference is, real pet owners typically phone up to make an appointment. A mystery shopper will phone to say how much is the cost of the service. And then when the receptionist tries to give them some help, like, do you want me to book you in and sort of help you navigate calendars? The mystery shopper's like, oh, I might call back later, which is really weird. And you're thinking, what are they, what can they possibly report back to the organisation? They gave me a cost of something, that was it.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  But the ums and ahs are, are so interesting in these, in these calls. So I, I'm gonna totally make a mess of even saying this, but I'll try and get it right. So the mystery shopper will typically phone up and say, how much would it cost to get a dog vaccinated? A real caller will say, how much would it cost if they're asking about cost? How much, I've got a new puppy. How much would it cost to get my dog vaccinated? So they don't say our dog, they say my dog for a start. But the mystery shopper might say, how much would it cost for a, uh, sorry, how much would it cost for a um dog to be vaccinated? Whereas the real caller is more likely to say, how much would it cost for my dog to be uh vaccinated?

• 33:14Speaker 00

  So the ers are in different places. And what's that about? I mean, I don't know, I don't have enough data to really address the question, but what it shows us is that the ums and ahs aren't randomly splattered everywhere. They are, when you look at enough of them, they're doing particular bits of work in particular ways. And it's quite fascinating if you're someone like me to figure out what that's doing.

• 33:33Chris Williamson?

  I read a blog post not long ago that was talking about the relative interpretation of people who either used silences or ums and filler words in between on whether they were seen as more or less intelligent. And I can't remember what the outcomes of that study were. Do you have you ever looked at this stuff?

• 33:55Speaker 00

  I haven't seen that, but I I can imagine that the outcome was that the people who say um and are are judged to be less intelligent because that would be the stereotype.

• 34:02Chris Williamson?

  I can't remember. I feel like I feel like it wasn't quite as simple as that. I feel like the results were more along the lines of what you do, which is pretty much everything's contextual. It's more to do with the flow of the conversation anyway, because somebody that's using silence is actually showing that they have confidence to be able to let that sit and that they're maybe being more considered with what it is that they say. So I guess it's it's much more colourful. Speaking of filler words, why is everybody saying the word like?

• 34:32Speaker 00

  I don't know. It's the one it's.

• 34:34Chris Williamson?

  This is come on. This is you. This is right in the middle of your wheelhouse. Why? Why are we cursed with this word?

• 34:42Speaker 00

  I haven't studied it, but it is something that maybe I should start analysing. I mean, obviously, people put it in in place of say, or or or or an action. So she was like, he was like, and it quite often comes before a quote, before reported speech, it can come before a reported action. So it's definitely doing some kind of

• 35:04Speaker 00

  preface to describing the words, conduct, behaviour of other people. I don't know why it's so common. It's a generational thing, but I'm but like, like lots of words, you know, I I definitely say stuff that my mum doesn't. And, you know, I I say stuff that my students don't. And we, you know, things just sort of come in and out of of common usage. And that's just language. Language is alive, it grows, it changes. Uh, one of my favourite things to do is have a look at, uh, if you just Google any word, it will give you a, it will give you a dictionary definition, but it'll also give you usage over time. So for example, if you look at marvelous,

• 35:44Speaker 00

  you know, marvelous, I don't know which way this is going to go on your screen, but you know, marvelous has dropped off a lot in usage, but awesome has increased. You know, and, and you can start to see the people who might be thinking, oh, we need to rescue marvelous, you know, that's, that's a great word. And, and but then, you know, people are saying awesome and that's hard to resist. So, yeah, language changes all the time. And I think the important thing is to try not to put any kind of value judgment on this idea that saying like has something to do with that person's character, because again, as soon as you start to look at transcripts of people actually talking, politicians, you know, everybody, you can show a lot of mess and repair, error, speech perturbations, ums and ars and everything in, in pretty much anyone's conversation.

• 36:28Chris Williamson?

  I saw a transcript that you'd done, I think of Boris Johnson, trying to give a pretty short speech. And it just looks like someone's thrown alphabetically spaghetti down on a piece of paper. It's, it's not very slick at all. And you think this person has literally been elected to the highest position of power below the queen in the United Kingdom, and he basically can't speak when you read it out.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, there is, some of that is just kind of standard and normal, like I was saying, you know, we're, we're much messier. It seems when you see it all written down and transcribed. Um, but yeah. Sometimes it can be interesting to really try to be, be precise about the mess. Especially when, you know, if someone's judged to be a great orator, for example, or they sort of pride themselves on speaking Latin and dropping that into an interaction and then show actually it's quite messy. Yeah, but there's only so much of some people's voices you can take in your in your ear because you have to go over, you know, it takes a long time to do the transcription.

