There are more ways for humans to communicate with each other than ever. Sure, we no longer rely on carving runes into rocks to get our messages across, and the pigeon post is but a shadow of its former self. But in the past 50 or so years, their places have been taken by the likes of email, text messages and incredibly annoying WhatsApp groups. Yet, despite all these new resources, many of our conversational arrows still fail to reach their targets.
Some of the reasons for this – and several helpful solutions – are outlined in a new book by New York Times and New Yorker writer Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better. His latest, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, had its origins in a domestic scene that will be familiar to many.
“I got into this bad pattern with my wife,” says Duhigg. “I would come home after a long day at work and start complaining about my day. And Liz, my wife, would give me a good suggestion, like, ‘Why don’t you take your boss out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other more?’
“And instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get even more upset. I’d say, ‘Why aren’t you listening to me?’ or ‘Why aren’t you taking my side and being outraged on my behalf?’ Then she would get upset because I was attacking her for giving me good advice.
“I went to researchers and I asked them, ‘What’s going on here? This is my wife – someone whom I want to connect with.’”
The answers to that make up the content of the book, which is leavened with occasionally hair-raising real-life examples – such as that of Jim Lawler, the would-be CIA agent who struggled to convert just one foreign citizen to the cause of American espionage until he employed the hidden power of conversation. Less morally compromised case studies include the stories of how the programme-makers got the characters right in The Big Bang Theory and how Netflix’s corporate open-communication policy went pear-shaped.
Reading our minds
The time is right, it seems, to have the discussion about how we communicate. According to Duhigg, “We’re living through this golden age of understanding communication for really the first time, because of advances in neural imaging and data collection.” In other words, scientists are getting better at reading our minds.
The boffins spelt it out for him. Duhigg says he was told that every discussion is made up of different kinds of conversations.
“In general, those conversations tend to fall into one of three brackets. There’s practical conversations, where we discuss solving problems or making plans. There’s emotional conversations, where I might tell you how I’m feeling and I don’t want you to solve my feelings, I want you to empathise. And there’s social conversations, about how we relate to each other in society and the social identities that are important to us.”
His sources explained that conversations work when two people are having the same kind of conversation at the same time. He had been coming home and having an emotional conversation, and his wife responded with a practical conversation, so they had trouble connecting.
How hard is it to realign the conversation in these cases? Not very. “The easiest way is just to ask a question,” says Duhigg. “So now when I come home and I start complaining about my day, my wife will often say, ‘Do you want me to help you solve this problem or do you just need to vent and complain?’ And usually, I’m like, ‘I just need to vent and complain. This isn’t really that big a deal.’”
If that’s not doing the trick – which it may not outside the domestic sphere – there is a second technique to use. “In those situations, we should ask what’s known as a deep question: something that asks about someone’s values or beliefs or experiences – which can sound a little bit intimidating, but it’s actually easier than it sounds. If you bump into someone and you learn they’re a doctor, instead of asking, ‘Where do you practise medicine, what hospital do you work at?’, you can say, ‘What made you decide to become a doctor, what do you love about practising medicine?’
“Those kinds of questions are invitations for someone to say something more meaningful and real. In those deep questions, when we ask them, people tend to tell us what kind of conversation they want.”
There is abundant research to show that, although we tend to think people will be intimidated by or averse to what we feel might be intimate questions, surprisingly good results come out of them.
So, if we know so much about how to communicate, why are people and their views becoming increasingly polarised, at times dangerously so? Why do people seem to be having more trouble talking to and listening to each other?
Although our brains are proficient at turning good communication skills into habits, we are not getting enough practice, says Duhigg. “Because of the pandemic in part, and also because of the rise of online communication, where people don’t have to have quite as many conversations as they used to, we’ve got out of practice. But simply practising it and deciding that you want to be a better conversationalist makes you a better conversationalist. That is the most important thing that supercommunicators do: they want to connect with other people and they show that they want to connect with other people.”
He says there are a couple of simple things anyone can do to charge up their communication skills. “Commit yourself to asking more questions. People identified as supercommunicators consistently ask 10-20 times as many questions as the average person. Some are questions you hardly even notice, like, ‘Oh, what did you say next?’ or ‘What did you think of that?’ But some are those deep questions where they ask us how we feel about our life.”
