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You Are Not So Smart
305 - Supercommunicators - Charles Duhigg (rebroadcast)
01:16:54
Our guest in this episode is Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and writer for the New Yorker Magazine who is also the New York Times Bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better. His new book is Supercommunicators, a practical and approachable guide to what makes great conversations work. In the episode we discuss the science behind what it takes to form a connection with another human being through dialogue, how to generate or nurture a bond, and how to form, repair, and maintain a conversational pipeline through listening and communicating that guarantees reciprocation and understanding.
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- [00:01]
David McRaney
If you could hear love, what would it sound like? Son, can we talk about your drinking? Yeah Dad, I think we should helping those closest to you think about their excessive drinking.
- [00:23]
Charles Duhigg
Maybe that's what love sounds like. More@rethinkthedrink.com an OHA initiative.
- [00:30]
David McRaney
You can go to kittedkitted shop and use the code smart50 smart50 at checkout and you will get half off a set of thinking superpowers in a box. If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, check it out. Middle of the show welcome to the you Are not so Smart podcast, episode 305 hey there. This is the you Are not so Smart podcast. I am your host, writer, producer, editor and all the rest. David McRaney. Perhaps one day I will add some staff, but for now this is still a one person operation and because of that, when I must head out of town like I must do this week, I will sometimes play a previous episode of the program, which is what this episode will be. The next episode after this will be a deep dive into the latest research into both the illusion of objectivity and something called Concordance over Truth Bias. You will hear from three researchers whose latest paper found that for all people, regardless of education or reasoning ability or political allegiance, resistance to true news that paints your side in a bad light is stronger than susceptibility to fake news that paints your side in a positive light. In other words, people tend to believe in fake news that confirms their political beliefs over true news that disconfirms them. And you may have been suspecting that for a while, but there's been a debate in psychology about this. There's been a back and forth between people who do not think this is how it works and people who do. And now we have evidence that it is the the way we'd wish it did. The bad the bad thing. We have evidence for the bad thing that will be a new episode, and the next episode after that will also be a new episode. We sit down with a psychologist who studies our fascination with mentalism and and our tendency to believe in things like facilitated communication, something that has recently grown in mega popularity despite the fact that it was debunked a long time ago. Right now, though, I am headed to Orlando to give a lecture before the Free Thought community, which I'm very much looking forward to. So this episode will be one we ran about a year ago with my friend Charles Duhigg, who wrote a book titled Super Communicators, which I consider to be a blood relative of my book How Minds Change. And thanks to that, the resulting conversation reflects our shared obsessions with this topic. So that's what I'm about to play. I just wanted to open the show with a brief update. Lots of fascinating new stuff is on its way and you can support this one person operation Help Keep Me making New Things by heading over to Patreon. And if you do that and pitch in at any amount you get the show ad free. But at higher amounts you get all sorts of neat stuff. Links to all of that in the show notes. And now on with the episode. I want to begin by telling you a story from the history of psychology and the history of NASA. Yes, the two are intertwined, which is surprising. Was surprising to me. The history of sending humans into space, into the moon includes a lot of psychology. And like everything else that NASA has done, the things they learn scientifically during the space program, the engineering, the technology, and the things they learned about how to best prepare the human mind for going up into space, all of that would later be applied somewhere to an aspect of modern life today. You have used something, some piece of technology or some sort of standard around human behavior or wellness or team building or how to properly investigate whether someone is a good candidate for a position, all these things. Our understanding was accelerated by that space program. We learned a lot of stuff attempting to put people in space and on the moon. Which brings me to this story that I just love. Okay, lets tell the story. In 1958, in October, in response to Sputnik, the Soviet Union's first successful launch of an artificial satellite into orbit, NASA began operations in the United States. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Cold War was on. And now as part of that Cold War, the space race had begun. And it was clear that both Russia and the United States wanted to put human beings in space. Eventually fruit flies and then dogs, then primates, they had all sacrificed their lives. Human beings did that. And scientists from that period, the records are full of regret, discussion of the ethics, the suffering. Was all of this worth it to make sure that when we put people up there, they would not also sacrifice their lives. So in the United States, when it came time to look for human beings to go into space, there was a lot of discussion about how do we make sure that these are the most extraordinary human beings we can find. I don't want to proceed without mentioning and acknowledging that it wasn't a pursuit of the absolute most extraordinary human beings they could find because they limited their pool to just men, white men. That was the era, 1940s, 1950s, a lot of gender biases, a lot of racism. So in that first round of potential astronauts, no women, no people of color, which is unfortunate to say the least. That's not true of today's astronaut pool, including the people who are going on the Artemis mission. Much more diversity. But wasn't like that 1950s, by the way. The first woman to go to space was a cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963. It would be nearly 20 years before another woman would go to space. Another cosmonaut, Svetlana Savitskaya, 1982. And in the United States, the first woman astronaut to go to space was Sally Ride, 1983. The first African American astronaut in space was guion S. Bluford Jr. Also in 1983. We'll get back to the 80s in a second. A lot of things were happening there. But back to the original pursuit for potential astronauts, back in the very beginning. And I say potential because that's the words they were using, potential because the scientists that consulted NASA and the scientists that consulted the scientists that consulted NASA and the scientists that worked at NASA, we're talking like engineers, doctors, biologists, physicists, they were all imagining some kind of superhumans. Because all sorts of things could go wrong. And all sorts of things had to go right. And that's just to survive the launch, much less make it into orbit, make it back. And the moon might not even be possible. So the kinds of individuals they were looking for, they had to admit, also might not be possible. Here are the requirements. They had to be test pilots, people who could handle high stress situations and operate experimental aircraft and could be trained on new kinds of aircraft. They had to be a specific height to fit into the spacecraft. Not too tall, but also not too short, so they could reach all the things they needed to reach. They had to be under 40 years old and in incredible physical condition. They needed to be educated, particularly in engineering. And they needed to have very high IQs, with very robust problem solving abilities. And they must be psychologically stable as defined by that era. No bad habits, no mental issues. These were the standards in the beginning. But things changed by the 1970s. The next class of astronauts, much more diversity, many new specialities. Clearly, going into the 1980s, lots of things were changing at NASA. NASA wasn't just expanding who could become an astronaut. They were refining the qualifications, the requirements, the things they tested for to determine if a person was truly extraordinary, at least in the ways they needed a person to be extraordinary, to complete missions into Space to the moon or wherever a rocket might take them. And that's where the story goes Next. Because in 1984, Ronald Reagan, the President, ordered NASA to send people to a space station. The space station was a big deal because now you could do all sorts of research that you couldn't do on these missions that had to go up, do the thing, come right back, you could stay in space for a while. And because these new astronauts would be spending so much time in space, like up to a year in space, in tight quarters and in the company of only a handful of other astronauts, they wanted to make sure that in addition to being incredibly smart, educated, specialized, physically fit, amazing at problem solving, capable of handling high stress situations, highly competent at operating complex machinery, stable, brave, resilient, they also had to be not assholes.
- [11:59]
Charles Duhigg
All of a sudden they need to start looking for different kinds of astronauts. Because if you're sent up into like a tin can for an entire year with like four other people and you're surrounded by vacuum, if you're not good at relating to each other, if you don't have high emotional intelligence, you just get on each other's nerves so much that it actually frays at the mission. It makes it hard for people to do their work.
- [12:21]
David McRaney
That is the voice of Charles Duhigg, the Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times best selling author of the Power of Habit and Smarter, Faster Better, whose new book Super Communicators features the story he is about to share about Terrence McGuire. Maguire was the lead psychiatrist for NASA in the 1980s and he was responsible for assessing the, quote, psychological readiness of astronauts, end quote.