• 37:30Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I bet. And well, I suppose some people kind of play into it, right? So I've got a friend Rory Sutherland, who is kind of a big gruff British man and talks like this and everything's a bit shit, isn't it? And the way that he speaks, I find incredibly charming. He'll sort of, well, you know, and he'll add in these elements. But for him, it's part of, I find it completely part of the charm, that he'll pontificate with noise for a little bit, and then deliver some amazing insight. And I think that that goes back to what you were saying before about the fact that it's so contextual. The fact is that how is this person delivering it with everything else as well? And speaking of that, there's a

• 38:14Chris Williamson?

  common held belief that some huge percentage of our communication is nonverbal. Is that true?

• 38:23Speaker 00

  So if we, yeah, this is a great communication myth, very easily busted. So if you look, if you Google this, you'll see lots of examples of a pie chart, and the pie chart will tell you that communication is 93% nonverbal and 7% verbal. So if I now turned off the audio, this podcast would make sense still for 93% of the time. We immediately know that can't be true. But and, and, and, you know, it's very easy to sort of make that myth fall over. So for example, if if the podcast, you're just listening to it on audio, how come radio is so popular if 93% of communication is nonverbal? How do we ever speak in the dark? How do you have a conversation when someone's downstairs and you're calling up

• 39:07Speaker 00

  and down? So obviously, this doesn't really make sense. If you go to another country and it's a different language, you know, like if you go to France and you don't speak French, you should be able to get by 93% of the time. So this, it just doesn't really make any sense. But it's so compelling. And people do love a good statistic and a nice pie chart. And they feel like, wow, I've really learned this thing and definitely makes sense. But one of the even nicer things about that particular. Communication myth is that the author of some of the original studies, Albert Merabian, himself has tried to bust the myth and sort of say how irritated he is by the sort of, he calls them something like self-styled communication consultant gurus who sort of stick this on pie charts and it wasn't what you found, it was something else, it was more complicated, whatever.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  Um. But I've, I mean, I've been in lots of events, you know, where people are talking about this stuff and they just trot it out and. Again, almost always I just don't say anything because it's just, it seems petty to say this is rubbish, but okay then, or you just have to let it go. But it, but it's clearly wrong and you only have to think about it for like two seconds to think, yeah, that can't be right.

• 40:13Chris Williamson?

  Is body language stuff bollocks as well then? If I look up and to the right, if I cross my arms, if I start mirroring your posture and stuff like that, how, how much truthfulness is in that?

• 40:26Speaker 00

  So obviously our bodies, our gestures, our gaze and all of those things are all working in aggregate to get things done. So if, you know, if somebody is, you know, goes past in front of your camera and they might do that, that might mean you want a drink and there's no words needed, we know what that means. But of course you can't just do that, like I can't do that to you now and like, you know, how, how are you going to get me that drink? It's not going to happen. So. If you think about something like a request, depending on what you're asking for, who you're asking, your, your entitlement to ask for it, their obligation to fulfill the request, um, how important it all is, we will design our requests differently.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  And depending on the sort of, the resources that we have to interact, we will deploy them as well. But of course, you know, doing things with our bodies and our heads and our eyes is really important. And to give you one example of, of this totally silent second long interaction, it's coming back from Scotland on the train a few years ago. And I got on Edinburgh and the train was semi-empty then I had a ticket. Got on, got my seat and then gradually, you know, coming all the way back down to the East Midlands, it gets busier and busier and busier, got rowdier, I think there'd been football, not sure, but the train got really busy, really rowdy, very crowded. And a bunch of blokes got on, they were obviously quite drunk

• 41:54Speaker 00

  and don't know what their team had happened, but you know, it was rowdy and it had, it had that sense of like not sure where this is going and obviously. You know, for me sitting there, I'm just thinking, just ream a book, not, don't make eye contact, just hope it'll all be fine. But there's a woman stood at the end of the carriage, so I'm sort of sat halfway down the carriage, and there's a woman at the end of the carriage. And we just look at each other for a split second, well, you know, maybe a second. And in that moment, we tell each other, we're, we're seeing the situation, we'll just keep an eye on each other. And, you know, I don't know who she is, never saw her again, nothing happened, it was all okay. But in that moment, you know some, you, you're doing something, and that's just a look.

• 42:36Speaker 00

  But of course, how do you turn a look into a, into a look? You know, you have to even, we, we're even tacitly, you know, we're not aware of it, but we're calibrating our gaze so carefully that we know what a look is versus when we're talking and we're, you know, looking to the right, lying, looking to the left, not like, whatever it might be, but it, you know, those things, I think, generally don't have much evidence behind them at all. Because it's actually really difficult to assess that kind of look to the right, look to the left. Is this lying? Is this flirt? You know, what, what are these things? Because they're almost never studied in natural settings, and that is the sort of, the USP of my field. We look at real interaction, where the stakes are real, whatever they are for people

• 43:18Speaker 00

  in the wild, not simulated, we don't look at interaction in the laboratory, we don't ask people about their interactions. And that's very important to the kind of work that, that we do in conversation analysis.

