The Science of Conversation: How To Say What You Mean, Be Heard, and Stop People-Pleasing | Alison Wood Brooks

24:11Alison Wood Brooks:The 1700s is a pretty logical place to start. It was called the Age of Conversation because it was the first time that people started realizing they could have conversations in the way that they wanted to. Before that, the monarchies, the kings and queens, had put a lot of pressure on people to have conversation in specific ways about specific topics, and it was sort of very tightly controlled. So then we track sort of how things evolved as people realize, oh, I have more autonomy here than I thought. We zoom in on Immanuel Kant, who was a very famous philosopher and who used to host dinner parties during the age of conversation.

24:52Alison Wood Brooks:And he kind of came up with his own dinner party rules to make sure that his dinner party conversation was mutually enjoyable for everybody who was lucky enough to get an invitation. We go past the age of conversation and the Enlightenment and move towards more social mixing, right? And during the Industrial Revolution, agrarian societies, the people kind of came into cities and there was more social mixing between classes. And so you can see over time, oh, well, now what are we going to talk about? Now what are we allowed? Who are we allowed to talk to? When I run into somebody on the street, what am I allowed to say?

25:29Alison Wood Brooks:And so the rules and norms and expectations of what conversation was and what you could use it for evolved over time. And now, of course, we find ourselves in a pretty wild digital age of conversation where we're sort of standing in a room the size of the world, right? Like we can talk to, I'm putting air quotes, talk to more people in more ways than ever before in human history. And I think that's exerting pretty profound pressure on our brains. I'll plus one that. Last question before we get into the talks framework. You use this phrase that I really like, the myth of naturalness, by which you're pointing to something I think, if I understand you correctly, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, that we may have a story of we're not a good conversationalist, we're not good people, we're not good with other people, et cetera, et cetera.

26:27But actually, this is a skill, not a factory setting.

26:31Alison Wood Brooks:Yeah, it's a skill, not just a gift. It's not just a natural talent. We watch other people having conversations all the time. Even listeners here, they're like listening to us having conversation and they're thinking to themselves, oh, this is going well or this is not going well or that bothered me or I love that. We're constantly watching and listening and trying to like learn and we're like judging people. And so when we see things go well, it's so easy to make that attribution and say like, oh, well, that person's just really good at this. They're really good at conversation. They're talented.

27:05Alison Wood Brooks:Not only are they good at it and gifted, it's coming to them on the spot. They're like spontaneously coming up with great ideas and amazing jokes. And it's just all easy. And like so many other skills, you don't see the little duck feet under the water paddling wildly with how much work is happening right then in the moment during the conversation. but also the years of skill development that any other human has put into this, that you, you know, the hundreds of thousands of conversations you've had that have led you to the point to conduct a podcast interview in this way, and the hundreds of thousands of conversations that I've had talking and thinking about conversation, talking on podcasts, spending 15 years writing a book, right?

27:57Alison Wood Brooks:Like none of this comes to us spontaneously. And yet for some reason, conversation gives the impression that it does come spontaneously and that it should come spontaneously. When we stumble and trip and feel awkward and don't know what to say or like say stuff we regret, it makes us feel like, oh, I'm just not good at this. It's this myth of naturalness. I'm either not good at conversation, I don't like it, or the person I was talking to isn't good at it and I don't like talking to them. So we make these sort of negative attributions that often are undeserved. Yeah, I mean, most of us, when we watch LeBron James play basketball, if we ever watch sports on television, we know that he has a mixture of natural skill and an enormous amount of practice.

28:48And yet we don't put conversation in the same bucket. I think one of the many services you're providing here is helping us to think about conversation as a trainable skill.

29:01Alison Wood Brooks:Yeah. And I sometimes wonder why. Why do we think of LeBron James playing basketball differently than we do about conversation? I think there's a lot to it, right? Like everybody's doing it in a way. It feels like it should be second nature. It almost feels like it's this thing that's built into being a human being. And therefore, it should be easy and natural. And I should be not only great at it, but almost like perfect at it by the time I get to adulthood. When you really look under the hood of conversation, you see how messy it is. It's more like a train wreck. And even the best conversationalists have so much room for improvement.

29:39Alison Wood Brooks:not even room for improvement as much as like they know that it's going to be bad and they've developed strategies to deal with that messiness. Well said. Coming up, Alison Wood Brooks talks about how to develop conversational skills and how to avoid some common conversational pitfalls, some granular tactical pieces of advice on how to have a conversation and some science around conversation that may surprise you.

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32:57Alison Wood Brooks:Yeah, I think we all have an intuitive understanding of what topics are, right? It's like the things we talk about. The reason that I, as a behavioral scientist and as a person, find this one so exciting is that our brains actually do this naturally. We're really good at taking a conversation or a chunk of text. and our brains sort of naturally catalog it and categorize it into these chunks. So we can look back on any of your podcast episodes, any conversation, any book and say, oh yeah, here were the chapters or like here are the five main pastures that they covered in this conversation. And we're all pretty good at that.

