We Need to Talk

Summary

Hidden Brain: "We Need to Talk" – Episode Summary

Release Date: February 10, 2025
Host: Shankar Vedantam
Guest: Alison Woodbrooks, Behavioral Scientist at Harvard Business School

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Introduction: Rethinking Everyday Skills

In the episode titled "We Need to Talk," host Shankar Vedantam delves into the intricacies of everyday conversations, challenging the common assumption that talking is a mastered, effortless skill. He posits that, much like learning to play an instrument or a sport, effective communication requires continuous learning and practice. Vedantam introduces Alison Woodbrooks, a behavioral scientist renowned for her expertise in the science of conversation, to explore why our daily interactions often fall short of being dynamic and meaningful.

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Alison Woodbrooks' Memorable Conversations

The Blind Date Fiasco [02:25 - 08:08]

Alison Woodbrooks recounts a particularly challenging blind date experience that underscores the pitfalls of unbalanced conversations. Scheduled with a well-educated, handsome man from the finance sector, Woodbrooks enthusiastically bombarded him with questions to get to know him better. However, after [03:59] realizing that her date hadn't asked her a single question in the first ten minutes, she felt disregarded and decided to leave. Despite his later text expressing interest in another meeting, Woodbrooks chose to provide honest feedback: "I just want to know I left because you didn't ask me anything about myself." [08:08] This experience highlighted the importance of mutual engagement in conversations.

The Unintended Impact of Honest Feedback [08:08 - 13:22]

Woodbrooks shares another poignant story involving a long-time friend whom she advised against marrying her boyfriend. Despite the sincere and thoughtful approach during their dinner conversation, the friend proposed to her boyfriend shortly after, leaving Woodbrooks grappling with guilt and self-doubt. She reflects, "I felt like I popped into her head... Maybe I made her feel embarrassed that she was ready to go forward with this huge step in her life." [12:34] This incident illustrates how personal anxieties and the focus on one's own perspective can obscure the true dynamics of a conversation.

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The Complexity of Conversations

Conversations as Coordination Games [15:44 - 18:00]

Woodbrooks describes conversations as complex coordination games filled with countless microdecisions. Every interaction requires individuals to seamlessly integrate speaking and listening, often without conscious awareness. She emphasizes that the very act of coordinating turns and sharing understanding is a "miracle" of human communication. [16:45] This complexity explains why conversations can sometimes feel overwhelming or fall apart despite our best intentions.

Lack of Feedback in Conversational Skills [18:00 - 20:23]

Shankar and Woodbrooks discuss how individuals rarely receive direct feedback on their conversational habits, which hinders improvement. Woodbrooks introduces the concept of "ZQs" or zero questioners—people who ask no questions during conversations, leading to unbalanced and unengaging interactions. She notes, "Openly communicating conversational missteps requires an incredible array of stars to align and a very skilled person to be able to deliver feedback in a way that doesn't feel overly personal." [20:23] This absence of feedback perpetuates ineffective communication patterns.

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Avoiding Conversational Trap Doors

The Purgatory of Small Talk [20:23 - 23:32]

Woodbrooks shares an anecdote from a Halloween night where she found herself stuck in superficial small talk with a neighbor from Ohio. Despite her efforts to find common ground through topics like football rivalries, the conversation remained stagnant. [22:17] This scenario exemplifies how conversations can easily become trapped in mundane subjects, preventing deeper and more meaningful exchanges.

Introducing "Boomerasking" [24:34 - 25:23]

Woodbrooks explains "boomerasking," a conversational flaw where one asks a question only to redirect the conversation back to themselves. For example, asking, "How was your weekend?" and then immediately sharing unrelated personal experiences without genuinely engaging with the response. [24:50] This behavior signals a lack of genuine interest and can make the other party feel undervalued.

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Enhancing Conversational Engagement

The Topic Pyramid [36:59 - 39:21]

Woodbrooks introduces the "Topic Pyramid," a tool designed to help individuals navigate conversations more effectively:

1. Small Talk (Base): General topics like the weather or weekend plans.
2. Medium Talk: More personalized topics that relate to the interests and experiences of the conversation partners.
3. Deep Talk (Peak): Intimate and meaningful subjects reserved for close relationships.

She emphasizes the importance of not remaining at the base of the pyramid for too long to avoid stagnation. [37:10] By consciously progressing through these levels, individuals can foster more engaging and fulfilling conversations.

