231. Secret Signals: Why We Rarely Say Exactly What We Mean

Why what isn’t said can communicate more than what is spoken. We often speak in hints and half-truths, not because we can’t be direct, but because subtlety protects our relationships. “An awful lot of the time, we don’t just blurt out what we mean,” says Steven Pinker https://www.fastersmarter.io/guests/steven-pinker/. “We hint, we wink, we beat around the bush — counting on our listener to read between the lines, connect the dots, catch our drift.” Pinker is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, a celebrated linguist and cognitive scientist, and the author of twelve influential books. His latest, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life http://fastersmarter.io/when-everyone-knows, explores how our shared understanding of awareness — what Steven refers to as common knowledge — and the way we signal it, governs everything from friendships to authority to negotiations. “Common knowledge is what ratifies or annuls social relationships, and that's why blurting something out that contradicts the assumptions of the relationship can blow everything up and be deeply awkward.” In this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart https://www.fastersmarter.io/, Pinker joins host Matt Abrahams to discuss why humans lean on innuendo, euphemism, and strategic ambiguity. They examine how culture and context shape what we hear, why our social fabric depends on more than just literal meaning, and offer practical ways to refine our communication by paying attention not just to what we say, but to what others know we know. To listen to the extended Deep Thinks version of this episode, please visit FasterSmarter.io/premium https://www.fastersmarter.io/premium/. Episode Reference Links: Steven Pinker https://www.fastersmarter.io/guests/steven-pinker/Steven’s Book: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows http://fastersmarter.io/when-everyone-knowsEp.91 Um, Like, So: How Filler Words Can Create More Connected, Effective Communication https://www.fastersmarter.io/91-um-like-so-how-filler-words-can-create-more-connected-effective-communication/Ep.225 Speaking Fluent Internet: How Algorithms Are Changing the Way We Speak https://www.fastersmarter.io/225-speaking-fluent-internet-how-algorithms-are-changing-the-way-we-speak/ Connect: Premium Signup >>>> Think Fast Talk Smart Premium https://www.fastersmarter.io/premium/Email Questions & Feedback >>> [email protected] Transcripts >>>Think Fast Talk Smart Website https://www.fastersmarter.io/231-secret-signals-why-we-rarely-say-exactly-what-we-mean/Newsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>>FasterSmarter.io http://fastersmarter.io/Think Fast Talk Smart >>>LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/think-fast-talk-smart/,Instagram https://www.instagram.com/thinkfasttalksmart/, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6caGRBUYZCmgDGM2RK6mxKB9jG_ccmm3Matt Abrahams >>>LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/maabrahams/ Chapters: (00:00) - Introduction (00:53) - Why We Speak Indirectly (05:09) - The Role of Context (09:05) - Cross-Cultural Perspectives (10:21) - Hypocrisy as Social Glue (12:13) - Clarity, Conciseness, & Grace (15:37) - Metaphors We Live By (16:52) - The Final Three Questions (20:48) - Conclusion ******** Thank you to our sponsors. These partnerships support the ongoing production of the podcast, allowing us to bring it to you at no cost. Learn more about how Notion https://www.notion.com/?utm_source=podcasts&utm_medium=thinkfast can support your business at notion.com/thinkfast. https://www.notion.com/?utm_source=podcasts&utm_medium=thinkfast Join our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community and become the communicator you want to be. https://learning.fastersmarter.io/?redirect_from=podpage

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

• 0:00Matt Abrahams?

  In the moment, conflict is difficult for everyone. In our October newsletter, out now, you will learn ways to help yourself handle these challenges better. Not only do you get specific advice, we're also providing an infographic to help you remember. Find our newsletter on the Think Fast, Talk Smart LinkedIn page or at fastersmarter.io under Resources.

• 0:25Matt Abrahams?

  While many of us focus on being direct, the reality is, being indirect strategically helps us accomplish much of our communication. My name's Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today, I'm super excited to spend time with Steven Pinker. Steven is the John Stone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He studies language, cognition, and social relations. He has received many awards for his teaching. He's written 12 insightful and impactful books, and his latest is When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. Welcome, Steven.

• 1:08Matt Abrahams?

  I've been looking forward to this conversation ever since we set it up.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Me too. Thanks for having me.

• 1:13Matt Abrahams?

  Excellent. Shall we get started?

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Let's start.

• 1:16Matt Abrahams?

  Much of your work looks at language and cognition. You've distinguished between the what and the what you mean by it of language. What do you mean by this distinction, and how can we use this insight to become more persuasive and effective in the communication we have?