33:38Alison Wood Brooks:Our brains were built to do that. What's so exciting about this ability to chunk conversation into topics means we can use that ability to help us manage topics better as a conversation unfolds. And so as a scientist who's like constantly looking for easy strategies that can help people, this level of analysis, this topic chunking skill can help us before a conversation starts, during a conversation, and after it. For example, before a conversation, what we have found through experiments is thinking about some flexible topics that you might want to talk about with somebody is incredibly helpful.

34:24Alison Wood Brooks:Not just for podcast hosts who have like a list of things they're working through, but literally every conversation that you have in your life. Spending even 30 seconds thinking about your mom before you call her and saying, okay, what's going on in her life? What will she find interesting to talk about? What do I need to remember to raise in this conversation? What will delight us together in our relationship? Just those 30 seconds makes the conversation so much better. It reduces your anxiety when you very predictably confront moments where you're like, oh, shit, I know I need to talk about something else, but I don't know what that thing should be because it means you have like a little list of options in your back pocket.

35:05Alison Wood Brooks:It helps you remember to talk about stuff that you mean to talk about. So many conversations where you're like, oh, shoot, I forgot to ask them about the guitar lessons they started or like, oh, at work, I meant to ask them about this. Right. So it helps you remember to do the things you want to do. And it just gets rid of the disfluency. So ums, uhs, stutters, weird pauses. It just smooths out the boundaries between topics. it also leads us to, on average, discuss more topics because you're able to move more fluidly between them. And discussing more topics is another life hack that, on average, helps people have better conversations.

35:46Alison Wood Brooks:When we ask people, did you talk about the right number of topics after a conversation has ended, about 60 % of people say, yeah, we covered the right amount of topics. Among the 40 % of people who say, no, we didn't cover the right amount of topics, you are much more likely, about three times as likely to say that you didn't talk about enough things. So the most common mistake is stagnating and staying too long, like circling the drain on a topic and not moving to something else. And I think knowing that is so empowering because as soon as something starts to lag, you should feel very empowered to assertively switch to something else.

36:28Alison Wood Brooks:It's not rude. It's actually helpful to this joint endeavor of conversation. One of your little maxims under the T or topics part of the talk framework is that small talk isn't the enemy. Yeah, it's very linked to this idea of topic switching, the speed that you're switching topics. I had no idea. Dan, do you hate small talk? I don't love it. I live in the suburbs and there's a lot of like suburban norm core discussions of lawn care and shit like that. Kid bedtimes. Yeah. Yeah. That can be hard. So I actually didn't, on a personal note, didn't realize how much small talk people are having in their lives and how much they hate it until I started teaching this course and had sort of hundreds of students who were like, how do I fix my small talk problem?

37:26Alison Wood Brooks:And I realized, and I know this is like a little bit of an extended humble brag, but I don't really do small talk. My tolerance for it is so low that I just move past it immediately. So what I figured out in my research is like, oh, I need to help other people do that too. It's not that the small talk topics are bad. It's that we stay on them for too long. And that dutiful feeling of staying on talking about your lawn for too long happens really fast. Like probably one turn in the conversation is more than enough. And then you should say like, oh, like, what are you worried about with your house?

38:03Alison Wood Brooks:How's that? Are you happy with where you live? Right? Like getting more personal, asking follow-up questions. So often will start with something like, oh, I'm not happy with my landscaper or whatever. And we fail to ask a follow-up question that could actually turn that topic into something much more exciting to talk about by asking a follow-up question. So follow-up questions help us get away from it and also personal disclosure. So saying like, you know what? My parents like took shit care of my yard when I was a kid. And now it actually matters so much to me. It's like embarrassing. Let me tell you the insane things that I've done in my yard to compensate for this trauma from my youth.

38:47Alison Wood Brooks:Right. Like like bringing up sharing something vulnerable about yourself on that topic and help you move away from the boringness of it and move to a more interesting and personalized place. I love that. What is the topic pyramid? Yeah, so this is exactly. So in the book, we talk about this pyramid that has three levels. The bottom level are topics that you could talk about with anybody. This is like, how was your weekend? Let's talk about the weather. How are you sleeping? How are the kids? Those topics aren't bad. In fact, it's sort of the ritual we've all developed in order to connect quickly with people we don't know that well, strangers that we know nothing about, people we haven't seen in a while that we need to catch up and we don't really know where to start.

39:35Alison Wood Brooks:Again, the problem that we need to be avoiding is getting stuck at the base of the pyramid for too long. So whatever your topic is, like, hey, I see you're wearing a black shirt, take that topic and move up the pyramid quickly. The second layer of the pyramid is slightly more tailored topics. So it can be tailored in many ways. It could be, you know that someone seems excited about this topic, so they're just interested. It could tap into their expertise. Like, oh, someone who likes fashion would really like to talk about the fabric of their shirt and other people don't give a shit. Like, you got to figure that out.