- [12:55]
Charles Duhigg
So NASA says, look, we got to start finding astronauts who have high emotional iq, which up until then hadn't been much of a priority. Now the problem is they have this one psychologist who sort of has to, has to analyze every candidate. And the problem for him is that by the time you get to the final rounds of an astronaut interview, you are so practiced, you're so polished, you're so good that like you can fake emotional intelligence with the best in the world, right? Like, like. And this guy, he actually said, he said, I can't tell in interviews who has actual emotional intelligence and who's faking it because they know all the answers. I asked them a question about their, their worst memory and they have something ready to tell me. I asked them about their biggest weakness and they say something. They sort of you, you. Afterwards, you sort of see it as being admirable, like, like, I can't trick these guys into revealing Anything.
- [13:44]
David McRaney
As Charles points out in his book, on longer missions, cosmonauts had experienced hallucinations and, and depression. And astronauts in the Apollo 7 missions had some pretty troubling arguments with mission control over things like the tone of their voice, the quality of the food, the clunky bathroom facilities and stuff like that. So after much research, in 1987, Maguire wrote to his superiors, quote, the advent of the space station with minimal tours of six months in a crowded environment from which there is no respite, suggest the need for greater attention to personality factors, end quote. Which is a loaded term, kind of shorthand for attention to weeding out assholes, as I mentioned earlier. And McGuire looked at a lot of research involving personality factors, including some research by Taibi Koller, which was very new at the time. A psychologist who developed the process communication model, which was all about character traits and motivations and team based stress. And in short, McGuire determined, based off all this psychology, everyone really, really needs to be able to get along, especially when things get frustrating and boring and stressful and terrifying. And as Charles explains, this was new territory in many, many ways. They already screened for sensitivity to depression and hair trigger tempers. But the concept of emotional intelligence wasn't yet mainstream and certainly not yet a standard in astronaut evaluations. Charles quotes in his book the work of Yale psychologists who just a few years later would define emotional intelligence as when people are aware of their own feelings and those of others, they are open to positive and negative aspects of internal experience, are able to label them, and when appropriate, communicate them. End quote. And here's a kicker, another quote. The emotionally intelligent person is often a pleasure to be around and leaves others feeling better. The emotionally intelligent person, however, does not mindlessly seek pleasure, but rather attends to emotion in the path toward growth. So, yeah, McGuire, as the head of NASA's psychological readiness protocols, was tasked with establishing a test to determine who would be a good hang, who would be a supportive, unproblematic non asshole on long space missions. And he began to zero in on some possible methods for developing such a test.
- [16:32]
Charles Duhigg
So he comes up with this new strategy. And the way he comes up with it is he's listening to old recordings of previous candidates and he notices that the folks who went on to be great astronauts, they laugh differently than everyone else.
- [16:53]
David McRaney
They laughed differently than everyone else. That's who made for a great astronaut. And according to the psychological research, this was a major insight into a person's emotional intelligence. McGuire recalled the work of a psychologist at the University of Maryland named Robert Provine. Whose research a few years earlier showed and still shows that laughter, for the most part, isn't an involuntary response to humor or silliness or the unexpected, but it serves as a form of communication meant to convey to others that we are empathizing with one another. When you laugh with someone, you are connecting to their current emotional state.
- [17:47]
Charles Duhigg
He had never noticed this before, but. So, okay, so he comes up with this whole theory, and this is how he starts doing interviews. He walks into the interview room, and he's holding a big sheath of papers, and he. He accidentally spills them. He actually does it on purpose, but it looks like an accident. Like, he spills these papers all over the floor. And he's wearing this, like, garish yellow tie with balloons on it. And he looks at the person he's about to interview, and he says to them, you know, I can't believe I just did that. And my kid made me wear this tie to work today. I, like, look like a clown. And then he would laugh really big. He'd go, this is. This is such a. Like, I can't believe I did this. And then you would notice how the person laughed back. Because everyone would laugh back, right? If somebody laughs, we know that we're supposed to politely respond. We're supposed to match that laughter. Some people would just kind of politely chuckle. They'd be like, that's. That's funny. And other people would be like, yeah, that's crazy. Like, let me help you get the papers right? What he found is that the people who matched the energy and the mood of his laughter, they were the ones who were showing him that they wanted to connect with him. They were the ones who had high emotional iq.
- [18:58]
David McRaney
In Provine's research, he found that people felt pushed away, ostracized, patronized, condescended, and generally not good when another person failed to match their laughter with similar laughs of their own. For instance, if someone was laughing intensely, wheezing, bent over, crying, bellowing, but the other person merely chuckled in response, it signaled some kind of mismatch, some kind of impulse toward dominance or rejection. Or if you tell a dumb joke, share a pun, or just act silly in some way in which you expect the other person to groan or eye roll, and in response, you get a giant belly laugh. You can tell something's off, that the other person is faking for some reason or making fun of you in a not friendly way. It's so innate, these sensibilities, that in studies where people listen to other people laughing strangers, most of us demonstrate a very High degree of accuracy when tasked with determining what is a real laugh and what is merely acting.
- [20:11]
Charles Duhigg
And it's not just laughter. Right. Then later on in the interview, he would discuss a family member who had passed away and he would just kind of bring it up casually. He sort of mentioned like, you know, oh yeah, I had a sister and she passed away when I was a kid and it was tough for my family. And then he would go into other stuff, but he'd pay attention. Do they try and comfort him? Do they ask questions? Do they say things like, oh, how did that affect your mom? Or you know, do you still think about her? Do they try and match him by saying things like, I have a friend I lost like 12 years ago and I still have dreams about him sometimes those are people who again, they want to connect. They're showing that they want to connect. And so as a result they have a high emotional IQ. And laughter is a great example of this. 80% of the time in daily life when we laugh, it is not in response to anything funny. We are laughing to show the other person that we want to connect with them. And when they laugh back, they're showing us that they want to connect back, but only if we laugh the same way. Only if we, only if we match each other's emotions, only if we signal, like, rather than just playing along, I actually want to connect with you. And it transformed who NASA hired as astronauts. And as a result, their astronauts all had this amazing emotional iq. And that doesn't mean that if you have low IQ you're a bad person. Right? It just means for what NASA needed at that moment, they needed astronauts who wanted to connect with each other. And the way that we signal that is often through non verbal communication. It's often through matching people's emotions and the intensity of those emotions. That's how we show someone. I want to connect with you.
- [21:53]
David McRaney
In psychology they call this valence and arousal. Valence is where on a scale from positive and negative is a person's mood and arousal is how intensely do they feel that mood. It makes a nice quadrant of emotional states. High or low on the horizontal rows, positive or negative on the vertical. That's a form of. You mentioned this in the book. There's all sorts of back channeling that takes place during a conversation every little. Yeah, Ah, come on now. Like, yeah, sometimes that's very gentle. It's very like. And sometimes it's like, no way.
- [22:33]
Charles Duhigg
Like, like, oh my God, he said that.
- [22:35]
David McRaney
Oh, wow.
- [22:37]
Charles Duhigg
Think about how terrible it feels if like I'M like if I'm high energy and I'm like, can't believe he did this. And your response is, yeah, no, no, that's really hard. I can't believe he did that. Right.
- [22:48]
David McRaney
Like that. I immediately know I don't want to.
- [22:50]
Charles Duhigg
Ever hang out with but I know that we're not agreeing.