Mastering Open-Ended Questions [39:21 - 41:10]

Highlighting the power of open-ended questions, Woodbrooks explains how they invite expansive and detailed responses. Questions like "What are you excited about lately?" encourage deeper sharing compared to closed-ended ones like "Did you sleep well last night?" [39:36] In negotiations, she found that only 9% of conversational turns involved open-ended questions, a missed opportunity for richer interactions.

The Impact of Follow-Up Questions [41:23 - 43:21]

Follow-up questions are identified as pivotal in demonstrating active listening and responsiveness. Woodbrooks cites a study where individuals who asked follow-up questions during speed dates were significantly more likely to secure a second date. [42:02] These questions show genuine interest and engagement, fostering stronger connections.

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Real-Life Applications and Examples

Co-Narration in Conversations [43:40 - 45:14]

Woodbrooks analyzes a conversation between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper discussing grief. She observes the phenomenon of "co-narration," where both participants seamlessly contribute to the storytelling, indicating deep engagement and trust. [43:40] This collaborative narrative enhances the emotional resonance and intimacy of the interaction.

The Power of Flattery [46:40 - 48:37]

Through a personal story, Woodbrooks illustrates how sincere flattery can make individuals feel acknowledged and valued. Recalling her friend Dave's repetitive compliments at a party, she notes how such gestures, despite seeming insincere, effectively fostered a welcoming and positive atmosphere. [48:26] This underscores the role of positive reinforcement in strengthening social bonds.

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Conclusion: The Art and Science of Conversation

Alison Woodbrooks concludes that effective conversation is a learnable skill, debunking the myth that it relies solely on innate charisma. Techniques like topic preparation, utilizing the Topic Pyramid, and asking open-ended and follow-up questions can significantly enhance the quality of interactions. Vedantam and Woodbrooks emphasize that by understanding and applying these scientific insights, individuals can transform their everyday conversations into more engaging, meaningful, and rewarding experiences.

Stay tuned for the next episode, where Woodbrooks will address the dreaded difficult conversations—the ones we often avoid but are crucial for maintaining healthy relationships.

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Notable Quotes:

• "Open ended questions are so powerful because your partner answers in more than twice the word count compared to closed ended questions." — Alison Woodbrooks [39:36]

• "We have to coordinate... it's a miracle that human beings have figured out how to talk at all." — Alison Woodbrooks [16:45]

• "They let you know they were listening by asking follow up questions. It's a sort of direct indicator of attention and curiosity." — Alison Woodbrooks [42:02]

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This comprehensive exploration of conversational dynamics offers valuable tools and insights for anyone looking to enhance their communication skills, making everyday interactions more fulfilling and effective.

Transcript

[Shankar Vedantam]

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. At various points in our lives, all of us turn to coaches and trainers. If you're a student athlete, you might need a coach to improve your tennis stroke or soccer footwork. If you need to take up a musical instrument in your 30s, you'll need the help of a piano teacher or guitar instructor. If you decide you want to learn a new language in your 50s, you sign up for classes with an expert in that language. But there are lots of domains in our lives where many of us never dream of recruiting the help of a coach. That's because we feel we are masters in those domains already. We don't need a coach to help us breathe or walk or talk. Or do we? Just because we've done something a long time doesn't mean we are doing it right. Just because we feel we are skilled at something doesn't mean we don't have plenty of room for improvement. Today on the show, we focus on a skill that seems so commonplace that many of us fail to see how difficult it is to do well. We're going to look at how we engage in conversation and the things we can do to get better at it. Learning to Talk. This week on Hidden Brain. When discussing the children in our lives, we say they learn to Talk at age 1 or 2. For the late bloomers, maybe it's 3 or 4. We make it sound as if learning to talk is something we master early and then practice without a problem as adults. But it turns out that most of us have a lot to learn when it comes to having conversations that are dynamic, engaging and meaningful. Alison Woodbrooks is a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School. For many years now, she has studied the science of conversation. Alison Woodbrooks, welcome to Hidden Brain.