• 1:30Speaker 01

  It's long been known by anyone who studies language that an awful lot of the time, we don't just blurt out what we mean in so many words, but we hint, we wink, we shooey shally, we beat around the bush, we use euphemism, we use innuendo, counting on our listener to read between the lines, connect the dots, catch our drift. And as someone who studies language, this has always been a puzzle. Why don't we just blurt out what we mean? So just some obvious examples. Politeness. If you could pass a salt, that would be awesome. Now, that's an awful weird thing to say. For one thing, it's certainly hyperbolic. It wouldn't be awesome. It might be nice. But also, why are you pondering hypotheticals? We all understand what it means. Give me the salt. Why don't we just say, give me the salt?

• 2:11Speaker 01

  In more emotionally hot circumstances, there's certainly a lot of indirectness. So imagine you're trying to bribe your way into a restaurant by slipping a $50 bill to the maitre d'. You probably wouldn't say, if I give you the 50, will you let's jump the queue and see this right away? You might say like, I was wondering if you might have a cancellation? Or is there any way you could short my wait? Or sexual come-ons is, as we all know, a big arena for indirectness and euphemism. You want to come up and see my etchings? You want to come up for coffee? You want to come up for Netflix and chill? So in all these cases, you might say, oh, plausible deniability. But come on, how plausible is it? Because any grown woman could be in any doubt as to what do you want to come up for coffee means late at night? So why do we do it?

• 2:56Speaker 01

  And the answer that I came up with is that we avoid common knowledge. Now, my book is about common knowledge. And common knowledge has a technical meaning. In linguistics, in philosophy, in economics, in game theory, in political science, in a lot of academia, what it means is, I know something, you know something, I know that you know it, you know that I know it, I know that you know that I know it, I know that you know that I know that you know that I know it, add infinitum. Common knowledge is important because it's necessary for coordination, for being on the same page. If you're the only one who knows that you're supposed to drive on the right and everyone else thinks that you're supposed to drive on the left, you better drive on the left. It's not enough that you know it, even if you're right according to the law of the land. It doesn't matter. What matters is what everyone knows that everyone else knows.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Relationships are propped up by common knowledge. What makes us friends? You know, possibly sign a contract. I know that you consider us friends. And what does that mean? Well, it's because you know that I consider us friends and so on. Or lovers, or a boss and a subordinate, or an authority and a person who recognizes their authority, we're two transaction partners. The relationship exists in our heads and it's a matter of common knowledge. So direct speech, blurting something out generates common knowledge. It's not a question of whether it's deniable. It's a question of whether you know that the other person knows what you meant is deniable. That is, is the common knowledge deniable? And common knowledge is what ratifies or nulls social relationships.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  And that's why blurting something out that contradicts assumptions of the relationship can blow everything up and be deeply awkward. Whereas hinting, innuendo, they know, but they don't know you know they know. And that allows you to maintain the previous relationship. So in the case of, say, a sexual proposition, if Harry says, you want to come up for coffee? And Sally says, no, she knows she's turned down a sexual overture. And he knows she's turned down an overture. But does she know that he knows she knows? She could think, maybe he thinks I'm naive. Maybe he thinks that I just turned down a coffee invitation. And he doesn't know that she knows that he knows. She could think, maybe she thinks I'm dense. Maybe she thinks I just interpret it as turning it down for coffee, even though I know she really turned down the sexual overture.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  So without the common knowledge, they can maintain the fiction of a purely platonic friendship. Whereas if he said, you want to come up for sex? And she says, no, it's never the same. They can try to go back to a platonic friendship, but once it was out there, once it's common knowledge, that changes everything. So when everyone knows something, it's really different than when everyone knows it and everyone knows that everyone knows it.

• 5:31Matt Abrahams?

  It seems to me that the context also plays a role in what we all know about each other. So taking flirtation, which I actually, in grad school, my research was on flirtation, not only because I wanted to get dates when I was that age, but I was always fascinated by strategic communication. And I think flirtation is a wonderful venue to study that. If you go see a doctor and the doctor says, how are you doing? That has one meaning. But if you're in a bar and somebody says, how are you doing? That has a very different meaning. Context seems to add an extra level of understanding of what you know and I know. And so we have to be aware, not just of what's being said, but the context in which it's being said. And clearly, we can run into some mismatches if I'm not paying attention appropriately to the context.

• 6:14Matt Abrahams?

  So it sounds to me like we have the ability to assess and judge these circumstances and try our best to fit within that optimal space. How do we learn to do this? I don't ever remember taking a class on indirect ambiguous communication. How do we learn what's appropriate?