- [22:53]
David McRaney
We' it now. Like, like one of the things I love about all of this is you can try to be a sociopath with this and fake it, but it won't work. You have to actually care about, you have to actually want to know more about that person's story. You have to actually be curious. If you're not truly curious, faking it will be identified by the other person in the conversation very quickly. Absolutely. Absolutely. In Charles Duhigg's new book, Super Communicators, he uses the NASA empathy test to illustrate a whole lot of psychological research into non linguistic communication. The zillions of things we do when attempting to form a connection with another human being, when attempting to sync up and generate or nurture a bond, to form or repair or maintain a pipeline for reciprocation and understanding. Psychologists have a term for all this called the matching principle, which put simply, states that effective communication comes down to, as Charles puts it, connection and alignment. That is both parties recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring and then matching each other, end quote. What that means is if someone is reaching out to express emotions, then you allow yourself to feel those emotions as well. You hold space for them to feel theirs. If they need help making a decision, you switch to problem solving and critical thinking. But don't try to go into problem solving mode and offer advice. When a person is reaching out for emotional support, and if they are concerned with gossip or social status or expressing their agency and identity, well, that's a third kind of conversation with its own set of rules. But before you learn these three different ways of communicating, the first thing, the first thing that's required, as some psychologists explain it, is determining whether the other person needs to be helped, hugged or heard. And when you have high emotional intelligence, that's what you do. First of all, the first thing you try to determine and you go from there. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that over the last year or so, I've been inviting guests on the show whose books I feel would make great companion pieces to my most recent book, How Minds Change. And Charles Duhigg's new book, Super Communicators is more than just a great companion piece. I Consider it a blood brother to how minds change. Essential Reading if you care about having better conversations about difficult topics, improving your relationships, negotiating, persuading, debating, and every other kind of communication that we are often very bad at, doing well to the point we often throw up our hands in frustration and just avoid communicating altogether. As the title of Charles book suggests, some people are super communicators. And there are a dozen psychological terms for this kind of person, like high centrality, participants, core information providers. They are the kind of people who easily navigate difficult conversations, the kind of people others reach out to when times are hard or decisions are difficult. And I bet you know exactly that sort of person, who that is in your life, who you reach out to, who knows how to figure out if you need to be helped, hugged or heard, and what to do after that. Some people are naturals at this and some people have developed these skills to high levels of mastery. And that is the good news. These are skills that anyone can and in my opinion, should learn. It'll make you better at just about everything else you do in your life. So after this break, we're going to talk to Charles Duhigg about how you can learn these skills and how you can start using what you've learned today, this week, or this weekend to not only improve your odds of becoming an astronaut, but make some actual progress discussing the issues you care about and or connecting with the people you love. All that after this break. Your new beginning starts now.
- [28:11]
Charles Duhigg
Dr. Horton has new construction homes available in Ellensburg and throughout the greater Seattle area. With spacious floor plans, flexible living spaces and home technology packages, you can enjoy more cozy moments and sweet memories in.
- [28:25]
David McRaney
Your beautiful new home.
- [28:26]
Charles Duhigg
With new home communities opening in Ellensburg and throughout the Seattle area, Dr. Horton.
- [28:31]
David McRaney
Has the ideal home for you.
- [28:33]
Charles Duhigg
Learn more@drhorton.com drop Dr. Horton, America's Builder and Equal Housing Opportunity Builder Department of Rejected Dreams if you had a dream rejected IKEA can make it possible. So I always dreamed of having a man cave, but the wife doesn't like it. What if I called it a woman cave? Okay, so let's not do that, but add some relaxing lighting and a comfy IKEA hofburg ottoman. And now it's a cozy retreat. Nice. A cozy retreat.
- [29:00]
David McRaney
Man.
- [29:01]
Charles Duhigg
Cozy retreat, sir. Okay, Find your big dreams, small dreams and cozy retreat dreams in store or online at ikea.us dream the possibilities.
- [29:12]
David McRaney
Okay, here's the other thing I was talking about at the very beginning of the show, before the show started. The school of thought. I love this place. I'VE been a fan of the School of Thought for years. It's a non profit organization. They provide free Creative Commons critical thinking resources to more than 30 million people worldwide and their mission is to help popularize critical thinking, reason, media literacy, scientific literacy, and a desire to understand things deeply via intellectual humility. So you can see why I would totally be into something like this. The founders of the School of Thought have just launched something new called Kitted Thinking Tools K I T T E D Thinking Tools and the way this works is you go to the website, you pick out the kit that you want, there's tons of them, and the School of Thought will send you a kit of very nice, beautifully designed, well curated, high quality. Each one about double the size of a playing Card, Matte Cello 400 GSM stock prompt cards and a nice magnetically latching box that you can use to facilitate workshops, level up brainstorming and creative thinking sessions, optimize user and customer experience and design and elevate strategic planning and decision making, mitigate risks and liabilities, and much, much more. Each kit can, if you want to use it this way, interact with this crazy cool app. Each card has a corresponding digital version with examples and templates and videos and step by step instructions and more. You even get PowerPoint and Keynote templates. There's so many ways you could use this. Here's some ideas. If you're a venture capital investor, you could get the Investors Critical Thinking Kit and use it to stress test and evaluate different startups for Series A funding. If you're a User Experience Designer, you can get the User Design Kit to put together a workshop with internal stockholders for a software product. Or if you're an HR professional, you could mix and match these kits to create a complete professional development learning program tailored specifically for your team over the course of the next two years. So if you're the kind of person who is fascinated with critical thinking and motivated reasoning and intellectual humility and biases, fallacies and heuristics, you know, the sort of person who listens to podcasts like you are not so smart. You're probably the kind of person who would love these decks. If you're curious, you can get a special 50% off offer. That's right, half off offer right here. You can get half off off of one of these kits by heading to Kitted Shop K I T T E D Shop and using the code smart50 at checkout. That's smart50 at checkout. 5% of the profits will go back to the School of Thought so you're supporting a good cause that distributes free critical thinking tools all over the world on top of receiving a set of thinking superpowers in a box. Check all of this out at Kitted Shop or just click the link in the show notes. And now we return to our program. Welcome back to the youe Are not so Smart podcast. I'm David McCraney. Our guest in this episode is Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who is a writer for the New Yorker magazine and the New York Times. Best selling author of the Power of Habit and Smarter, Faster, Better. Charles's new book is Super Communicators. And I consider it a blood brother to my book How Minds Change because it serves as a very practical guide, in addition to being a very approachable book in every way to what makes great conversations work. The psychology, the science, plus lots of stories from the history of communication. And in it you will learn how to be understood and how to understand how to connect in ways that super communicators are already able to connect. These people who are very, very good at this sort of thing, either because they sort of have a natural talent or they developed it through some method which he talks about in the book. Charles Duhigg argues in Super Communicators that there are three dominant forms of practical. What is this really about? Emotional, how do we feel? And social. Who are we? Practical is sort of the problem solving, goal achieving kind of conversation. Emotional is, hey, I want to share some feelings and see how they play. And social is gossip and status and understanding your identity and the identity of others. And if you don't know what kind of conversation you're having, communication will break down. And you've probably experienced this. And that's just the beginning. We won't get to everything in the book, but I'm sure you will enjoy this conversation. Here we go. Charles Duhigg. Hey, man. Hey there. How are you?
- [34:20]
Charles Duhigg
How are you?
- [34:20]
David McRaney
How are you?
- [34:21]
Charles Duhigg
Good. It's been a little while.
- [34:23]
David McRaney
It's been a minute, huh?