[Alison Woodbrooks]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

So I settle into this table at this buzzy restaurant in New York City downtown. And I mean, across from me at this table is this beautiful man. And I'm so excited. And we just launch into it, we launch into conversation. Now the whole point of a first date is to get to know each other. So I am pelting him with questions. Where is he from? What's his family like? What was his college like? What was it like to play football there? Tell me more about your football career. What's your job like now? Where do you live? Do you have lots of friends in the. So I'm asking him lots of questions, and I realize that 10 minutes have gone by and he has not asked me a single thing about myself. Wow, 10 minutes. And I realize at this point that this has been a complete sort of absence of question asking in my direction. And at that point you sort of have this out of body experience. And I'm floating over the table looking down at this conversation game that's now afoot. And you start to play this little game where you're like, how many questions can I ask this person before they ask a single question back to me? Like, how far can I push this? And I think he doesn't really realize that I'm now playing this game. And he certainly doesn't realize how badly he's losing the game. And another 10 minutes go by, 20 minutes. He has asked me nothing about myself. He has no idea that I'm devastated and really feeling sort of hurt that he doesn't seem reciprocally interested in me.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

Did you ever hear from him again?

[Alison Woodbrooks]

I did. He texted me later that night and he said, you're beautiful. I had a great time. I want to see you again. Which, by the way, still, there is no question. I mean, it's like, fine, lovely, but he's still. There's no question of. Are you okay? How are you doing? Did you get home safely? Is everything all right? No question. I mean, it was really quite wild. And, you know, I'm a bit of a people pleaser. I don't usually. I'm not usually overly direct with people. But this moment felt like he really could benefit from some feedback. I mean, his future girlfriend, who's looking for a man with blue eyes and have a job in Finance and Six5 is going to find this guy and I want him to be able to make that person happy. And so. So I text him back and I. And I just say, I just want you to know I left because you didn't ask me anything about myself. And it really. It really made me feel like you weren't interested in me. I'm really grateful that you met up with me. And I wish you the.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

So did you raise it at the dinner?

[Alison Woodbrooks]

Yeah. So we were at this sort of trendy restaurant downtown, and there was music thumping, and we were eating delicious foods and having cocktails, and I worked up the. Finally mustered the courage to tell her what had been on my mind. And I could tell that she was both intrigued and interested in what I was telling her. And she engaged with me on it so nicely. But, you know, as so many hard conversations, hard topics become more difficult over time, I realized that she'd heard me. She was maybe getting a little bit emotional, and so I didn't want to push it, and I switched topics, and we moved on. So after this dinner, I felt so proud that I had worked up the courage to be direct and honest with my friend and proud of her for being so receptive to my perspective. And it just. I felt like the conversation had gone really well. So fast forward two days, and a text message pops up on my phone from my friend, and immediately I'm so curious. I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, has she. Did I. Did I change her mind? Had she been thinking about this? Is she ready to open up about. Maybe she's been wondering about this guy too. And maybe they. She kind of knows they're not a good fit for each other, and she's gonna say, thank you so much for empowering me to really say this out loud. I was. I was excited to see how she was gonna react. And I opened my phone, I opened the text message, and what do I see? I see a photo. It's very clearly her hand. It's the same bright red nail polish she'd been wearing at our dinner just two nights before. And a beautiful diamond ring on her ring finger. Her boyfriend had proposed, and she had said yes.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

That's right. And that she had already helped him pick out the ring. Oh, wow. I think she was grappling with a lot of feelings in that moment. She. She didn't want to embarrass me. She didn't want to hurt me. She didn't. Maybe. Maybe I made her feel embarrassed that she was ready to go forward with this huge step in her life. Or maybe. And this is. Maybe she didn't really hear me. You know, I kind of mentioned it quickly, and I didn't go. I didn't want to make it a dramatic thing. And we moved on quickly. So maybe she wasn't even really able to process what I was. I don't know, because we never talked about it again.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

When we come back, why conversations are much more complex than most of us realize and how to get better at them. You're listening to Hidden Brain. Hello, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Most of us engage in conversation all day, every day with partners, children, friends, co workers, neighbors. Yet despite all this constant practice, we're not as skilled at talking to others as we might expect. We miss cues, misunderstand what others are saying, and get stymied by moments of awkwardness or tension. At Harvard Business School, Alison Woodbrook studies the science of conversation. What makes talking with one person a joy and talking with another person a choreography or a bore? Alison, when you start to dissect A conversation. Like a scientist, you realize that it's more complicated than we realize. You call it a complex coordination game with trap doors and challenges hidden inside a maze of decisions. What do you mean by this?