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Kids often charm us because they just blurt things out. They haven't mastered this yet. It's, oh, grandpa just farted. Or, how come you have hair growing out of your nose? They just sort of say things. So you do have to master it. Some of it is from feedback. You say things that are, as you get older and the other kids stare at you, make fun of you. Some of it is just an extension of conversation. We don't lay out every last step in a logic of a conversation. Conversation would be impossible. There's so many missing links. It would be like a legal contract. And a legal contract is written so that it would be immune to an adversary trying to exploit loopholes. When we have conversation, we start off cooperative. That's what we mean by to be on speaking terms.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  When you have two adversaries, there is no conversation. Two coaches of two football teams don't get together for a chat before the game. So conversation presupposes some degree of cooperation. That's a basic law of linguistics. When you're cooperative, you can leave things out so that the conversation doesn't take all day. And you just know that the other person will figure out what you meant on the assumption that you're both aiming at the same thing, namely information, coordination. And so knowing how a listener will connect the dots, will fill in the blanks, allows you to sometimes to be creative in making one of these propositions. Now, there are formulas, like, could you please pass the salt? No one even thinks about what that means.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Literally, it's a idle question, not what it really is, which is an imperative. But still, that's the case where it's formulaic. But sometimes there is no formula. And we think about something that's a prerequisite to the act. Knowing that our hearer, on the assumption that we're not crazy, that we're rational, that we really are trying to get at something, they then connect the dots and think, oh, yeah, of course, he wants me to do something, but he's too polite to boss me around. So he's stating the precondition. And we use our natural conversational skill at filling in the missing premises in order to convey the imperative. The reason that we do this indirectness, this musing, you know, do you think you could, please, et cetera,

• 8:37Speaker 01

  is friends and/or just casual acquaintances don't like to boss each other around like they're servants. It's not like, Jeeves, bring me the butter. You don't want to treat a friend like that. But still, the butter's at their end of the table and you want it? How are you going to get it without bossing them around?

• 8:52Matt Abrahams?

  So there's this level of metacognition that's required to pull this off.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  There is in novel, when they're novel cases. A lot of these circumstances are so familiar that we have formulas. Do you think you could pass the salt? Could you pass the salt? Where you don't have to engage in the metacognition in that circumstance because it's so familiar cliche that the English language gives you these formulas. But when it's a one-time thing then, or a novel situation, and you're calibrating it to the other person, a sexual come on being a classic example, much more is at stake than getting the salt.

• 9:27Matt Abrahams?

  You mentioned in English, and I'm curious about cross-culturally, if these things apply as well. I'll share an experience I had. I was teaching a student who was a non-native speaker of English, and he came into my class thrilled. I mean, he was elated, super excited. So I said, hey, what's going on? Why are you so excited? And he looked at me and said, the woman that I'm very interested in told me that she just wants to be friends, and I'm really excited about that. And I had to rain on his parade because let's just be friends. When he looked it up, is exactly what he was looking for. But we all know that was saying something very different. So have you found that these ideas of what you know and other people know, and using the strategic ambiguity crosses cultures as well?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Do all cultures have some kinds of politeness, some kinds of indirectness? The answer is yes. Cultures can vary, and often tourists, travelers, businessmen have to get used to the level of indirectness in a culture. So Japan is famously indirect and polite, and there are many layers of honorifics. And to the point where sometimes people get frustrated that you just never get down to business. You exchange so many pleasantries. Conversely, there are cultures like New York or Israel, where people are famously blunt, and people can easily get offended because they don't realize that's just how you exchange information in that culture. But all cultures have some.

• 10:43Matt Abrahams?

  What becomes really fascinating to me is when you have people from lots of different cultures come together and they have conversation, and you see this play out in how some people could be offended and others aren't. So it sounds to me, at the end of the day, that this indirect communication is, while many of us say, hey, just I want people to be direct and honest with me. None of this doublespeak or hypocrisy. This is actually really necessary for us to function. Would you agree with that?

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, in the last chapter of When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows is about, is called Radical Honesty, Rational Hypocrisy. We're all kind of hypocrites about our hypocrisy. That is, we say, this hypocrisy is just such a waste of time and it's so annoying. People beating around the bush, role playing and rituals. Why don't we just cut the crap and say what we mean? Wouldn't life be better? The answer is no, it would be awful. A lot of our relationships really depend on common assumptions that are, at the end of the day, fictions. They're not literally true. One of them is that friends would do anything for each other and they value the other person's welfare as much as their own. They value the friendship. There's no limit on how much they value the friendship. Of course, that can't be true. But if you were to say, okay, we've been on the phone

• 11:53Speaker 01

  for 25 minutes now and 25 minutes is about all I can really take of talking to you and there are other things that I'd really rather do now, that is often true. Or saying, your friendship is worth only so much to me, but no more, that kills the friendship, changes everything if you actually say it.