• 43:29Chris Williamson?

  I saw that a ton of psychological studies have just been put close to the chopping block. Power poses, nudging was in there as well, a bunch of stuff that was really, really struggling to replicate, and I think that one of the big questions that was being asked there was around the fact that, look, in a naturalistic setting, this is, it, it's very, very difficult for us to get this, but okay, so how are you going to study it? If it's, study if it's outside of the laboratory, and is this, you know, cultural conditioning masquerading as human nature? How do you separate out the cultural conditioning from something that's more inherent? I mean, that's, it's, it is an interesting one. I remember seeing this meme ages ago

• 44:10Chris Williamson?

  that was the look that you give old people when you walk past them on the street as a teenager to let them know that you're not a chav. And it was the

• 44:21Chris Williamson?

  That face, it's not a smile, it's sort of down into the sides, sort of thinning of the lips and widening of the face without opening the mouth up. And I haven't been able to stop thinking about that meme. I must have seen it two years ago because it's completely true. I have no idea, there's no name for what that greeting emotion is. It's not a hello, it's actually something to do with like a I'm okay and you're okay, maybe. I don't know. Do you know the thing that I mean? Do you know the dynamic I'm talking about?

• 44:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm probably phoneticians could give the answer to this because they're very interested in somebody who studies the way speech is produced, including things like the difference, let's say the difference between going yeah and yep, and something about the closing of the yep. We all know when we've been yeped rather than yed. So I think there is something about a closed mouth smile. It's like the most neutral but friendly thing. I'm not going to open my mouth. I'm not going to do anything. I'm keeping my mouth closed. Yeah, I think that there is something in showing I'm doing nothing, if you like.

• 45:34Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yeah, very passive.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I have a colleague and she gets her students to, as a kind of experiment, go on to, you know, go somewhere on campus and then do nothing. How do you do nothing in a way that doesn't attract attention? And of course, and you're not allowed to look at your phone, you know, how do you do it? And it's how do you, how do you stand at the bar and do I am waiting to be served versus I'm at the bar, but I don't actually want to be served yet because I'm waiting for someone. And we have really, you know, loads of ways of doing nothing in an innocent way. How do you, how do you do nothing in an innocent way on the street? Well, we could do it. So it's trying to, it's the same sort of thing. How do you show somebody that you're not threatening? And, you know, you've picked out that meme and I think that's, yeah, spot on.

• 46:19Chris Williamson?

  What about dating and first date do's and don'ts? What are some of the biggest things that people should and shouldn't do?

• 46:28Speaker 00

  Um, I I did do some research ten or so years ago on speed dating. It's my one and only foray into it because I thought, oh god, I don't want to be the professor of dating, actually. And the thing that I was particularly interested in was this, this, again, this was, this was before things like first dates on the television, which I've never seen. I keep thinking I should go and look at those, but you never know what the raw data is like. So. So I was looking at people on speed dates. They were in a particular age bracket, thirty to forty five. And it was, you know, what do they, what seems to be the components of a date that runs smoothly. I didn't know what happened, you know, into the future of their lives.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  Um, and some of those things are, you know, quite obvious, actually. Ask questions that aren't weird questions, that aren't too intrusive, that haven't been learned from a little book, you know, about, you know, ask them like, what's, what's the most dramatic thing that's ever happened to you is your first question, because that would be a really interesting topic. Actually, some, you know, you need to do those mundane things first and just sort of, just, just turn by turn, feel your way into the action, into the interaction and just take, that's what we're doing in conversation. We're constantly taking our cues from the other person. So it's a bit like being that vet receptionist, the one who notices this one doesn't want to talk about their dog versus this one definitely does. So all of those kinds of things are are the same. I I think having a topic,

• 47:49Speaker 00

  um, you know, finding a topic that you can expand for more than two or three turns is important. I've just started to do some work on first dates on Messenger and WhatsApp, you know, maybe the the modern way to do it. So I'm looking at things like

• 48:06Speaker 00

  rapid, rapid, rapid message, message, message, silence. You know, so you, so you can see, and I've got, I've got these people from early dating all the way through to like the development of when they're an item and then a bit more. And you can see some painful stuff like, yeah, message, message, message, message, you know, all going smoothly and then there'll be a delay. And then the first person is like, how long are they going to wait before they try again to restart the encounter? And I don't know, even just reading these things that I've never met the people that's just text messages, but you sort of feel. Feel the pain of the person who's like, they haven't said anything, shall I try again? And eventually, you know.

• 48:43Chris Williamson?

  Can't triple text, you can double text, but you can't triple text.