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

That's right. We cannot possibly communicate about all of these microdecisions. We cannot. The irony of it is that even while we're talking to each other, we can't actually communicate directly about all of these things. Not only for feasibility concerns, we don't have enough time to communicate about all these decisions, but also we have this expectation of sort of naturalness. A good conversation needs to feel like you've alighted on delightful topics without talking about it, that you understand each other's minds without communicating directly about it. That's sort of where the magic lives. And too much direct communication can quickly undermine that magic.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

That's right. In many ways, he finally met the right woman to give him feedback. That'd be so valuable for him, but in other ways. Some would say that he went on a date with the wrong woman, messed with the wrong girl. That's right. It's so rare to get certainly direct feedback about, oh, that joke was really funny, or I really loved when you gave me that compliment, or hey, you've asked me 16 questions so far, good for you, or hey, that thing that you said, I didn't quite understand it, or hey, when you said this, it really hurt my feelings. We just don't have time to communicate in that way and give live feedback like that. And it just goes against all of the sort of norms of human to human communication.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

Yes, even a professor of conversation is not immune from the perils of small talk. About once a week, I would say, I have a conversation where I think, wow, I really, I messed up. Up small talk. There. This conversation. We were taking our three children out, trick or treating. It Was an unseasonably warm night. It was beautiful. We have a wonderful flat neighborhood where we walk around and the kids trick or treat and get candy. And we joined up with a number of other families to go together. And we knew most of the other families, but there were two families we had not met before. So at some point, as we're walking around on this beautiful night, watching our adorable kids pick up enormous candy bars, I strike up a conversation with one of the neighbors, one of these family members that I didn't know before. And it was a man from Ohio. I overheard him saying that he was from Ohio. And so as the two of us became isolated, I quickly started asking questions about Ohio. Where are you from in Ohio? Did you go to Ohio State? Oh, I've been to German Village. It's such a quaint part of Columbus. So I'm using all of my Ohio knowledge to kind of find a way into this conversation. My husband's from Michigan, so I started talking about Big Ten football or, you know, the rivalry between Ohio State and Michigan. And I'm really going for it. But really, no matter what I say about Ohio, it doesn't seem like we can find a way out of it. We're sort of stuck. We're stuck.

[Shankar Vedantam]

You're trapped in Ohio.

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

Yes, Rachel Greenwald. I think she's amazing. She's sort of the grand Poobah of professional matchmakers. She started out her career as a matchmaker, and then she had so much success that she started training other matchmakers to do this job. And she said to me, we have a phrase for people who don't ask questions. When you think of people who ask zero questions, especially on a date, we call them ZQs, zero questioners. And there's this quote she says, you know, they say curiosity killed the cat, but on a date, curiosity does not kill the date. In fact, the ZQ kills the date.

[Shankar Vedantam]

So you have iq, you have eq, and now you have zq.

[Alison Woodbrooks]

That's right.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[C]

All right, our special guest right now, Wayne Campbell. Garth Elgar. Wayne's World. Wayne's World. All right. Talking about Wayne Stock. Very exciting. Big event. Everybody's excited, huh? Yeah, it's gonna be a big concert at Adlai Stevenson Park. It's just gonna be a big party. You know, we got some great bands coming, like Aerosmith. I just want to remind everybody that there's still plenty of tickets left. But that's no reason to wait till the last minute because it's just a. A chance for the city of Aurora to do something. Uh huh. Fun. Uh huh. And to put the city on the map. Mm. It's a lot of work. Oh, well, work is hard. You're not really listening to me, are you? Uh huh. I mean, I could say anything right now, like you're a complete tool. Mm. But you wouldn't hear it.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

Oh, Shukra, this happens all the time. I think this. The reason this clip is so funny to us is because it's so relatable. We have done research recently to show that people's minds are wandering 24% of the time during conversation. And this was based on their own self reports. So we interrupted them every five minutes in a conversation and asked them, were you listening attentively to your partner or was your mind wandering? And 24% of the time they say, actually, my mind was wandering. I wasn't listening to my partner. We suspect this is an underestimate because people know that it's sort of embarrassing to not be listening to their partner. You see this happen during video calls or like on zoom. People are smiling and nodding at the camera even while they're like, to the side texting their friend or making a grocery list. Because there are these norms of politeness, Right. We know that our we should make our partners feel like. Like we're listening to them.