- [34:25]
Charles Duhigg
Yeah, yeah. How are you doing?
- [34:27]
David McRaney
Who knows?
- [34:31]
Charles Duhigg
My name is Charles Duhigg. I'm a writer at the New Yorker magazine and I am the author of Super Communicators how to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.
- [34:40]
David McRaney
Okay. I read your book. I read every single word of it. And this could not be more preaching to the choir. Like this is this, this book and the book that I put out a year and plus ago. They are like blood brothers. This is so cool. There are many things in there that I identified as like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, he's going to talk about this. And it's awesome. And there were many things there. I was like, damn, I wish I had said it like that.
- [35:04]
Charles Duhigg
No, I love your book and I do think you're right that they're very closely aligned, particularly in that they want. They recognize that anyone can get better at connecting with other people or communicating with them or making their themselves heard and sort of change minds together. And that, that it's really just a set of skills, right? Like it's not something that anyone's born with or that you have to be an extrovert or charismatic. It's just a set of skills that literally anyone can learn. And, and that's really powerful because once you recognize that, then it means like, oh, you can do this. Like anyone can do this.
- [35:43]
David McRaney
Absolutely, absolutely. I. The bits and pieces that I was familiar with that I've taken with me to, to like workshops or whatever, I've shown people on stage. I get that from people. They're astonished that like, oh wait, this makes sense to me. Oh wait, I could take this and do this like right now, or I'm doing it right now in this conversation, you know, and oftentimes it's like, oh, I just have to not do what I the. I just have to undo something that I was already doing or be very mindful. All these things played into it. And then of course, what I love is that everything is backed by science. And you do such an incredible job of pointing out the research, picking out incredible stories to illustrate what's going on and. But just like I was saying before, my God, you are in a master of structure. I, I was very meta, meta, meta while reading it going, damn, this dude's good at this. That's really nice of you to say. Was so well done. Like we're going to talk about this, then here's a little thing and then we're going to say about this and here's some science and here's a story and then submit and then where are we at? Well, I'll.
- [36:44]
Charles Duhigg
I'll tell you the dirty secret, which is that. So I love thinking about structure because the thing that I. The thing that I think is so important is. And your book does this and my book is. My books are filled with. It is finding really compelling stories, right? Really suspenseful stories, really emotional stories. And the reason why is because you can be exposed to as much research and as much science as there exists and we will all forget it if we do not have some kind of story or narrative to embed it in. Right. It's so much easier to remember that lesson when I've told you how someone has used the lesson before than just telling you what the lesson is. And so, as a result, the number one priority for me is number one, the two priorities are to have strong, real science, strong advice that's actually useful, and then to have a story that's really compelling, whether it's about, you know, in super communicators, about how the CIA recruits people, or about how a jury, a jury, like, deliberates whether someone should go to prison. And because I, I want to tell the story so badly, I have to think about structure. Because the problem with a story is a story on its own has its own momentum. Like it, there's no place in which it's obvious where you ought to pause and introduce the science. And so the only way that you can do that is just as, you know, just think, think a lot about the structure even before you start writing.
- [38:08]
David McRaney
Yes, you, I, I, I could, I could waste our entire time together today talk about just structure. Because I, I, it's, it ends up being all I, all you think about all day long. And like, how do I get this? I know what I want to do. How do I get, how do I con, how do I keep the reader going? How do I keep the momentum up? How do I convince you?
- [38:27]
Charles Duhigg
That's always the core question. How can I convince you to turn the page and keep reading?
- [38:32]
David McRaney
Yeah, well, at the same time, not tricking you and not like, like, like, exactly.
- [38:36]
Charles Duhigg
And there's so many books who don't. Right. There's so many books who say, like, I just have good stuff to teach you. Like, you ought to, you ought to read this. Which is kind of like saying, like, spinach is really good for you. Everyone, Kale is really healthy. You ought to eat kale. There's no one on this planet who's like, I'm just looking forward to eating some kale, man. I'm just going to tear into that. So I think the thing is that you have to figure out how to make it so that someone has to turn that page. They gotta find out what happened next.
- [39:02]
David McRaney
One, the number one thing is always look at as we're doing it right now. By the way, I hope you've noticed that in this conversation, we keep doing one. And there's another principle there. How about, like, we can't stop. I was very impressed that in Super Communicators, in the introduction, you almost give it all Away along the way, you're often giving it all away. You're like, this. Here's the thing, here's the thing. If you wanted to, you could look at that. And it never takes away from the book because.
- [39:31]
Charles Duhigg
Oh, that's nice to hear.
- [39:32]
David McRaney
That's really, really, like, in a sort of a meta way, you're like, being very vulnerable as the author, but you're also saying this has function and you're going to get something from it. And I'm not worried.
- [39:44]
Charles Duhigg
I wanted it to be really actionable. Like, I wanted people to be able to read this book and, like, get better at communicating, get better at having meaningful conversations, better at connecting with people, with other people, like, in 10 minutes after they put the book down. And the only way that you can do that is you have to give people really clear instructions on how to practice. Because the truth of the matter is that when communicate. When we become super communicators, what we're doing is we're really relying on our habits and our instincts, right? We, we hardly even have to think about how we're communicating because it's so natural to us. And, and our brains are actually wired to, to do this naturally. We have these inborn instincts that have made Homo sapiens what we are today. But in order to do that, sometimes you just have to be reminded of how to listen to your instinct, and you have to be able to practice it immediately to let that instinct kind of kick in. And so that's one of the things I tried to do. After each section, there's a guide to using these ideas because I wanted people to sort of read the chapter without having to think about and take notes. And then they get to the guide and it's like, I've done all the note taking for you.
- [40:49]
David McRaney
Yes.
- [40:49]
Charles Duhigg
Like, I can tell you how to make this real. And I just think that that's so helpful.
- [40:53]
David McRaney
It was so impressive because as I'm preparing for the interview, that's what I'm doing. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm getting. And. But after chapter one had its breakdown, I was like, does he do this the whole way through? He. Oh, wow, this is going to be a lot easier. It was really well done. So anyway, you're killing it. And these are just all of this to say, like, from this weird word that we're in. It's great. This has put some wind in my sails for the stuff that I'm working on. Okay. So it's really cool.
- [41:20]
Charles Duhigg
Oh, I appreciate that.
- [41:24]
David McRaney
This really hit Me hard. So. Thanks. Who would you call right now if you're having a bad day? Like, who do you know for sure is the person you would call? And you then ask these incredible follow up questions. That person that is popping your head, is that the funniest person you know? Is that the smartest person you know? And is that sort of the most like charismatic, confident, entertaining person you know? And I was like, son of a bitch. All three of these know. And then you say, so then what is it that they're doing that makes you feel so good? What is going on here?
- [41:59]
Charles Duhigg
And, and, and they're magical. I mean, one of the things we, we know a lot about what super communicators do that make them so effective in conversation. We also know a lot about the consequences, which is they tend to be more popular than other people. They tend to be, but they're popular in a way where it's kind of a nice popularity because they're like invited into conversations, they're invited into leadership positions, they tend to be more financially successful because people are just inviting them into opportunities on a regular basis. So there's these real upsides to learning how to communicate better and to making other people feel like we are connected with them. It triggers all the stuff that's hardwired into our brains by evolution that pays huge dividends to us. It's worth learning.