• 48:45Speaker 00

  Is that right? I also had a PhD student a few years ago who screenshotted, screen recorded people doing Facebook Messenger chat. So we could see what they were writing before they sent it. And, you know, some of these conversations were hilarious because you'd see someone, the cursor would be blinking there on the screen. And they'd be typing XXX blinker, you know, then delete. And then like maybe a sticky out tongue emoji, delete, and then like, what do they end up sending? And, you know, I'm thinking, what would that look like in a real conversation if it was face to face? That'd be quite a strange kind of like, are we going for like cheek cheek? What are we doing in this way? We're greeting each other or signing off. So, yeah, but what you see in her particular work is the same kinds of things that you see in spoken interaction.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  It's just that you can't hide the fact that you are starting it one way and then deleting it and doing something else. Whereas in fact, our conversation is full of things like, from the dating stuff that I looked at. There's these moments that always happen, which is about whether or not the person's been married before. So this is this demographic thirty to forty five. And so one of the things that always comes up, either because people disclose it tacitly, like saying things like, I was divorced or I've got kids. So they give away some of their relationship history. But if they don't, then it becomes a bit of an elephant, like, like, okay, who's, am I going to ask you what your relationship history is? How am I going to figure this out?

• 50:11Speaker 00

  And what I found was that women want, in these dates, this is, you know, ten years ago, it's a particular cohort. Women ask men, so what's your relationship history then? They want to know, and men are accountable if they can't say at age whatever, you know, forty, that they've had some kind of commitment in the past. Whereas I have to say, in my small data set, it didn't matter the other way around. So men didn't ask the question and they didn't, you know, they weren't bothered if a woman hadn't had that kind of. Demonstrable commitment previously, but I've got this, this one case where the, the woman is, is saying, you know, so if you've got, so, so you've got no ki- any kids, like I, I probably can't say that you've got no kids on the basis of everything you've told me so far, which sounds very sad.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  And you see these little, little, little corrections as the question comes out. So if you were in writing them down, you could, it would look like, so no kids then delete. Got any kids?

• 51:01Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I suppose it's.

• 51:04Speaker 00

  You wouldn't see the presumption and then, or I suppose I should ask you this, even though I definitely know by now, I can tell, you know, whatever.

• 51:09Chris Williamson?

  When you're studying chats, you're only studying what people ended up pressing send on. But the number of times that you go back and forth, and then you have to think that there's one layer further up from that, which you need to actually speak to our mate Elon about to get Neuralink, which is, what were the things that arose in consciousness, but didn't make it to your thumbs?

• 51:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, right.

• 51:30Chris Williamson?

  Because there's a bunch of things that you could have said that this note, this note, this note, that note, still no, I wrote it, but no. And then this is the one that I end up pressing sender.

• 51:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. Which, when you think about it, how on earth we actually do have these rapid conversations that are moving at such a pace. It's quite amazing. Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know, you know, what's going up, what's going on upstream because my, you know, again, my field is dedicated to what some colleagues have called the rich surface of interaction. So, I don't know what's going on in your, under your school. You don't know what's going on the, under my school. We've only got what each of the says and does as evidence of anything. So, that's, that's where conversation analysis focuses, which is different. I, I'm, I am a psychologist by background, but I'm not interested.

• 52:16Speaker 00

  I mean, I am interested as an ordinary human being, but I don't try to ascribe what someone really thought, or whether they really are this thing, because what I'm looking at is how people are attending to. Am I coming off this way or not? Or I didn't want to come off this way. I need to attend to the way I'm coming across. Or if people say things like, I don't know. Is that, I'm not interested in whether they really know or not, some, somewhere in their brain and how you'll get to that. It's more like, why is someone saying, I don't know at this point? Is it actually to try and avoid answering the question? Is it, is it to account for not being able to answer a question? What is that doing right now? Cause when you, again, when you look at these words and how they're placed in sequences like this, it's quite hard to just track them all back to some

• 52:56Speaker 00

  sense of what's going on cognitively, because you can see that people are doing, doing things that it's not just about. My brain to your brain, it's also about how am I coming across and and and fixing this? And am I saying things that make sense? Do I need to keep tweaking and keep keep kind of turning the the spanner a little bit until I've got the thing? And we have sort of, we have shared understanding of this thing that we're both doing together in this interaction.

• 53:25Chris Williamson?

  Also, there's certain people whose personalities don't lend themselves to taking that feedback particularly well or at all. And everyone's got that friend that just continues to bloviate and they're just plugging away and plugging away. And sometimes they're useful if you're out on a a night out or whatever and you just want someone, it's like background, it's wittering, you know, it's just the birds outside. You go, yeah, yeah, there there goes Bruce, he's just continuing to churn on and on and on. And then you have other people who are overly receptive, right, to the awkwardness, to potential silences, to whatever. You studied, am I right in thinking that you looked at hostage negotiations and suicide hotlines and stuff like that as well? What did you learn from that?