Simple strategy two is to show that you are listening. “Sometimes, we don’t know that the other person is listening. We think they’re just waiting their turn to speak. The more you ask a follow-up question, the more you engage in what’s known as ‘looping for understanding’, where I ask you the question and then I repeat back what I heard you say to make sure I’m getting it right, and then I ask you, ‘Did I get that right?’ The more we do that, the more we show other people that we are genuinely interested in them and want to connect with them. And that makes it easier to do. That’s the loop.”
There’s an emoji for it
Duhigg sees the proliferation of means of communication as an opportunity. “It forces us to think about matters. Something similar happened about 100 years ago, when telephones first became popular. There were all these articles that said no one will ever be able to have real communication on the phone because you can’t see each other. And at the time that was written, it was true. [Back then], people basically used the telephone like a telegram. They would use it to send grocery lists or stock orders. They wouldn’t have conversations.”
How things changed, as parents of teenagers realised from the 1950s on. And today’s teens have a whole new set of skills. “My kids use their phones constantly to talk with their friends. They sometimes just send each other strings of emojis, and it looks like gibberish to me, but they explain it’s a form of emotional communication.”
When we realise the rules for each medium, “we often find a way to connect with others, regardless of the channel of communication”.
Underlying everything Duhigg has to say is the concept of being “neurally entrained”. He explains: “When you’re in a conver-sation with someone, you’re not aware of it but our eyes start dilating at similar rates, our breaths start to match each other, and, even more importantly, the activity within our brain starts looking more and more similar.”
As evidence, he points to the phenomenon whereby if someone describes an emotion they are feeling, we experience that emotion a little bit ourselves. “That is our brains becoming neurally entrained, more and more similar. Communication is the goal of making our minds alike for at least the duration of our conversation. We’ve evolved to enjoy that feeling. When you have a great conversation with someone, it feels really wonderful.”
There is an evolutionary imperative to all this. “In an earlier age in the state of nature, the Homo sapiens who could achieve neural entrainment with others were the ones who were able to form families and then villages. Forming a family or a village … gives us access to resources we didn’t have previously. It is really helpful to survival. And as a result, our brains have evolved to crave this pro-sociality. The people who survived were the ones who wanted it.”
From the forest to the office, the principle is the same. “Anyone who has ever worked in an office knows that often, being a good communicator is more important than being good at anything else. The managers who succeed are the ones who can communicate. A chief executive’s job is almost purely communication.”
Duhigg can obviously talk the talk, but does he also, so to speak, talk the talk in his own life? “I ask deep questions all the time. I was just in Austin, Texas, and I took a lot of taxis. I found myself having conversations with my drivers. It’s really fun.
“I find I want to have more conversations now, and that when I want to do it, it’s easier to have meaningful, interesting conversations.”
If you’re planning to try this at home – or work – don’t expect miracles. Duhigg describes at length an experiment in which US gun control advocates and opponents were put through a variety of exercises to see whether improved communication practices had any effect. It did: both sides ended up listening to and occasionally liking each other as individuals. But no one changed their mind about gun control.
Damn lies & conversations
What’s the secret behind Donald Trump’s success when speaking at mass rallies?
Can anyone be “neurally entrained” with the halting, meandering, vacuous, abusive, repetitive speaking style of leading US orator, innovative communication pathfinder and soon-to-be presidential candidate Donald Trump?
Thousands of people at once, apparently. How does that work?
“When any candidate is giving a speech, if they’re good, they’re in dialogue with their audience,” says Duhigg.
“When the audience cheers, they provide feedback and the orator leans into that topic and that emotion. They’re making it obvious that they’re listening. And equally, they’re often responding to emotional cues or emotional messages that the audience is providing.
“And whether that’s Trump or [President Joe] Biden, or whether it’s someone in New Zealand or Australia, if you go to those rallies, they aren’t one-sided conversations. They’re two-sided. That’s why they’re successful.
“When they’re one sided, and the speaker is talking about whatever they want to, the audience is bored, and it’s not really a dialogue and everyone kind of wanders off.
“But when it’s these rallies for people who are passionate, it’s because there’s a conversation. The politician is proving that they’re listening. They’re matching their audience, whether it’s a practical or emotional or social conversation. They’re doing all the same things. They’re just doing it at a larger scale.
“Often, the politician finds a constituency and the constituency educates the politician about what they ought to care about: ‘You come to my rally because you’ve heard what I say about immigration or economics. And while I’m there, I express my anger about other topics.’ A good politician will often reflect back that anger or that hope and show that they’re listening.”
In other words, politician and audience – rabble-rouser and rabble – are neurally entrained.
Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, by Charles Duhigg (Random House Business, $40)