- [42:44]
David McRaney
Yeah, it is. Again, this isn't just preaching the choir. These are two choirs preaching at each other right now. That's true. That's good. I love this world. I love that there's some psychological terms maybe for what a supercharger communicator is. One of my favorite ones is high centrality participant and core information providers. This is in the context of if you find one of these super communicator individuals in a group of people having a discussion about something. And this really helped me see what's going on with them before I just read your book back to you. Tell people a little bit about what happens, if you will, when researchers are trying to sort out who might be the super communicator in a group group and what they offer to a group that's trying to sync up in some way.
- [43:33]
Charles Duhigg
So there was this experiment done by Beau Cyvers at Dartmouth, which is really interesting. He basically would bring all these people in and he would have them watch these like super ambiguous film clips while he's scanning their brains. And some of them were in foreign languages and he turned off the sound and the subtitles so that like basically you Just saw these, like super confusing scenes of people talking to each other without being able to hear what they were saying. And then they would go into a group and they would have to answer these questions. And after they would answer the questions together, he would have them re watch the clips and he would scan their brain again. And what he found is that our brains are totally different when we watch these clips the first time. But in particularly in some groups, after we have a conversation together, after we make certain decisions and answer certain questions, you know, what's really going on in this scene? What's the relationship between these two characters? After we answer those questions together, our brains become much more similar. And this is actually at the core of what we know about communication, is that it involves neural entrainment. Our brains becoming more and more alike. And the reason why I love this, this particular experiment, Bo found that some of the groups synchronized much more strongly than others. Like, basically, it was almost as if in those groups everybody had decided to like, think the same way, which obviously they didn't say. And he said, look, there must be someone in these groups, each of these groups that's like, causing this. And so he starts looking at it. And what I love is that this, each of those groups actually has a super communicator, or as he refers to it, a high centrality participant. But it's not obvious at first who they are, because oftentimes what the researchers found is that there's one person who, once they sign on to an opinion, everyone else agrees with them, but they don't even realize that they've. That they're agreeing with them because they introduce that opinion so casually. And it's usually an opinion that's built on other people's words and other people's thoughts. It's usually a summation, a consensus of what's been said so far that everyone says, oh yeah, yeah, that's the right answer. Without realizing, this person just shaped that answer by picking and choosing what to include in it. They just assume it comes from everyone. The other thing that was interesting is that, you know, Cyvers, the researcher, his first hypothesis was that super communicators would be these dominant leaders, right? And some groups had someone who would like, assign roles to everyone and like, keep them on task. He actually found that those groups had the least amount of synchrony because what happens is if you have a dominant leader, he kind of pushes everyone into their own heads. He pushes everyone into their own corners. He doesn't create room. So what's the super communicators did is exactly the opposite. They invited people to speak. They made it easier to hear each other. And part of that is that super communicators ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person. And some of them are these things known as deep questions that are really powerful, but a lot of them are things like, oh, what'd you think of that? Oh, what happened next? Oh, what'd you say after that? There are these questions that we almost don't even register as questions, because what they do is they invite us to speak. And that's incredibly powerful, and that helps everyone align.
- [46:49]
David McRaney
This reminds me of something from hostage negotiators. Like, just now, you were like, I will use this as an example, but you're like, they invite us to speak, right?
- [47:00]
Charles Duhigg
It's a great technique, right, to, like, repeat what the person just said to, like, sort of help them.
- [47:06]
David McRaney
And.
- [47:06]
Charles Duhigg
And you're right. They invite us to speak. Like, what I would say is, like, yeah, they invite us to speak. And I would go into details of how they do that. And you're exactly right that sometimes it's just a matter of repeating what the person just said. Definitely. Hostage negotiators use this a lot to prolong a conversation when they don't know what to ask. But what's interesting about that is that why do the. Why does repeating what someone just said, like, the last three words they said, why does it matter? It matters because it shows that we're listening and we're curious. And that's what super communicators do. They signal that they're listening, and they signal that they want to connect, that they are curious about you, that they want to understand you. And it's that wanting, the showing of that wanting that makes all the difference.
- [47:52]
David McRaney
That also one of the things it does, it gives the other person permission to, like, you know, you'll hold back. You're reading the room. You don't want to be cringy. You don't want to take over the conversation. You don't want to make everything about yourself. But this person's giving you a little, like, a little extra permission to. No, no. Do all those things. It's fine. And you're like, oh, yeah, here I go. Right, Right. Yeah, you're elaborating, right? So you're. You're starting to actually make sense of it in a way that it didn't make sense until you started to do this elaboration, do this articulation.
- [48:22]
Charles Duhigg
And that's really powerful what you just said. That There's. You're starting to make sense of it. Because one of the things that we know is, in addition to simply just asking people for more, one of the most powerful things we can do is, is ask certain kinds of questions, which are known as deep questions. And a deep question is something that asks someone about their. Their values or their beliefs or their experiences, sometimes without appearing to. And that this is what's interesting about deep questions is you can ask deep questions that don't seem very deep, and they're really easy to ask. One of my favorite examples is, like, if you bump into someone and you're like, what do you do for a living? And they say, oh, I'm a lawyer. A deep question would be, oh, yeah, what made you decide to go to law school? Or, you know, what's the best part of being a lawyer? Like, what do you love about your job? Those are deep questions, because what they're asking me is, what are the values that led you to this career? What are your experiences that led you to going to law school? What are your beliefs that you carry into work? And if I answer one of those questions, I'm telling you something meaningful about myself. And there's a. There's a basic principle here, which is that if we ask people about the facts of their life, they're often conversational dead ends. But if we ask people how they feel about their life, then usually they open up and blossom. And it also makes it really natural for us to answer that same question ourselves. Oh. Oh, that's why you went to. You went to law school. That's interesting. I went to medical school for a kind of similar reason. Like, what I want. Like, what was important to me was. That doesn't seem like I'm, like, stealing your spotlight. Right. Or it doesn't seem awkward. It seems like I'm sharing. Like, we're both sharing.
- [49:58]
David McRaney
And.
- [49:59]
Charles Duhigg
And we know that there's this instinct for emotional reciprocity when we say something that's a little bit vulnerable. And explaining why I went to law school is a little bit vulnerable. It's very minorly vulnerable, but it is a little bit vulnerable because I'm telling you something about myself that maybe you're going to judge when I say something vulnerable. If you match that vulnerability, we feel closer to each other. We actually listen to each other much more closely.
- [50:25]
David McRaney
Yeah. A lot of what happens in a great conversation is both people get closer to understanding what, wait, why am I doing what I'm doing? Whatever that is. What is driving my behavior? What are My motivators, what are my drives? What did. Like, it helps you feel so much less like an automaton. It helps you feel so much less like you're simply going with whatever flow you found yourself in. Yeah. And it gives you power over your next decision making process. It gives you a little bit of hope and understanding. You write some poetry to yourself about the way you're feeling thanks to this opportunity to elaborate and discover, oh, that's why I'm this way. That's what's. What my value structure is. It's an enormously vulnerable thing to experience with another human being. And it feels unbelievable to establish that level of trust. All that stuff you mentioned in the book.
- [51:14]
Charles Duhigg
Yeah. It feels like a gift in some respects. Right. When somebody helps you understand what you actually want or what you need. And, and it. There's an interesting dynamic that often happens in conversations which is. So maybe the best way to explain this is to tell sort of the origin story of the book.
- [51:33]
David McRaney
I was about to, I was about to do a meta thing. I was waiting, I was waiting for you to like, reach a natural place. And I was going to say, well, that all said. And this is an old journalism trick from back in the day where you, you'd often say, well, that seems really hard. Like the end.
- [51:48]
Charles Duhigg
Stop.