[Shankar Vedantam]

For most of us, talking doesn't seem hard. We open our mouths and words come up. But as we go through life, it is usually the case that the people around us are not telling us when they find us boring or irritating or just plain offensive. When we come back, how to make our conversations more engaging. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. I have a vivid memory of a great conversation. Right before the COVID pandemic struck. I was sitting in a New Orleans restaurant with four researchers who were in town to attend a psychology conference. The conversation felt like a rapid fire game of ping pong. It felt effortless. It was glorious. At Harvard Business School, Allison Woodbrook studies how we can all have many more memorable conversations. She's the author of the Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. Alison, I have a strong belief that authentic conversations must just emerge naturally. And I Suspect many listeners have the same belief. You say this is a mistake.

[Alison Woodbrooks]

That's right. We often talk about this idea of the myth of naturalness. So many of my students and so many people believe that good conversationalists are born, that they are extroverted and gregarious and charismatic, and that's just how they are. It's their personality. But so much of the work that I've done over the last 15 years suggests that many, many things about conversation are very learnable, even for the most introverted, shy, awkward people who really think that they weren't born charismatic. These things can be learned as well. And one of the most valuable things that we've learned in our research and in my class is this idea of topic preparation. Topic preparation is literally just thinking about what are possible things that we could talk about before the conversation begins. It's not complex. And many people find this idea of preparing for a conversation, especially for people that we're close to outside of work, to be very aversive. You sort of have this instinct that I shouldn't need to prepare for a conversation with someone that I'm close to. We'll get together and I'll know exactly what to talk about, or we'll have many things to talk about. And many of my students feel this way too. They're sort of like, why are you making me prepare for a casual conversation?

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

That's right. This story is surprisingly sort of tender and important to me. It is a friend that I'd spent many years singing in a band with. She's this talented, wonderful friend. And we had both started having children, and after she had her first child, she became sick, and it was just. It was devastating. And meanwhile, I had my own babies, so I wasn't even available to go and visit her very often. And so this conversation when we got together felt so momentous. It felt like we needed to catch up on so many things about this incredibly difficult period of her life. And brilliant woman that she is, not only had she prepared topics and really thought carefully about all the things we needed to catch up on together in our limited time together, but she had given each topic a Whitney Houston song title. She's. And really, it almost makes me cry thinking of it. It was so thoughtful and so fun in such sort of dire circumstances. And so she had prepped topics like Whitney Houston's song Higher Love. She said, when was the last time you took your baby on an airplane? And how terrible was. Or the Whitney Houston song run to you. I think it was run to you, run to me. And she said, you know, are you still running? Right? Like, what's your running regimen these days? And so she had just. It was just so thoughtful and so like her to make to prep topics at all and to show me that she was thinking about us even when we were apart. And then to bump it up even another notch, I'd give him these Whitney Houston song titles.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

The topic pyramid is a tool that I realized that my students needed so badly and I think everyone needs so badly. There are three levels to the pyramid. At the base of the pyramid, this is where small talk lives. These are topics that you could talk about with anyone. So how's the. What about this weather? How was your weekend? What are you excited about? You know, what's going on at the weekend coming up, those sort of, well trodden, well known small talk topics. It's totally okay to be at the bottom of the pyramid. In fact, many conversations have to start there. It's this well trodden ground, especially with strangers or with people you, you haven't seen in a long time. You have to start there. That's part of the norm of conversation. The mistake is staying at the base of the pyramid too long and letting it stagnate and become dull. And that's when these alarm bells go off in your mind where you say, oh my, we gotta get out of this. We gotta get to something more meaningful. So the second tier of the pyramid is what we call medium talk or tailored talk, where you're moving towards a topic that is more interesting, more personal, and more closer maybe to what your partner has in terms of interests and expertise. So it's becoming more personalized. The third, the top tier of the pyramid is deep talk. Deep talk is what friends and family members and work besties. This is what we're all hungry for, the type of conversation to have with people we're very close to. It's a sort of, of unique place of shared reality where maybe only the two of you could be talking about this topic in this way. And so not every conversation needs to get to the peak. That's not always the goal when your neighbor is just taking out their trash. You don't need to get to the peak of the pyramid necessarily. The key here is fostering a little bit more of an awareness of where you are in the pyramid and making sure that you don't get stuck at the base of the pyramid for too long.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