• 54:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, first of all, it, you know, it's, it's an amazing job that the crisis negotiators do. So I I looked particularly at suicide crisis negotiation. So these are the recordings, so so I was given access to the recordings by the police negotiators who record at the scene as part of the job. So again, the data are kind of already there, they're like found materials because they're recorded. I'm not, you know, I'm not sure if anyone really ever looks at them again, but I, this is, this was the job. And, you know, the first time you start to listen to these recordings, you know, very typically it's someone who's on a roof threatening to jump or threatening to asphyxiate themselves, to do some serious harm to themselves.

• 54:47Speaker 00

  And obviously, you know, it's, it's the most difficult data that I've ever analysed and you also feel a real sense of responsibility because at the end of the research, I'm going to go back to the negotiators and tell them what what I found. And.

• 55:02Speaker 00

  Not, not, not do training, because I don't like to think of it quite as training. But basically, what I'm doing is showing them what they're doing that really is effective. And some, and showing them the things or hoping that they will see from the, the, the, the clips that I will then choose to, to sort of play. Anonymized and play out for them, hoping that they will come to the conclusion that that isn't, isn't an effective strategy. But mostly, it's about your colleague who is amazing at their job or is very experienced. What is it that they're actually doing? Because one of the things that I, you know, as a total novice into this environment, hadn't realised at the start was that. A lot of these negotiations have a successful outcome in that the person comes down safely. So I was, went into it thinking, you know, I had no idea what the statistics were.

• 55:45Chris Williamson?

  You would be listening to a ton of people's last rights, basically.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah, and that isn't how it is. So, so then what I'm interested in is, okay. Along this two hour, four hour, nine hour negotiation, what are the turning points? So that we can think about. What are the, what are the negotiators doing to get that person to, let's say, a more physically safe space on the roof? So that they can really push the negotiation. So a lot of the first part is, how do we get someone from a precarious, very precarious situation where they might fall? Even if they now don't intend to commit suicide, to somewhere much more physically stable? So that we can then really start to, you know, support them, encourage them and so on. So that was that.

• 56:30Speaker 00

  And, and a couple of things that I found that were very interesting, me and my colleague, um, Ryan Sickfeld, and we, we looked at. Basic requests for dialogue. So any negotiation requires people to take turns in, in conversation. That's, that's what it is. It's nothing else. You don't know anything about the person typically, so you've got no background about that you might think you're interested in a psychologist. Like you, you don't know about their suicidal ideation, you don't know about their intent, you don't know anything about them, that they're a stranger. So you can't sort of assess their background and then on the basis of that develop a strategy, your strategy has to evolve. On the basis of the evidence of everything that they say. So what you want is to think, right, everything they say is staying alive.

• 57:15Speaker 00

  So every time the person says something, they're choosing to stay alive and not jump. So that's good. So how do we keep them taking turns? But also, how do we keep them taking turns that are positive rather than negative? And that's what we are after. And so one of the first jobs is the negotiator arrives on the scene, you have to expect resistance. Because if you do something so strong in a way, or such a, take such a strong stance that you're on a roof and you're going to jump. It's not the case that the negotiator comes and says, really want you to come down, buddy. Oh, okay then. Because people in, in that situation are, again, surprisingly logical, very clued into how rational they appear. So they're not going to just change their mind like that. There has to be a negotiation, it's going to take time, it has to, otherwise people don't look.

• 57:59Speaker 00

  You know, if you take a stance, you don't just change your mind, people want to be seen as consistent, so you see that. So how do you get someone talking? And the very, one of the very first things we found was that negotiators will typically say, can we talk about how you are? And in this one nice example that I've got, the negotiator says, can we talk about how you are? And when you just show that line, I then show that the next line is naught point seven seconds. So you think, okay, that's not going to be, not going to start talking, you're going to see resistance. And people think that they, they're going to say, I don't want to talk about how I am. They focus on, they're not going to want to talk about how they are to this stranger. But in fact, what happens next is that the person in crisis says, no, I don't want to talk.

• 58:44Speaker 00

  So they don't attend to the how you are, they're just like, I don't want to talk this thing, this, this particular thing that you've asked me to do. And then they put the phone down in this case, so that's, that's the. But now the negotiator's got to try again, so you just see these little natural experiments in which the negotiator can't give up, they've got to try again. And in the trying again, you see, well, what is it that's working? And what we found was that dialogue proposals that are built from the verb to talk, get resistance. They get resistance, like, what's the point in talking? Talking doesn't do anything. And and they actually orient to this notion that talking doesn't really do things. Whereas when negotiators say something like, I want to speak to you and let's sort things out. So speak gets traction. It doesn't get resistance. People don't say things like, actions speak louder than speak.