- [51:49]
David McRaney
It's unbelievable. The answers you will get after saying that seems really hard. You could be talking about a sewage line busted at a bowling alley and you went there to report it. And you're talking about how you talk to the city employees who are cleaning it up and they're like, yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you're like, before you go, one of your last questions, like, wow, this seems like it was really hard. Stop, wait. You get incredible answers after that. I. This is something I was going to ask naturally. And you were about to offer it without me having to go there. But why would you even write a book like this where you could get away with writing something a lot more. You could, you could lean on, you could, you could lie back on your laurel leaves from the things you've accomplished.
- [52:30]
Charles Duhigg
I could write Power of Habits, Part 2.
- [52:31]
David McRaney
Right. Power of habit at work. Like, you could totally have done that.
- [52:35]
Charles Duhigg
Exactly. So this is the reason I did it, is because the first thing is I basically write books for problems I have to, so that I can call experts and help. Help ask them to help me solve it. And I had fallen into this pattern that was, that was not a great pattern, which is I would oftentimes come home from work And I would have had a hard day and I would complain to my wife and I'd be like, you know, my boss doesn't understand me and my coworkers don't appreciate me. And she very reasonably would offer me some good advice. She would say something like, why don't you take your boss out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other a little bit better. And instead of being able to hear her, I would get even more upset. And I would say like, why aren't you supporting me? You should be outraged on my behalf. And then she would get upset because I was like attacking her for giving me advice. And this is pretty typical, right People. Everyone who's in a relationship has experienced this before where one person has a problem and they want to discuss it and the other person wants to solve it. And it's frustrating. And I was trying to figure out a, why is it frustrating and B, why does it happen so much. So I started calling up all these experts and saying, you know, I have a friend who has a problem, tell me how to help him solve it. And what they said is, well, it's an interesting time you call because we're living through this golden age of understanding the science of communication because of advances in neural imaging and data collection. And they said one of the biggest things that we've learned is that there. We tend to think of a discussion as being about one thing, like we're talking about my day or we're talking about how to improve our kids grades. But actually every discussion is made up of multiple different kinds of conversations. And in general, most of those conversations fall into one of three buckets. There's usually these practical conversations, right, where we're trying to figure out make a plan together or solve a problem or what's this really about? What are we actually talking about? Then there's emotional conversations. And in an emotional conversation I might tell you how I feel and I don't want you to solve my problem. I don't want a plan. I want you to empathize. I want you to tell me that you understand this feeling. And then there's social conversations, which is about how we relate to each other and how we relate to society. And they said the thing that we've learned, and this gets back to sort of what the work that Beau Ciphers did, is that if you're not have, if everyone isn't having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, then you're not really connecting with each other. You actually will fail to hear each Other fully. And so when you were coming home, you were having an emotional conversation and your wife was having a practical conversation. And those are both perfectly legitimate conversations. But because you weren't having the same kind of conversation at the same time, both of you walked away frustrated. And this is within psychology, it's known as the matching principle, that in order to really connect with each other and to really hear each other, we need to figure out what kind of conversation is going to, going on. I need to match you and I need to invite you to match me. And in a discussion, we might move from different kind of conversation, different kind of conversations. We start emotional, we get practical, we get social, we go back to emotional. But we have to do that together.
- [55:36]
David McRaney
Let's go through, let's go through these for a second because I find all of them deeply compelling. One of the major pieces of advice you have in the book, obviously all this is going to be about connection in the end, but how you connect is going to be a process. And one of them. The, the first thing you need to do is kind of figure out what kind of conversation are we having here or what kind of conversation is the other person looking for? What is the kind of conversation that is most likely to get us to get synced up right now? And you have these three incredible buckets, these three incredible concepts, these types that overlap and weave within each other, but they certainly are particular. One is I, I, in my notes, I thought about the what, what's this about? Conversation is sort of like, okay, this is goals, decision making. We have, we're. We, we have a shared goal or we have a shared problem we're trying to solve. This is this, is this kind of thing really good place for facts and evidence? If maybe, absolutely. But it's in there. It's one of those. And you can be all logical perhaps in this conversation more so than the others. If that's your thing, if you feel like that's what we all should be doing right now. If your favorite people in sci fi are Spock and Data, this conversation's all for you. Then the other next bucket is how do we feel? Which is about trust and vulnerability and internal states and emotional goals. This often is that when people are, I want to talk to you about something. I'm not looking for advice. I'm looking, looking to have someone notice I'm a human being and let's talk about that. But we don't often say that out loud.
- [57:11]
Charles Duhigg
And by the way, in that conversation, that emotional conversation, the how do we feel Conversation, you're exactly. The facts often don't matter at all, right? Like, like, if I tell you I'm feeling sad because, because I feel like my mom doesn't talk to me enough, if you say, well, let's look at the data on how frequently your mom calls you, right? I'm going to convince you that actually she calls you plenty of. I don't want to hear that. I, what I want to do is I want to have an emotional conversation where we acknowledge our feelings and we discuss our feelings. That's what's powerful.
- [57:40]
David McRaney
This comes up so often in relationship advice where there's a lot of, well, why are we talking about this if you don't want to solve the problem? Like, because what a strange thing to think. Which you've, your frustration is oddly placed because you, you were, you have a lack of emotional intelligence that would make your life so much better if you were able to recognize, oh, this is a time for us to like, sync up on emotions and like, explore why that made me feel this way.
- [58:08]
Charles Duhigg
And well, and sometimes one of the things that we know that super communicators do when it comes to that second kind of conversation, the emotional conversation, is that they, they tend to just listen for people to say something emotional and then they lean in a little bit and it's actually happens much more than we think it does. Like, imagine you're at work and it's Monday and you say like, oh, how was your weekend? Right? Because before the meeting starts, you want to make some small talk. Someone might say something like, oh, you know, like, I went to my kids graduation, it was great. Or they might say, oh, it was actually, it was kind of a rough weekend. I've got some stuff going on at home. Now, for most people, particularly in a business setting, your instinct is to say something like, oh, congratulations, or oh, that's too bad, I'm sorry to hear that. Okay, now let's go on to the agenda. Now let's have this practical discussion. But what super communicators do is they'll take a minute just to validate and acknowledge they heard some emotion and ask about it. They'll say something like, oh, man, that's amazing. Like, what did you feel like watching your son walk across that stage? Or, I'm sorry you had a tough weekend. Like, you know, I, I've definitely, I've had stuff going on in my life. If you ever want to talk about it, I'm here to talk about it with you. Just acknowledging that something emotional has been said that all of a sudden creates an opportunity for us to really bond with each other. Because even if that other person doesn't take it up, even if they're like, yeah, the graduation was great, or they're like, thank you so much, like, I think, I think I got it taken care of now they know that you're available for that kind of conversation. And those are some of the most meaningful conversations we have at home and at work.
- [59:43]
David McRaney
Absolutely. You've expressed a vulnerability, they've expressed vulnerability and nothing bad happened, which absolutely starts to secure you in a position with this person. Like, I'm going to return to that person, this person and I could work things out. Also, being a person's weird, the fact that we're conscious, whatever that means, on top of all this social primate bio stuff, sometimes I feel feelings. And just talking about it with another person helps me feel like I've got a little better handle on feeling those feelings again in the future. That's difficult to do by yourself. And even if it's something simple like, you know, this weekend, you know, I had had a graduation and blah, blah, like, and that I've had conversations, conversations like that that leaned into. We started having a discussion about mortality and what that feels like. And I left that conversation a more fully realized, better human being who had grown a little bit, leveled up a teeny tiny bit. I could have. Small talk would have destroyed that.