40:10Alison Wood Brooks:Or it can involve personal disclosure. So making yourself vulnerable, sharing something embarrassing or something you're proud of. Feelings-based sharing is often helpful. but getting out of that base of the pyramid that's mundane small talk to tailored talk. At the top of this topic pyramid is deep talk. And not every conversation needs to get there. I don't actually want to have a deep conversation with my husband the second I get home from work, probably almost ever. But some conversations get to that point and you can feel when you're there. It's like you can only talk about that topic with that set of people in that moment in that way.

40:51Alison Wood Brooks:And that is just so thrilling. So when you get there, you should try and appreciate like, hey, we did the journey of conversation and we actually found this amazing moment. We're going to come back down the pyramid. We're going to keep going up and down the pyramid throughout our conversations, fostering a little bit more awareness of where you are appreciating it and don't get stuck at the base for too long. It's really helpful. I'm going to zip through the talk framework because I also have a million questions on the backside of it, too. So we talked about T topics. A is asking. What should we know about asking?

41:28Great question.

41:30Alison Wood Brooks:Top line advice. Ask more questions. It's so basic. It's so fundamental and perhaps not even that surprising, but doing it is so important. Question asking unlocks everything that makes conversations good. that interactivity, that ping-pong-y sharing of information, showing someone that you actually care to learn what's in their mind, listening to their answers, all of that. If you just say to yourself, I need to ask more questions, it's a little intervention that people can actually do. Like you say to yourself, I need to ask more questions, and people actually do ask more questions. That's amazing.

42:09Alison Wood Brooks:And when they do ask more questions, then you get beyond that top line advice of just ask more, which already is going to help you get more second dates. It's going to help doctor's appointments go better. You're going to have better relationships. Your work meetings are going to go better. You have better friendships, all of it. Just ask more questions. Leave no conversation having asked zero questions. We call those ZQs, zero questioners. It's like the death knell for conversation and relationships. And we've all been in those, you know, like you've all been on a date where nobody asked you something and you go absolutely bonkers.

42:43Alison Wood Brooks:But once you move past this top line advice, there are really super heroic question types. And one of the most heroic question types are follow-up questions that follow up on anything that your partner has already said. It shows that you are listening to them. It shows that you want to know more. So curiosity, it's almost a guaranteed way to escape small talk. So if we're talking about your yard, I could say like, do you have a landscaper or not? And then from there, I don't have a landscaper because I can't afford it. Like, do you know somebody who's like a pretty good price range, right? Like all of a sudden we're now out of lawn care and moving into like finances and like sharing of our personal views on manual labor, right?

43:28Alison Wood Brooks:Like that's so much more interesting and follow-up questions help us get there. Another heroic question type are open-ended questions that don't constrain your partner's answers to yes, no, or some other predetermined set of answers, but let them answer however they want. What we have found in our research is that open-ended questions elicit more than twice the word count from your partner, right? It's so like they are sharing so much more information with you and a higher proportion of that information is actually useful as well, especially in negotiations, like where learning is the whole game.

44:10Alison Wood Brooks:When we looked at the wording of open-ended questions, we found something that I find quite helpful. Questions that start with the word why, like why are you sitting in that studio? Why do you have that kind of camera? Why do you have the number of children you have? Can feel very accusatory. It's almost saying like there must be something wrong with what you've chosen to do. Now tell me your motives. whereas questions that start with the word what, what did you think about when you were designing your podcast studio? What were you feeling when you did your first interview there? What are the pros and cons of having one child or three children?

44:47Alison Wood Brooks:That is way less threatening and you actually elicit more information from people. It strikes a sweet spot between information disclosure and relational outcomes like likability and safety. This advice of ask more questions is fantastic and immediately operationalizable by people in the audience. And I'm sure you're anticipating this question I'm going to ask you. It can go pear shaped like I have been accused many times of interrogating. So how to avoid that pitfall? Do you get that accusation most commonly in interviews and in work conversations or outside of work? Outside of work. I mean, when I'm interviewing somebody, that's the deal.

45:35So I'm allowed to do that. But it's more like it hasn't happened so much recently. But yeah, once in a while, somebody will say, like, I feel like I'm being interviewed. And I don't think they mean it as a compliment.

45:46Alison Wood Brooks:No, it's so interesting. Of all people in the world, I think journalists are really great question askers. It's like the number one skill that they have learned to do well. And so when they found out about our question asking findings, they were like, yeah, of course, isn't everybody asking tons of questions? And we were like, no, come to find out. No. But then the next follow-up question, of course, is where does asking lots of questions become asking too many questions? Is there a tipping point? Of course, yes, there is a tipping point. Let me bring some data to this answer. I worked with a company called Gong that records sales calls.

46:24Alison Wood Brooks:And so what they find is the same thing we find in all of our data sets. Salespeople who ask more questions, convert more calls into sales, they do better, etc. There is a tipping point on sales calls because sales is an annoying domain. By definition, you're like sort of there to persuade people to agree with you. And as soon as persuasion or sales becomes part of the mission, people are on the lookout. Like, are you trying to get information out of me that you're going to exploit? Are you going to take advantage of me? Like, your goals are more confrontational there. And so we see a tipping point at the very extreme end.