• 59:29Speaker 00

  We don't have that in our idiom. We don't have the same sense that speaking doesn't do anything can, you can, you know.

• 59:36Chris Williamson?

  Talk is cheap, speak is cheap.

• 59:38Speaker 00

  Exactly, we don't, we don't say it that same way. And and and so we found, and this was all, generally, my field is thought of as qualitative research where you look at, you know, in a, in a lot of detail at small number of cases. But because we were so surprised by this, we, we went through and coded all the data, did some statistical analysis as well. And basically found that, yeah, speak gets far less resistance and faster traction than asking to talk. And I suppose the nice coda to all of this is that we then went back and showed this to the negotiators in the UK. And they were able to sort of get, start that, start it faster. It's also nice to show people things that is already part of somebody else's natural practice.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  We're not telling them to do something that's weird or not part of anybody's or or experience and what they are just kind of doing naturally somehow. But it also shows you that verbs make a difference. So back to the point earlier about being pushed and pulled around by language, we're not really aware. We also typically think that this person's going to do it or not. It doesn't matter what words you say. But but frankly, if you don't look at the actual encounters, you you'd not, you can't say that. You you can't say that words don't make a difference if you're not prepared to actually study those words in those real situations. And and so that's what we found.

• 1:00:55Chris Williamson?

  Didn't you have another example about bathroom towels in hotels?

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, that, well, that was, that was me thinking about this idea of nudge. Because of course, you know, it's a very, you know, very. It it's a pop site kind of behavioural science kind of concept. It's not my type of thing, it's not my type of work. But I think it is interesting that in this particular study, I can't remember the authors now, but it was basically, you know, people recycle more. Um with with the wording of the sign in one direction rather than another. Um I can't remember what that is now even, but but really my point was. Let's look at the language much more than the the sort of overall message. That it's pushing towards. So one of them was about, I think it was something like, you know, please recycle your towels versus something like. You know, fifty five percent of people in this who stayed in this room, your room.

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  Um recycled and it was something like that. Then we'll personalize message drawing on social norms. And there's all sorts of theory you can put around that. But but for me, what I'd be interested in is looking at the way. We are pushed and pulled around by language in a not malevolent way. Sometimes it is malevolent, but but actually words make a difference. So. Asking someone to to speak rather than talk is doing something. It's it's sort of tilting the the outcome in some way. I've also shown that if you ask someone if they're willing to do something that they previously resisted doing a bit. Then they're more likely to say yes than if you ask them if they're interested in doing it or if they would like to do it. There's a bit of a caveat here, which is that willing is quite a heavy thing to ask someone if they're willing to do it. So.

• 1:02:30Speaker 00

  You don't say to your partner, would you be willing to put the bins out? Because it kind of implies, well, what do you mean willing? Like, that's quite heavy. But but but actually, willing gets these turnarounds in ways that don't other other verbs. Don't get. So you can start to see that. Words in turns make a difference to the very next thing that happens.

• 1:02:51Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

  And so I I I mean, that that isn't the kind of thing that that nudge behavioural scientists typically look at. But I think it's very interesting, the sort of natural way in which we are. You know, shaped by language all the time. So going back to those how are yous and the this this this this recording of a conversation where. It's two women on the phone and they go, Debbie, Shelley. What do you what do you, you know, what's going on? And and you can see that they're just immediately not, they're not, they're finding it impossible to resist the. The the conflict straight away. How do you not do that? It's very hard to immediately not engage in the frame that someone has set up. So as soon as you accept that, you you realize, God, we we, you know, how do you not get involved in that argument? How do you resist that?

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  You know, whatever, whatever it might be. Yeah.

• 1:03:40Chris Williamson?

  I've got a friend, Alex Hormozi, and he did a video not long ago, talking about how he always convinces his misses to go to Cheesecake Factory. Uh, and he frames the question in the same way that he used to do on sales calls. And instead of asking if she wants to go to Cheesecake Factory, or saying that he wants to go, he says, would you be opposed to going to Cheesecake Factory? And obviously like, well, I'm not opposed to going to Cheesecake Factory. I'd just rather go somewhere else, but that's pretty effortful in terms of a response to go to. And if you've already got, well, I, I would like to go to Cheesecake Factory and you are not opposed. Therefore, if I have a preference and you have no preference, well, no, I do have a preference. I just haven't had my turn to say it yet.

• 1:04:22Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, that was really interesting. Another person I've had, Chris Voss on the show, you may be familiar with. The ex-head negotiator of the FBI's anti-terrorism unit. Uh, and he has this really cool idea around getting a that's right from hostages, sorry, from hostage takers, hostages can't say anything. And he was telling this story about, um, he was coaching one of his guys through a very long hostage negotiation that was happening, maybe in the Philippines or in Vietnam or something like that. Uh, decade ago, and this guy had had these people for ages and they knew that the statistics suggest that if it gets past a particular amount of time that people start being shot, this is not good.