- [60:49]
Charles Duhigg
Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting that something you just said, because we talked a little bit about the practical conversation and the emotional conversation, but this third bucket of conversations, the social conversation, oftentimes when we're trying to process something or even just make sense of something, there's our own relationship with it. But also we know that the relationship to whatever we're thinking about also happens in the context of society. Right? Like, it's not just that. It's not just that I felt proud watching my kid walk across the stage. It's that I also feel proud telling other people about it. Like, I feel like this is like a family legacy. Like, like, you know, we managed to do something that my parents gave me something and I gave my kids something, or my parents didn't give me anything and I was even a better parent and I gave my kids something. The ways that we relate to other people are really, really important. And the only ways that we actually can process them is usually by discussing them with other people. This is why office gossip, study after study shows office gossip is actually incredibly valuable. And the reason why it's so valuable is because it allows you to communicate, particularly to new people, the norms of a particular culture and how that culture works without having to spell it all out. Because sometimes you can't spell it all out. So when someone says, like, oh, Carol, she, like, always, like, gets her. Her expense forms in late, or, you know, Jim, Jim, just like he, like, he hits on every woman. What we're really saying is these are behaviors that we don't appreciate here. And, and that's really powerful. And those are social conversations. Those are conversations about other people, about ourselves, about how we relate to other people. And that's really. That's really meaningful because oftentimes we figure out who we are by talking about how we relate to others.
- [62:44]
David McRaney
Yes. This keeps coming up over and over in the book. The these. It feels. I can. I can almost see someone who would like, oh, I'm how to Win Friends and Influence People. I get this all the time with my stuff, which is people. They think that that's what they're getting from my stuff, and then they get it. They're like, the way. It's not what I wanted. I wanted to. I wanted to be. To safely use the tools of sociopaths and, and then, and then so much of super communicators to become a super communicator. What you're doing is helping the people around you figure out who they are, what they want, why they are, are how to navigate the being a person. And in so doing, they will reciprocate that back at you. And that's exactly right. It's. That is the way we powerfully communicate with one another. And you're not going to achieve these strange sociopathic goals because it's the absolute opposite of all that.
- [63:37]
Charles Duhigg
That's exactly right. So I think super communicators, in addition to showing you that they want to connect with you, they understand that the goal of every conversation is to understand each other. The goal of conversation is not to convince you of something. The goal of the conversation is not even to find a common ground. The goal, the conversation is a success. If I understand what you've been saying to me, and I speak in a way that you understand what I'm trying to tell you. If that happens and that's a success. And so if you go in saying, this is my goal, my goal is just to understand, then you end up having this thing that's called a learning conversation, and it just happens naturally. You tend to ask more questions because your job is to understand the other person. The only way you can do that is by asking questions. We also tend to speak in ways that are. That sound unjudgmental to other people. Look, you know, I. From my perspective. Let me tell you how I see this differently. Rather than. Rather than telling someone they're wrong, we tend to talk about ourselves. So if we go into a conversation and we just say to ourself, I'm going to talk to you like my crazy Uncle Jimmy. I know he's got these, like, screwball political ideas. My goal is not to convince him that he is a screwball. My goal is to con is just to understand what he's actually saying and to ask him to understand me. That lowers the bar so much on that conversation. And you're right, that is completely different from the I want to persuade you to agree with me and there's a place for persuasion. But what we know is that, as you've written, persuasion becomes more effective when it's. When it's encased in trying to understand each other.
- [65:16]
David McRaney
Almost all of it is there. Like the. If your goal is to. To both parties have the most accurate, factual understanding of the world, having an understanding conversation like you're describing makes that a whole lot more likely because that's outside of both of you anyway.
- [65:32]
Charles Duhigg
Like you.
- [65:33]
David McRaney
Neither one of you has gone to space. Neither one of you knows for sure the earth is round. How are we going to figure this out together? What's the good evidence? Where's the evidence coming from? Who to trust? We have to get on the same page as to how we approach the world and what infects us and what motivates us and how we are affected by it and what you've experienced, that makes it much more likely that the actual evidence will do its work. If we're having a different kind of conversation with the emotional kind of conversation you're describing. I cannot honestly operate through the world till I have a pretty good understanding of what's actually motivating me so I can be prepared for it in the future. Same for you. If we both do that together, we become better at doing that. Whatever it is we're both trying to achieve, like we're trying to negotiate. I want this and you want that. What's the third thing we could do that we both want that might align. If it's a moral issue, like getting to the bottom of what actually is the best, what actually is moral, what is ethical, what is the thing that is right? We can't have that conversation if we haven't synced up in a way that makes it possible. For us to have that difficult of a conversation. So all of it plays to. Plays in well.
- [66:35]
Charles Duhigg
And there's a. There's a pretty easy technique for this. I think I mentioned it before. Looping for understanding.
- [66:41]
David McRaney
I love this.
- [66:41]
Charles Duhigg
Yeah. So this is something that they teach at, like, Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School and at Stanford and University of Michigan. And it's just this very, very simple technique that they kind of instruct students to use, particularly during a tough conversation. Particularly like if we're talking about something where we disagree with each or there's some conflict. And there's three steps to this looping for understanding. The first is ask a question, right? And preferably a deep question, if you can. It can be just a simple question. Then listen to what the person says. And then step two is repeat back in your own words what you just heard them say, but make sure it's in your own words. Right. Don't just mimic them instead, like, even if you have to take a second and process what they're telling you, repeat back what you think they're trying to tell you. And then step number three, and this is the one everyone always forgets, is ask if you got it right. And the reason why this is so powerful is not only because. Does it convince the other person I'm listening to them, it proves to them that I'm listening. Sometimes we get in our own heads, and even though we want to understand someone, we fall into this trap where we're just waiting for our turn to speak. Right? Like, instead of actually listening to the other person, we. We want to listen, but we're just coming up with our counter arguments. We're. We're like, no, that's not right. Right.
- [67:58]
David McRaney
We're.
- [67:58]
Charles Duhigg
We're getting ready for a rebuttal. But if your assignment to yourself is, man, you gotta first before you say anything else, you gotta repeat back what this person just said and then ask if you got it right. And if their answer is no, you have to ask another question and go through the loop again. If that's your assignment to yourself, you've basically hacked yourself into listening more closely.
- [68:18]
David McRaney
It's so, so it seems so simple because it's three steps, but inside each one of those steps are multiple infinities of possibilities.
- [68:25]
Charles Duhigg
That's exactly right.
- [68:26]
David McRaney
It's so great. Ask questions. Preferably questions that will get at the person's true motivations, true reasons, the actual factors that are churning up into emotional states. Then when you summarize it back, you do so like the greatest lawyer who's ever existed. Like on his history. Like, seems to me you'll say like, like if you need to put on the accent, do that. I.
- [68:51]
Charles Duhigg
Right.
- [68:52]
David McRaney
It helps me.
- [68:52]
Charles Duhigg
And sometimes it can just be a question, right? It can, it can just be like a really good follow up question. Is looping for understanding because you, you know, like, let me ask you one more question about what you just said because like you're, you're still proving that you listened. Right. And it seems less formal than being like, what I hear you say, sir is. But either of them work.