That's right. Our work suggests that asking more questions is like the sort of baseline, best thing that you can do in your life to get better at question asking. Just ask more. But there's a lot of nuance in the types of questions that are better and worse in certain circumstances. So open ended questions invite your partner to share. Right. These are questions are like, what's on your mind? Or what, what, what was your morning like? What are you excited about lately? These questions that are born of curiosity that invite your partner to share their perspective with you. Whereas close ended questions, as many of us know, usually have a very distinct answer. So do you like how this conversation is going? Did you sleep well last night? These sort of yes, no questions are very closed. And so in our research, what we found is open ended questions are so powerful because your partner answers in more than twice the word count compared to closed ended questions. This is powerful in any conversation, but particularly in conflictual conversations or when you're negotiating and we're learning information about your counterpart is so pivotal. Asking an open ended question like what do you care about? Or what's important to you here? You're going to learn so much more information about their perspective and their needs and their motives and their positions than will you accept this offer?

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

Follow up questions are superheroes. They are amazing. When we studied 1100 speed dates, so people going on these four minute speed dates, what we found is that people who asked more questions were more likely to get second dates. So their partners were more likely to say yes to them. So much so that if you asked just one more question on each of your 20 dates, you would convert one more of your dates into a yes.

[Shankar Vedantam]

Wow.

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

I think when you meet someone who's.

[C]

Had a loss, you have two options. One is to say I'm sorry for your loss, which is a perfectly lovely thing to do. But if you can share your experience, then they're not alone. Well, it's also, it's always interesting how when you, you know, I bring it up, meeting somebody for the first time and, and they say, oh, I'm sorry to bring it up, I, you know, and as if what they don't realize, I'm thinking about it all the Time. I mean, exactly. It is, as you said, exactly. It is, you know, it's one of my arms. I mean, it is an extension of who I am.

[Alison Woodbrooks]

Quite possibly for the rest of your life.

[C]

Oh, without a doubt.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

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

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

Yes. This was back in college. This character we'll call Dave was well known for being very charming. And a girlfriend and I went to this party and Dave was greeting everyone at the door. And we walk into the party and Dave turns to me and he says, Alice, you're so beautiful. You look so beautiful tonight. So beautiful. Welcome. Come on in. Come on in. And then he turns to my girlfriend and says, oh, Claire, you look so beautiful, so beautiful tonight. Unbelievable. And we sort of, we say, thank you, Dave. Thank you so much. And we walk off into the party. And as more people are arriving at the door, you hear him going through this sort of flattery shtick over and over. Every person that comes in, ugh, you're so beautiful. It's not even constrained to just the women. Right. To the men, oh, you look so handsome. He looks so great. Tonight. Everyone who walks through is getting this, the Dave flattery treatment. And it was a real epiphany moment for me. You know, I had known him a long time. I knew that he was a sort of smarmy. I had this shtick. And at the same time I reflected and I realized, you know what, though? It really did make me feel a lot better. It made me feel welcome at this party. It made me feel confident as I went into the party with my friend. And the most amazing thing, later that night, the friend that I had walked to the party with, I saw her kissing Dave later in the night. And it seemed like his sort of flattery, however insincere it obviously was, had worked its magic on my very smart friend.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

Thank you for acknowledging how great I look tonight. That's how it feels like. Thank you so much for noticing. Yes.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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

[Alison Woodbrooks]

It's been so fun. Thank you.

[Shankar Vedantam]

Next week on the program, we bring Alison back to discuss a very specific type of conversation. These are the conversations we dread having, the ones we put off, the ones that often end in tears and hurt feelings. If there's a difficult conversation you know you need to have with someone, you'll want to listen to this episode first.

[Alison Woodbrooks]

I poked an invisible barb into an important part of who he is, and he didn't feel seen and acknowledged and valued and worthy of care.

[Shankar Vedantam]

Do you have follow up questions for Alison that you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience? If so, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to [e-mail] that email address again is ideashiddenbrain.org use the subject line Conversation. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. For more Hidden Brain, be sure to subscribe to our free newsletter. In each issue, we'll bring you more ideas about human behavior, plus a brain teaser and a moment of joy. You can sign up [e-mail] that's N E W-hiddenbrain.org I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.