• 1:05:04Chris Williamson?

  And they were just not getting anywhere. And Chris said to his understudy, you need to get a that's right from him today. And the that's right is about steel manning the other person's position. It's about showing them that you understand precisely why they feel the way that they do. So this guy went through a huge, big, long spiel of, I understand that you feel like these imperial colonialist powers have come back and they've taken your country's sovereignty and that you're holding these tourists. I know that you feel this and I know that that's da, da, da, da, da, this big sort of long, very sort of protracted diatribe about how this is how you feel and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Is that right? And he got a that's right from him. And then within 24 hours, this guy had released

• 1:05:49Chris Williamson?

  all of the different hostages, but he fled. So they never ended up catching this dude. And then apparently about a month later, the hostage negotiator, Chris's understudy, received a phone call from a completely anonymous number. And he said, I just wanted to let you know that if you hadn't spoken to me that day, every single one of those hostages would have been killed. I'm not sure what you did, but your bosses need to be very thankful for you for having done it. However, if I ever see you on the street, I'm going to kill you in cold blood. And I was like, oh, my God. It's such an intense story. But yeah, the idea around somebody that maybe feels mistreated, misunderstood, maligned, whatever it might be,

• 1:06:34Chris Williamson?

  showing them that you appreciate the position that they're coming from.

• 1:06:40Chris Williamson?

  It seems to be a powerful tool.

• 1:06:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I suppose we call it empathy and it's really hard to get right because of course, the risk of telling people or saying, you know, blah, blah, blah, is that right? If you don't get it right and you're

• 1:06:53Chris Williamson?

  No idiot, everyone's dead now.

• 1:06:55Speaker 00

  Exactly. So this is why, you know, you have to really, what I've seen in those suicide negotiations is that there is a point where the negotiator has sort of built up, or at least they sort of show this by what they do. They've built up enough evidence, data from what's been said so far to be able to do that kind of thing at the right point in time. And how much they misfire if they come too early. And no, that's not how I feel. And then you're just sort of down the spiral. So, so yeah. The other thing that I particularly noticed in the negotiations, but I've seen this in other situations as well, any, any place where people start from quite different stances. So do you want to do this thing? I don't want to do

• 1:07:38Speaker 00

  this thing. Or I didn't even ask you to ask me about this thing. So, you know, a sale, a sales call is a, is a, is another example, but a crisis negotiation is another. And anybody who's being trying, you know, you're trying to get someone to do the thing that they've actively resisted. And it's about claiming independence. So again, the negotiators that were really effective weren't doing things like, I really care about you, I really understand, because it's, you can almost write the script, it's like, well, you don't know me, you don't care about me, you don't, you don't know me, you can't say these things. Whereas the negotiators that were getting the outcomes sort of more swiftly with less friction were saying things like, how did you get up there? Because if you say, how did you get up there?

• 1:08:21Speaker 00

  It's, it's a question that is, answering it doesn't require any kind of compromise because the person already decided to do that. So they're, they're talking about things that they have already decided to do. And so the sort of interactional foundations of the person coming down and that safe outcome is switching from, if you like, textbook showing care and empathy and help and sort of more softly, softly to actually moving towards something that is a bit more direct, like speak is, it doesn't sound as friendly as talk, but it's actually what happens better. Um, we also see that they, if they offer to help, that gets resistance, like you can't help me. Whereas if, if they say something like, let's see, we can sort things out.

• 1:09:04Speaker 00

  That gets more traction because it's about action. It's not about the soft things that you might imagine are working. And then eventually what you see is again, get the person in crisis to start talking about things they already decided to do today. And, and get them talking about them deciding to do things. And that seems to be the start of the successful outcome of the interaction.

• 1:09:25Chris Williamson?

  Chris has another one where he says that a lot of the time in relationships, if you feel like there's something that's off with your partner, people's go to is, what's wrong? What's wrong? What's wrong? And his advice, the, a better approach, he suggests is to say, it seems like there's something on your mind. And that again is, it's so interesting, you're, I mean, you must find it incredibly fascinating because it's at the intersection of a bunch of different things. It's not just linguistics. It's not just what the words mean. It's culturally, how is this word in the milieu?

• 1:10:03Chris Williamson?

  Beyond the definition of the word, then how's it been delivered? Then how long's the wait been? Then what's the particular stage of relationship that you have between what you're coming in with your priors? What are the expectations?

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:15Chris Williamson?

  I mean, it's a very multifaceted thing. And then to take that down and put it onto a piece of paper and then then to reverse engineer that back around. It seems pretty complex. It seems like an incredibly complex science art form.