47:04Alison Wood Brooks:On these sales calls that were, on average, likability and effectiveness of questions starts to go down when you're asking more than three questions per minute. It's a lot of questions. And that's spread out across a 20 or 30 minute sales call. That's a ton of questions. It's very extreme. And what's so fascinating, even though likability goes down at that extreme level, it's still higher than moderate level of question asking and way higher than asking very few. So like you do see this curvilinear shape, but it's still much better to ask too many than too few, even in this sort of confrontational, conflictual environment.

47:48Alison Wood Brooks:And in many cooperative environments, like going on a first date or hanging out with friends, we actually don't see a tipping point. There is no end to the number of questions you can ask and their benefits. So your question of like, why is it feeling interrogative, may have less to do with the number of questions you're asking and more to do with how you're asking them. Are you touching on topics or information that's sensitive to someone? Are you framing them in ways that feel accusatory? So are you asking why questions to get at their motives? Are you asking things about topics that they're really not ready to share about?

48:28Alison Wood Brooks:And are you doing it repetitively, right? So if you ask a question and they clearly don't want to answer it, asking about it again very quickly becomes unpleasant. Yeah. Sometimes I shine a very bright light in people's faces and pound the table. I don't know why that doesn't go well. That's so amazing. Oh, my gosh. There's another pitfall here, something called boomer asking, which I had never heard of before. What is boomer asking? Yeah. So boomer asking is a pitfall that is actually more common than the asking too many questions mistake. Boomer asking is something that most of us do and we should avoid it.

49:08Alison Wood Brooks:So I want you to imagine the arc of a boomerang. It's named after the arc of a boomerang. So you throw the boomerang out, it flies around, and then it comes back to you. So that would be like me saying, hey, Dan, have you ever shined a light on someone while you were asking them a question? And you're like, as a matter of fact, I have. I'm like, well, let me tell you about me doing that this weekend. You're going to die, right? Like I take this question that seemed to be about me asking you about your experience and I bring it back to myself immediately in the arc of a boomerang. And so people do this all the time, right?

49:45Alison Wood Brooks:Like they ask a question, but it's not actually out of sincere curiosity or interest in the other person. It's just as a way to license them to talk about themselves. Any move and conversation that clearly reveals that you just wanted to talk about yourself is not going to be received very well by your partner. And that includes Boomer asking. So it's seen as very insincere. You're actually better off just bragging or complaining or sharing your story than asking a question under this thin veil that you were like interested in your partner's answer. Better to do it just in a straightforward way.

50:19Yeah. Or just you did it earlier. Like, hey, I'm just going to give you a long, humble brag. And then you do it. And it's endearing instead of sneaky.

50:28Alison Wood Brooks:Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Don't boomerask. OK, so we've talked about the T and the A of the talk format topics and asking. The L is levity, which apparently AI is not yet good at. Why is levity so important? Levity is so important. I mean, to me personally, levity is like oxygen. And I think a lot of people feel this way and maybe can't verbalize it. Here's why it's important. I think often people think of levity, humor, warmth as like these extra bonus things that happen at little fleeting moments during conversation. And they're like, oh, that was pleasant. I'm glad that happened. But it's not the actual work.

51:07Alison Wood Brooks:It's not the real part. So it feels almost ancillary to the conversation. What you see is actually this endeavor of conversation is really messy and hard, and it requires a lot of effort and attention from everybody involved. And what levity is doing is pulling our engagement back to the conversation. It's helping us feel like, oh, we're safe here. I'm interested in what's happening. I'm not bored. I'm not angry. I'm not distracted. I'm here with you. And we're going to continue this coordination game together. And so because levity has the power to sort of disrupt boredom and bring us together, it is in service of every other goal that we're pursuing, like every other much more serious thing that we're pursuing, no matter what it is, brainstorming, making decisions, exchanging information, having fun together.

51:57Alison Wood Brooks:All of that is helped by these moments of levity. So they're really not a sort of extra sparkly bonus. They are core determinants of our ability to succeed, to achieve any of our goals in conversation. Some people listening to this may be thinking, okay, well, that sounds easier said than done. You thankfully have some pretty granular tactical pieces of advice. One of them is find the fun instead of trying to be funny. It's so fun. On the first day of this levity module in my class, I start by saying, you guys, I can't make you funnier. If you're not funny, like I'm not sure I'm going to be the one that makes you hilarious today.

52:40Alison Wood Brooks:But we can adopt mindsets that funny people inhabit. bit. We can learn from them. And we can try strategies that we see other people doing that seem to work well. And this mindset shift is really powerful, Dan. This idea of a lot of people put a ton of pressure on themselves to be funny. Like, oh, I want to be that guy. I want to be seen as the funny guy or the funny girl. I want to make everybody laugh. And so I want to be funny. Trying to be funny is very self-focused. It's about you. And it's a lot of pressure. You're not going to turn into a stand-up comedian for a brief fleeting moment in one turn of a conversation.