• 12:11Matt Abrahams?

  So this kind of communication really does provide the lubricant for these interactions and allows them to keep going.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  I wouldn't even say lubricant so much as the basis. That is, that's what being friends means. That's what being lovers means. It means you accept certain things as the ground rules. You know that the other person accepts them. You know that they know that you accept them. And that's what makes relationships possible.

• 12:35Matt Abrahams?

  In your book, The Sense of Style, you argue that good writing and communication is about clarity, conciseness, and grace. I understand conciseness, but can you tell us a little bit more about grace and then clarity?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  So what makes a lot of pro-academies, bureaucraties, corporaties, what makes it so frustrating to get through is often what's called the curse of knowledge. Curse of knowledge is a psychological phenomenon in which if you know something, it's very hard to imagine what it's like not to know it. That is, it's false common knowledge. You assume that your private knowledge is common knowledge. That's why in bad writing, the writer doesn't spell out the abbreviations, doesn't explain the jargon, doesn't give Samples doesn't allow for a concrete image. It doesn't occur to them because it's just so obvious to them and they don't realize it's not obvious to anyone else. So that's what goes into a lot of clarity is just the empathy of what does the reader know? And what can they see in their mind's eye?

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Sometimes clear writing may be kind of graceless. It may be an instruction manual, it could be a memo. But when we try to persuade, to charm, even to make our writing pleasurable enough that other people will pay for it. We want to get a job as a columnist or reviewer, we just want an audience. The prose has to be compelling and there are many things that go into that. There's first of all, just clarity. If you've got to struggle to figure out what the other person means, then you're going to give up. And that makes prose graceless. Imposing on the memory load of a reader, if you've got to hold too many words from the beginning of a sentence in mind before you get to the end of the sentence and know what they're doing. Or if it's not clear where the end of one phrase is from the beginning of the next one is. And the reader has to work hard.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  And if they're trying too hard to parse the syntax of the sentence instead of seeing through to the meaning, that makes prose less graceful. But also even the melody and rhythm of speech. In this case, there is no speech, it's writing, but writing is mentally always speech. When you read someone's words, you're always sounding it out to yourself as if they're speaking. And so just the sheer mellifluousness of the sentence as it would be said aloud goes into grace. And one other thing is the vividness of the mental picture that the reader is supposed to get. And one of the things that makes bad writing bad is the reader doesn't have any image, nothing to grasp. Instead of someone describing a study with kids and they talk about the experimental stimuli

• 15:02Speaker 01

  instead of the big bird and Oscar the grouch puppets. So being concrete, being visual, being vivid is an important way for prose to be graceful. The other component of grace is, and I have a whole chapter in The Sense of Style on this phenomenon of coherence. That is, even if every sentence in a passage is 100% comprehensible, the passage itself may be baffling if you don't know how One sentence leads into the next. And that's why we use connector words like however, nonetheless, on the other hand, moreover, that is, for example, in general. They seem like silly little fillers, but they're really not. They are the links, the glue that make one sentence flow into the next.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  And a lot of the feeling of coherence, flow, indeed, grace comes when you just know why the writer is saying what he's saying right now. How does it fit into everything that I've read so far?

• 15:59Matt Abrahams?

  This idea of coherence that helps people to really understand the flow of the message, super important, and I like that as a key component of grace. You've discussed the concept of metaphors in language. What are these and what do they mean for the way in which we communicate?

• 16:14Speaker 01

  There are more metaphors in language than we realize. Often, we're completely unaware of them. We know this from a brilliant work by the linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson in a book called Metaphors We Live By. It's 45 years old now. They notice that some things that we talk about, we keep harking back to the same metaphorical image. So a relationship is a journey. We've gone through a lot together. We're at a crossroads. We might have to go our separate ways. Look how far we've come. War, argument is war. I tried to defend my position, but he demolished it. Knowing is seeing. I see what you mean, but that argument is cloudy or murky. I can't make it out. We don't even realize we do it, but we do it all the time.

• 16:57Matt Abrahams?