- [69:14]
David McRaney
Yeah. And. And then that crucial one is because like I've spent years and years writing about this, that there's a. The. One of the worst things you can do is, is. Is think you understand something when you don't. You know, the. It's, it's, it's that old bit of wisdom that's always attributed to somebody, usually Mark Twain, who knows who actually said it. It's not what you, it's not what you don't know that gets you in trouble. Is what you know for sure there just ain't true. Yeah. That third part of the loop gets that out of the way. Ask the other person if you got it right. Like it seems like you're saying to me, let me know if I'm wrong here, if I'm understanding those correctly. Those kind of questions are huge. And each loop makes the conversation grow in size, in its power and magnitude and strength to actually affect each other's understanding of themselves, the world and plan and make goals and negotiate whatever you're doing doing with this conversation. That loop gets faster, stronger, and bigger each step you go. And it's great.
- [70:12]
Charles Duhigg
It's great. And it's really powerful in part because. And I'm sure you've experienced this. I definitely have. Where someone will say, what I hear you saying is this, Did I get it right? And I realize, no, you didn't get it right. But that's because I did a bad job of explaining it because I didn't actually understand what I wanted you to take away from the.
- [70:30]
David McRaney
This.
- [70:30]
Charles Duhigg
Right. Like my wife says, what I hear you saying is that like your boss is a jerk. And I say, no, no, no, no, no. Actually what it is is that like my boss is talking to me at the wrong times. And so, and so it's hard for me to connect with him when he like, needs help. Like sometimes asking that did I get it right? Is as much a gift to the other person to help them clarify their thoughts as it is to help you make sure that you've understood even if.
- [70:59]
David McRaney
You wander into like, wait, I actually don't know what comes next territory that's enormous. Like, what I'm hearing you saying is this and this. Like, no, that's not what I'm saying. Well then what are you saying? Huh? What am I saying is a great moment in any conversation. Why is that? Why does this matter to me? Why does this affect me? Why do I want your help? Oh my God. That's a great place to get with another human being. Be the third bucket was. And we talked about it pretty much was, you know, who are we? There was so much in there. And you threaded the needle perfectly in the book about social identity, getting the vac. That was my experience too. Like I learned a whole lot about identity stuff through Anti Vaxxers.
- [71:38]
Charles Duhigg
Yeah.
- [71:38]
David McRaney
And you did a great job of talking about them. I loved when you were talking about doctors. Like, don't talk to people in a way that turns you into, I'm a member of the expert tribe and you, you're a member of the ignorant tribe. Well, that ruins the whole damn thing.
- [71:50]
Charles Duhigg
Oh, totally. If you start the conversation by telling me that I don't have a role in this conversation, it's going to be really hard for us to talk to each other.
- [71:59]
David McRaney
I love the story you tell about the doctor is trying to talk to a vaccine hesitant person and they use many of the things we discussed, including like motivational interviewing, to get at what is actually motivating you. And that person was able to express some things, like a lot of my feelings. I'm a very religious person and for some reason that was a big part of their, their motivating, their motivations. They, at least they believed that had something to do with it and that like, you know, God's gonna, wants to kill me, God's gonna kill me, that kind of thing. You're a science person and parts of me think maybe you're atheistic or something like that. And I'm not sure I trust. So there's, that's how they were taking their, their, their fears and anxieties and narrating them. And the doctor walked away. If you remember it off the top of your head. I love what they told what the doctor.
- [72:46]
Charles Duhigg
So what the doctor does is, I mean, so the underlying principle here is that oftentimes if we reduce a conversation to just one identity that each of us has, that's disastrous. Right. If you're the doctor, I'm the patient. If you're the religious person and I'm the person of science. It's almost inevitable that we're going to feel identity threat, that we're going to. That we're not going to hear each other. So the way that we, we counter this is we invite all the many multitude of identities that we all possess into the room. But I'm also a father, and I'm a lawyer, and I'm a little league coach, and I'm a brother, and, and, and you might be a doctor and I'm a patient, but you're a parent, and I'm a parent and you go to the same park that I go to, and you're frustrated by the politicians the same way I'm frustrated by the politicians. Once we introduce all these other identities into the room, then we can have a conversation. That's exactly what happened with Dr. Chimi, who is this, like, wonderful doctor in Portland. This guy comes in and he says, you know, he's wearing a mask and, and he says. She says, do you want the, the vaccine? And he says, no, I'm deeply religious and I believe that God will take care of me because I'm washing my hands, like God, God's will will guide me through. And Dr. Shami is like, oh, nuts. Like, she's thinking to herself, she's like, what am I going to say to this person? Like, I. There's no, there's no medical answer that's going to make any sense to him. If that's the, if that's, there's no medical answer that out that trumps religion. And so instead of trying to convince him, what she just says is, she says, you know, I don't usually talk about religion at work, but I just feel so, like, fortunate that God gave us the tools we needed to come up with a vaccine. And, and I imagine, you know, I, I know that you're a grandfather and I'm a, I'm a, I'm a parent myself. I know that both of us, like, what we most care about is we most care about, like, the safety of our kids. And sometimes I see these kids come in and they've gotten sick because they're around family members that are unvaccinated and there's nothing I can do for them because at that point it's too late. They just have to sort of write out the illness. And that's all she says. And then she says, thank you so much for coming in. I'll see you next time. She leaves the room. She never says, I really think you should get the vaccine. She never says, if I were you, I'd get the vaccine. She hardly even makes an argument. She just acknowledges these other identities. We are both parents. We both care about the safety of our kids. The guy sticks around. He, like, stays in the exam room and she sees him in there like 15 or 20 minutes later and she's like, what's going on? And they're like, oh, he asked for the vaccine. We're just preparing to give it to him, like, of his own accord. Because once you say to someone, look, you contain multitudes, and those multitudes, they see things differently. So let's talk about how they see things differently. Then suddenly people can start listening to other voices inside their own head.
- [75:44]
David McRaney
Sam that is it for this episode of the you are not so Smart podcast. For links to everything that we talked about, head to you are not so smart.com or check the show notes inside your podcast player. You can find all of Charles Duhigg stuff over at charlesduhigg.com that's doohic d u h I g g charleS-U-H I g.com you can find my book how minds Change wherever they put books on shelves and ship books and trucks. Details, though, are over@davidmcraney.com and I have links to all of that in the show notes as well. On my homepage you can also find a roundtable video video with a group of persuasion experts who are featured in the book. You can read a sample chapter, download a discussion guide, sign up for the newsletter, read reviews and more. For all of the past episodes of this podcast, go to Stitchers, SoundCloud, Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, Audible, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or you are not so smart.com follow me on Twitter avidmcraney. Follow the ShowotsmartBlog. We're also on Facebook, you are not so Smart. And if you'd to like like to support this operation, hear that full conversation with the people over at NASA. I'll put that up the day after this comes out. Go to patreon.com you are not so Smart. Pitching in any amount will get you the show ad free, but higher amounts will get you posters, T shirts, signed, books and other stuff. The opening music, that's Clash by Caravan Palace. And if you really, really, really want to support the show, all you have to do really is just tell everyone you know about it. Share episodes that meant something to you that felt like you got something out of them. Share those, pass those along and check back in about two weeks for a fresh new episode.
- [78:26]
Charles Duhigg
With my job, I can't drink during the week. Weekends are a different story. After eight hours of this, I have earned my wine. You know what I'm saying? My family is a lot. It takes me four beers just to.
- [78:40]
David McRaney
Hang out with them. Binge drinking isn't all college kids doing cake stands. Oregonians in their 30s and 40s binge.
- [78:46]
Charles Duhigg
Drink at close to the same rates.
- [78:48]
David McRaney
As younger people, raising our risk for long term health problems. More@rethinkthedrink.com an OHA initiative.