53:21Alison Wood Brooks:Instead, a much healthier mindset is, how do I make this situation, whatever it is, a work meeting, a date, a dinner with your spouse, hanging with your kids, how do we make this fun? And that relieves the pressure on you to turn into a stand-up comedian and almost turns us all more into like stewards of our relationships, right? Like we're all collectively responsible for making shit fun and we can all do it. You don't actually even need to be funny at all to make conversation more fun. I'm thinking about a friend of mine, Rupika. Shout out to Rupika Malhotra. I don't know if she does this anymore, but she used to back in the day, walk around her office with a really sort of elegant plastic tray filled with cupcakes.

54:08and she would just walk around good vibing people with cupcakes. So she's not a stand up comedian. She can be funny, but like she was just dropping cupcake bombs on people. And that was a lot of fun.

54:19Alison Wood Brooks:That's an amazing example. And there's so many things that you could fill in that story with the word cupcake and it would do the same thing. She's bringing good vibes, one cupcake at a time, one compliment at a time, one expression of gratitude, one shift to an off-the-wall topic that no one was expecting by showing up with a pizza or a six-pack of beer, right? Like there's so many little moves that people can do to bring positive vibes and more levity to our conversations. And often we like dismiss those things. We dismiss cupcake rupica because we're like, oh, like how sweet she brought her like baked goods.

55:01Alison Wood Brooks:No, no. That is fundamentally going to change how everybody is feeling in that moment and how they feel about each other, right? It makes you feel more safe. It feels like it gives everyone permission to play and eat in front of each other. Everything of the social world is about giving each other permission to be honest, to be weird, to have fun, whether it's cupcakes or a good joke or even just a really great laugh. Those little moves give us all permission to have fun. Just to be clear and make sure this doesn't slip by unremarked upon, compliments are also part of this. Huge part of it. Yes.

55:40Alison Wood Brooks:And for whatever reason, I think often people think nice things about other people and often don't voice them, right? Like they don't say them out loud. There's been great research on this by psychologists named Erica Boothby and Vanessa Bonds at Cornell, where people have fears about giving too many compliments. They think that it could be like embarrassing to the person or it might make the compliment giver look incompetent by comparison or it might feel inappropriate for some reason. And so we hold them back. And this is a huge mistake because we underestimate how powerful just saying a silly compliment is.

56:18Alison Wood Brooks:Not only does it make the recipient feel terrific, like everybody wants to hear how smart and kind and especially in concrete ways like, oh, I love your last slide and your slide deck. It was so beautiful, right? Everybody wants to hear that silly compliment, but it also makes the compliment giver feel better, right? Like you have now given a gift to somebody else that actually made them feel better and you feel better about it too. So flattery is really a pretty profound mechanism for levity and warmth and conversation. It has to be sincere though. Oh, yeah. It actually doesn't. Really? Yeah.

56:57Alison Wood Brooks:Even obviously insincere flattery still makes people feel great. There was this great study where they sent out mailers from a company that said to people they obviously had never met, and they're saying, like, you're so chic. You have great taste. You know what? You have your finger on the pulse of fashion. And then they asked people, how did this mailer make you feel? And they were like, you know what? It made you feel pretty great. So even when compliments and flattery are very obviously insincere, they still can have very positive effects on people around. That's how powerful flattery is.

57:36Coming up, we continue to dive into Allison's talk rubric. We get some listening tips, some conversational repair strategies. We talk about how kindness can go pear-shaped and how to handle difficult moments in conversation.

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58:13One last question under the L rubric here. You say that self-deprecating humor needs to be done in moderation.

58:21Alison Wood Brooks:Yeah, this one's a little bit trickier. There are always status dynamics at play, right? Even in a one-on-one conversation, everybody's trying to signal to each other, like all humans. It's part of like being a human being. We're all like striving to be liked and admired and to sort of climb the status hierarchy in the world. One of the things that we've learned from our research is that status dynamics can change at the topic level. You know, we talk about journalism and the news. I'm going to be really low status compared to you. I don't have very much expertise. I don't know that much. And that should affect who's asking questions, who's making jokes, who's revealing information.

59:04Alison Wood Brooks:As soon as the topic switches to basketball or being in a band or having three kids, like I am going to crush on those topics or behavioral science or Harvard, right? Like lots of things that I might know more about. And so as these status dynamics are shifting, we have to modulate our behavior. And levity is one of the things that you need to modulate. So when you're in a low status position, it is actually a harder, shittier, more anxiety inducing position to be in. You have fewer jokes available or moves available to you that will be viewed as appropriate. And if you don't say anything at all, which is what most a lot of people in a low status position opt for is to be quieter, then no one can learn about you and about your ideas, right?