  I have a colleague, Michelle Gelfand. She likes to talk about mind your metaphors because in negotiation and influence and conflict, those metaphors impact how we approach it and the words we use. So if I see a negotiation as a battle versus a problem to be solved, I approach it very differently. We'll be right back to finish our conversation. But first, we're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. Their support covers the cost of production, so we can bring you this show for free. This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. The best communicators don't just get their message across, they make it easy for people to know what to do next. Your website can do the same thing. With Squarespace, you can build a polished online presence that clearly shows people who you are,

• 17:40Matt Abrahams?

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• 18:23Matt Abrahams?

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• 19:08Matt Abrahams?

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• 19:17Matt Abrahams?

  Well, Stephen, before we end, I'd like to ask you three questions, one I create just for you and the rest I've asked everybody who's ever been on the show. Are you up for that?

• 19:24Speaker 01

  Sure thing.

• 19:25Matt Abrahams?

  You have written about cursing, and it's fun to talk about. And I'm curious, how does cursing, swearing, how can we use it as an effective tool? What value does it provide?

• 19:34Speaker 01

  The thing swearing does is it elicits involuntary emotional reaction. Your primitive part of your brain, maybe your amygdala, just gets pinged usually with some, not just an offensive thought, excretion, feces, urine, cuckoldry, copulation, death, misfortune. Those are the subject matter of swearing across languages. But also, there's common knowledge in the sense that when someone uses a profane word, and they know that you're trying to get an emotional reaction out of them. That's why we avoid swear words when we have no interest in getting an emotional reaction. When you go into the doctor's office, the nurse might say, well, we'd like to take a stool sample. She wouldn't say, we'd like

• 20:15Speaker 01

  to take a shit sample. But shit does, it pings a little part of our brain. Now, there is a rule for taboo language. If used rarely and judiciously, it can express it, but you can't express it any other way. If you're angry, like, will you pick up your dog shit? And it's not a very nice way of putting it, but it's appropriate to be anger at the moment.

• 20:36Matt Abrahams?

  Understood. That was a damn good answer. Thank you. There's some research that I've heard when I talk and try to help people feel more comfortable and confident in their communication, manage their anxiety, that swearing actually releases some neurochemicals that can blunt the cortisol that comes about from anxiety. So it can actually make you feel a little more confident, or at least a little less unconfident, just by blurting out, not in front of public, obviously, but you might do it behind the curtain before you get out on stage. Let me ask you question number two. Who is a communicator that you admire and why?

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Oh, jeez. On the public stage, Barack Obama was a has a deserved reputation as a communicator, particularly for the nonverbal component of trying to bring the country together in moments of crisis. Now, he didn't succeed with everyone because there were factions that still hated him, but just by virtue of conspicuously making the effort to bring people together, I think that had a positive effect. Among writers, I think George Will has a way with words. He's been around for quite some time.

• 21:37Matt Abrahams?

  Obama certainly is recognized as an amazing communicator, and I appreciate you highlighting the ability to bring people together. Last question for you. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Well, certainly empathy, not in the sense of necessarily feeling someone's pain, but getting inside their head, overcoming the curse of knowledge, knowing what they don't know. The simultaneous awareness of the message to be communicated and the relationship that you have with your hearer. That's what all this euphemism and indirectness and innuendo is all about, calibrating it, finding the optimal level of directness or indirectness that's appropriate to the context, the nature of your relationship, the culture you're in, and the costs and benefits of the message going over your hearer's head, or being so blatant that they know what you're up to.

• 22:34Matt Abrahams?

  So empathy, making sure that you balance out or think through the message and the relationship you have, and trying to balance among all of those factors in terms of directness around context, relationship, cost benefit, and culture.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, optimal directness, yes.

• 22:49Matt Abrahams?

  Optimal directness. Thank you, Stephen, for all of the valuable insights. Truly a masterclass in how to be more effective in our communication, and you've uncovered many insights into our indirect communication. Thank you, and I wish you well with your newest book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge in the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me on.

• 23:14Matt Abrahams?

  Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about language and cognition, please listen to episode 91 with Valerie Friedland and episode 224 with Adam Alexic. This episode was produced by Catherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder, with special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram and check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, Ask Matt Anythings, and much more at fastersmarter.io/premium.

• 23:59Matt Abrahams?

  Before we wrap up, I just want to say thank you for listening. It really means a lot to hear how people all over the world are using these ideas in their own lives. It inspires me and the whole team that brings you this show. If you want more episodes and resources, feel free to follow, subscribe, and explore past conversations. We're grateful for your support of Think Fast, Talk Smart.