• 1:10:31Speaker 00

  I mean, it is complicated, but in a way it's what I'm doing is

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  is explaining and showing people things that people are often, you know, often because I'm working not just on dating, but you know, the more sort of serious institutional kinds of environments that I've mentioned, showing people things that they're not aware that they're doing.

• 1:10:52Speaker 00

  And how sometimes they're doing it incredibly well. And sometimes people like them, you know, are doing this thing not so well at all. And it's a bit like proofreading, you know, you can't proofread yourself, but as soon as you give it to somebody else and look over their shoulder, you can see all your all the errors. And and so it is it is complex, but it's not like there's a huge conceptual gap between what I'm doing and the phenomenon. It's not like I'm studying black holes where like they don't exist for people to understand them. They whereas language communication exists for people to live life and get everything done. And sometimes it can be a challenge because we've all got our lifetime's experience and anecdater of how we talk.

• 1:11:33Speaker 00

  But what I do know as an as a conversation analyst is that how we think we talk isn't quite how we talk. And sometimes the things that we think are effective aren't quite right. Or we can get a sense that that conversation didn't go very well, but I can show you how exactly where. And then the challenge is to show that it's not just a one off. It's a systematic thing that people tend to do it this way. And it tends to immediately derail, create a friction, create something you're going to fix. And you might get back on track, but you might not at the end of that that conversation.

• 1:12:01Chris Williamson?

  Have you looked at how easy it is for people to change their patterns, the speech patterns and the sort of words that they use? And things like that?

• 1:12:12Speaker 00

  So I do a lot of training with the research findings. Um. So some and some of those findings are easier for people to see their way to doing than others. Um. So

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  talk and speak and help and sort those words that negotiators use typically at the start can can be changed. If you like, people can start with, you know,

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  I want to speak to you and get things sorted out rather than I'm just here to talk and try to help. And you can change that fairly easily, simply because they typically happen at the start of the encounter where it is the negotiator doing the talking.

• 1:12:51Chris Williamson?

  Heavily scripted.

• 1:12:52Speaker 00

  And you haven't got into the kind of back forth, back forth at this point. So so there is that on the one hand. Then there are other, there are other things that you again are are easier to for people to change when they are, let's say, delivering a package of information that you can see works really well or doesn't go down so well. So one of the very first things that I did when I was sort of going from, oh, this is interesting from a research point of view to maybe the people who I'm studying would also find this useful, was looking at mediators, so people who are trying to help conflict without the courts involved. How do they have that initial conversation with people who might become their client at the end of this conversation, yes or no? How do they describe what mediation is? Because hardly anyone's heard of it.

• 1:13:36Speaker 00

  They typically phone a mediation service because they've got a problem, they've got a neighbour dispute or workplace dispute, but they don't really want to ever see this person again. In fact, what they're phoning for is, you know, they they start things like, I've just phoned a lawyer and they've given me your number, or I've just phoned the police and they've put me on to you, or I've just phoned the council. And so this person wants their neighbour evicted, arrested, you know, whatever. So then a mediator is going to explain mediation, which is, you know, they're going to get you together in a room and it's all going to be fine. It's not a very easy sales pitch. But at some point in this conversation, there's going to be a moment where the mediator will have heard the problem and then say something like, so let me tell you a bit about mediation. And then they deliver a package of information about what mediation is. And at this point, you see the the outcome start to split.

• 1:14:21Speaker 00

  So these are the things that you can train people to do because no one's born knowing how to explain mediation. And what I found was that if you explain it as a sort of ethos, a philosophy, we're impartial, we don't take someone's side, we don't judge. People are quite turned off by that. But if you explain there's a process, this happens and then this happens and this happens, then people are more bought into the idea that things are going to change because you've you've laid out a process and I can see myself slotting into that process. So those are the kinds of things that you can, you can change because you you just train your staff to explain what it is your organisation does in a different way. I suppose I would just say though, that, that, um. Everything that I learn that is effective is based in what someone is doing.

• 1:15:06Speaker 00

  And a lot of people aren't doing it. And whether or not you can really train people to, to, to change their words in a moment by moment where I'm, I'm not really sure. Um, it, it, at the end of the day, you need to be as good as that vet receptionist who, or, you know, who can hear this person wants to talk about their pet, I'll go with that because that's going to get me where I want to go, which is get the client. Whereas this one, they just want the information, so I'll give them the information and then they might become the client that way. And it's being able to do that. And so we have to ask ourselves, can I do that? Can I tell the difference between the one who wants to talk about the dog and the one who doesn't? Not everyone can.

• 1:15:43Chris Williamson?

  Elizabeth Stokoe, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to check out more of the stuff that you do online and follow you, where should they go?

• 1:15:50Speaker 00

  Twitter, probably. Um, I'm at Liz Stokoe on Twitter.

• 1:15:53Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. Liz, I appreciate you.

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:15:56Chris Williamson?

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