59:54Alison Wood Brooks:So it's this weird, very challenging position to be in. And self-deprecating humor falls into that category. If you're high status and everybody knows it and you make fun of yourself, everyone's like, ha ha ha, that's so sweet and charming and vulnerable. But also we know they're a badass. If you're low status and you're like, oh, I'm not good at this thing, or you make fun of yourself, people will actually question if you're competent. If you haven't proven yet that you have expertise or skill or knowledge in a certain way, making fun of yourself about it probably isn't gonna help. So I'm guessing if you're on the low status side of a conversation and you have limited moves available to you, a really good move might be to express sincere interest and ask interesting questions.

1:00:43Alison Wood Brooks:another fabulous effect of question asking you can ask a question you're almost better at question asking when you don't have that curse of knowledge right like you have sincere curiosity and space to learn I think a lot of people go into conversations feeling like oh well I can't talk about this and I can't talk about this because I don't know anything about them and I want to like shake them and say like no that's even better because it opens up this huge wellspring of questions that you could ask about it. And if someone else actually knows the answers to those questions, your conversation will be awesome.

1:01:18Yes. You are in a band?

1:01:20Alison Wood Brooks:I am currently in a band, Dan. That's how I met my husband in college. And we now play in a band. I sing and play piano. I play my oboe a little bit and just very recently started playing a little bass guitar. What's the name of the band? Our band's called The Lights. We're a pop folk band and we play around Boston. Two of my Harvard colleagues are in the band and my husband is the drummer and it's the best. So you were in prior bands? Yeah. So my husband and I played in a band in college. That's how we met. And then we played a bit after college and then we went on a little hiatus and now we're back together.

1:01:56We've been playing together with the lights for probably almost eight years and

1:02:01Alison Wood Brooks:we have a new album coming out soon. I'll send you one. All right. We'll drop a link in the show Okay, we're now at K. So it started with topics, then asking, then levity, now kindness. Hold forth, please. You can even sing it if you want.

1:02:20Alison Wood Brooks:What do you want to know about kindness, Dan? Why does it matter? I mean, this is such a fucking obvious question, but yeah, why does it matter? It does seem like an obvious question because we are all taught that kindness is a virtue, is important starting as soon as we start school or as soon as we start breathing. But I spent a lot of my life really honestly wondering, like, what does that mean? Like, what do people who are kind, what do they actually think about privately and what do they do for other people? There are obvious things that are like extreme and extremely generous and selfless.

1:02:57Alison Wood Brooks:There are also extreme examples of unkindness where people are hateful and unkind and dangerous and violent. But like everything in between, I always felt like for normal people going about their normal day-to-day lives, what should we be saying to each other that is more and less kind? And how can I do the better ones? How can I push myself in these little micro moments to do the good ones, to be the kindest person that I can be without being boring? And so in the book and in my course, we really tackle this question concretely. We focus on the language that people use when they're talking to other people and about other people.

1:03:41Alison Wood Brooks:So focusing on like respect, respectful. What does respectful language look and sound like. And then we focus on the receiving end of conversation, which is listening. And it's so ironic that the book is called Talk. My course is called Talk, because really, it probably should be called Listen. The best conversationalists are incredible listeners. And we've just made some very helpful discoveries just in the last few years about what it means to be a really kind, effective listener. Okay. Tell us. I want to know. I'm sure everybody wants to know. So we all know this phrase, active listening. There have been decades of work on active listening and active listening is really important.

1:04:24Alison Wood Brooks:It's mostly focuses on nonverbal cues. So making eye contact, nodding and smiling, making sure you're looking at your conversation partner when they're talking. Often it's like leaning forward, trunk lean. It's all these nonverbal cues to show your partner that you're engaged with them, that you care about them. And for decades, it has been measured in the mind of your partner saying like, did you feel like Allison was a good listener? Did you feel like Dan was a good listener? So our own perception. What we realized is that's completely untethered to what is actually happening in someone's mind while they're listening during a live conversation.

1:05:07Alison Wood Brooks:You could be smiling and nodding and leaning forward and making incredible eye contact and your mind is completely elsewhere, right? Like you're thinking about your grocery list, you're thinking about what you're going to text your kid back, you're ruminating about your work. And so we really wanted to see if we could figure out this connection between what people are doing outwardly and what's actually happening in the privacy of their mind as conversations unfold. What we found is fascinating. We did it a number of ways. One of the ways was we had people have conversations. We interrupted them every five minutes and just asked them, were you just listening attentively to your partner?

1:05:46Alison Wood Brooks:25 % of the time when you ask that question, people say, no, I was not. My mind was wandering. A very high number. That's a quarter of the time you're not listening. And we think it's an underestimate because there's social desirability concerns about saying I wasn't listening. To me, this is really helpful because one, I'm not alone. I'm not the only one whose mind is wandering constantly while I'm engaged with other people and pretending to listen and doing all the active listening cues of smiling and nodding. But also, if you come from a place of, oh, well, everybody's mind is wandering a lot of the time, it empowers us and opens up the possibility to overcome it and correct it and give each other grace when you like haven't heard stuff that the other person said.

1:06:33Alison Wood Brooks:So you can lean into repair strategies. You can say like, oh, I just missed what you just said. Do you mind repeating it? Or when you said black, I thought you meant this. I thought you meant race. These little tiny sidebars of repair sequences are one, they take courage, right? To your kind of in the moment, acknowledging you misunderstood someone or may have misunderstood someone. And two, they're so helpful for creating an accurate shared reality with someone, shared understanding with someone. It also just makes people feel safer. It's sort of saying like, you have permission for your mind to wander.

1:07:07Alison Wood Brooks:I don't expect you to be hanging on my every freaking word. That would be crazy. The human brain was built to wander and they all wander. So let's work together to like create this amazing thing of conversation together. And if I have to repeat myself sometimes, great. If you don't remember the, you know, ninth out of 12th thing we talked about, great. Follow up with me. Shoot me an email afterwards. I think it's a good way to give each other more grace for not having perfect information exchange all the time. The other important thing that comes out of it is that we learn that active listening cue.

1:07:44Alison Wood Brooks:So nonverbals are sort of the starting point for listening. It's like listening 101, but listening 301, 401, 501 is actually using your words to show someone that you've heard them. Yes, that's where I was going. Exactly. So like affirmation, repeating what you've heard, trying to say it in your own way, follow-up questions, paraphrasing what multiple people in a group have said to just be checking in on that shared understanding with each other. My favorite verbal expression of listening is callbacks, where you call back to something you talked about earlier in the conversation, like the bright spotlight that you shine on people when you're interrogating them at dinner parties.

1:08:24Alison Wood Brooks:I can only do that because I was listening to what you said earlier, right? You can only reference back verbally to something that you actually heard and processed and are able to raise again. Often callbacks are funny and fun because they feel clever, but they're always wonderful signal that someone was listening to you. I want to emphasize something and then do a callback. The callback is not going to be funny. Just spoiler alert. I get to be the judge, Dan. All right. Just want to emphasize this idea of restating something to your interlocutor in your own words. the communications coaches with whom I've worked for many years and about whom I talk probably too much on this show.

1:09:09So with apologies, I'll just point out that Dan Klerman and Mudita Nisker, my longtime coaches and friends, talk about something called reflective listening where, and I do it all the time here on the show and I do it in conversation out in the real world where somebody said a bunch of things to you and you just sum it up, you give the headline in your own words. This is the most benevolent manipulation technique I have ever found. And it is a cupcake that you are handing out to people. There's a callback.

1:09:38Alison Wood Brooks:It is. It's a very cute one. It is. It's incredibly benevolent. How often do you do that reflective listening and your version of what you heard is slightly incorrect? Like, do people often correct you? Yes. And then, well, two things to say. One, I play a little game. Like how often can I get people to say the word exactly back to me in the conversation? The other thing is that sometimes I do get it wrong and then I reflect the correction. That's very nice. It's very nice. It makes you feel so sturdy, right? Like you're really, oh, we just did a thing and we corrected it. And now we're really together in this.

1:10:17Alison Wood Brooks:We were definitely on the same page. I dare say most of the great conversationalists that I know all do this. It is like the thing they have in common. Okay, so here's the callback. Early in the conversation, we talked about being relentlessly focused on the needs of others without falling into what I just kind of off the cuff called calamitous altruism or people pleasing. And so now that we're talking about kindness and we've worked our way through the talk framework, let me go back to that question. Love it. So I'm going to incorporate a callback to when we think back to that conversational compass, the relational axis of the compass.

1:11:02Alison Wood Brooks:At one end, high relational goals are squarely focusing on the other person, right? Or on you as a unit, you and your relationship. It's very pro-social. The low relational end, our goals are focusing on our needs. And maybe our needs are in conflict with what another person needs. I want to give you advice. You don't want to hear it. I want to make a decision. You do not want to make that decision. You just want to hang out. I just want to hug. You want to tell me everything that you think I should do. When our needs and what we want truly collide, that's where things get tricky and require are, I think, often selflessness, being able to say, in this moment, I'm going to suspend my own needs and try and give this person what they need because I care about them and because I think being in a relationship matters more than what I need right now.

1:12:01Alison Wood Brooks:That to me is what it means to be in a rewarding relationship. A great relationship is both people are willing to sort of sacrifice their own fleeting self-interest and focus on the other person and at times give them what they need. But over time, like every relationship is just a repeated sequence of conversations. And so over time, ideally, you're both doing this generosity for each other. The reason I think kindness is the final maxim of the talk framework and why it's so important is because the human brain was built to be self-interested, to be egocentric and focus on your own needs and your own perspective.

1:12:41Alison Wood Brooks:We know everything about our own perspective, right? We have perfect information about our own selves and we have very sort of limited intermittent body information about other people. I have an identical twin. Even my identical twin, her name's Sarah. We had the same upbringing. We have the same brain, same body, same DNA, all of it. But I don't know everything about what she's experienced every day. And so in order for me to figure out how she's feeling, what she needs, what she's going to find funny, what she's excited about, I got to ask questions. I got to raise topics. I got to remember to focus on her and not just myself.

1:13:20Alison Wood Brooks:And that's true for everyone that we encounter. And so the reason that kindness matters is it's easy to focus on those self-interested goals, it's much, much harder to focus on the pro-social ones because it goes against human nature. We have to overcome our natural egocentrism in order to do it. What you're describing certainly applies to me. My default mode is definitely self-interested. And yet I am surrounded by people on my team and in my family who can get themselves into trouble because they're not advocating enough for their own needs. And so I just want to advocate for their needs in this conversation because I can see how kindness can go pear-shaped for those people.

1:14:07Alison Wood Brooks:Yeah, it can go awry. Imagine an existence where you're completely living for the needs of other people. It leads to burnout. It's stressful. Also in the context of conversation, not just about like serving their needs, it's also about sharing your own perspective, right? It's self-disclosure. We know that self-disclosure feels good. In the brain, it feels as pleasurable as sex, as eating chocolate. Sharing about yourself is highly pleasurable. And if you're never doing that, if you're only asking questions and listening to other people and helping them, it will lead to burnout and exhaustion and not being known.

1:14:45Alison Wood Brooks:People aren't going to get to know what your unique perspective is. And so I think great conversation and a conversation by conversation basis, you can think of good ones as being sort of ping pongy and balanced between both speakers. But over time and on the scale of a relationship, you can also think about sort of keeping the ledger balanced from one conversation to the next. Maybe one person has really acute needs right now. And so that conversation is going to be fully about them. And someday you hope that they will return the favor and focus entirely on you. And if not, right, If you're existing in that totally people-pleasing world and nobody is doing it reciprocally for you, then some changes need to be made.

1:15:30Alison Wood Brooks:You might need some new friends. And the gumption to speak up for your needs, which is for many people. Not only to others, but even to yourself, right? Saying, I matter too. My needs matter too. And they're not being met. And giving yourself permission to matter and that your needs matter too. We have to live in all four quadrants of the compass. In our remaining time, I want to cover, to the extent that we can, a big topic, which is how to handle difficult moments in conversation. You've got something called the receptiveness recipe. Can you describe that? Yes. I think there have been decades of books and courses and wisdom literature about how to have difficult conversations.

1:16:15Alison Wood Brooks:Most of that is not based on scientific evidence. And it's been very exciting in the last decade to see new evidence emerge that actually does look at these difficult moments that crop up in conversation. And let's see what are good conversationalists doing? What are they saying? What are they thinking about in those moments? And so receptiveness is this really groundbreaking research by Julia Minson and Mike Yeomans, looking at the language that people use during difficult moments that prevent the conversation from getting overheated and derailed, that keep you on track, while also not feeling like a doormat, right?

1:16:57Alison Wood Brooks:Like you can always not voice your opinion in order to avoid conflict. You can always just walk away. But what they're saying is, how do we have conviction for our own views and also remain open and encouraging to other people's differing viewpoints? And that's what receptive language can do. There are lots of components of the receptiveness recipe. A couple of the ones that I find most helpful, many of them are counterintuitive, by the way. When we find ourselves in these difficult moments, often our instinct is like, I need to prove that I'm right. And so to do that, I need to be strong and articulate and decisive and have the best data, all the best arguments.

1:17:39Alison Wood Brooks:In reality, when you realize, oh, but there's a human mind sitting on the other side, there's someone needs to be able to listen to what you're saying and feel good about it. And actually, how persuasion actually works is like over time, over the course of many conversations in good relationships, people might slowly change their views based on the gentle pressure of your differing view. They're not like going to turn on a dime because of one amazing argument you make. You realize, oh, it's really important to maintain, make sure that we feel safe with each other and we're having a good time and are not yelling at each other about whatever, politics, family, whatever.

1:18:16Alison Wood Brooks:One thing that I have found helpful, one element of this receptiveness recipe is qualifying language. So instead of trying to be so resolute and decisive, you use words like maybe, sometimes, I wonder if they hedge your claims, right? It's saying, I don't have certainty about this, but I wonder if in some cases immigration could be helpful. Let's think about that together. Instead of like, here are all the reasons that immigration is good or immigration is bad. that's much more pleasant to engage with than the sort of more decisive route. To me, that's counterintuitive because you're saying like, express uncertainty when you have uncertainty.

1:18:58Alison Wood Brooks:And by the way, we almost always have uncertainty about everything in life. So that's one. The other one that I find very concretely helpful is that you can divide yourself into multiple disagreeing parts. So I can say, hey, Dan, as your friend, I totally, can imagine why your dating life is so hard. And that sounds really stressful. And I can see that you're getting really anxious for your dates and you've had really bad luck and rejection sucks. Let me put on my like dating coach hat. And let's imagine what if you thought about prepping topics before your dates next time? Do you think that would help?

1:19:37Alison Wood Brooks:And so you're able to express both like understanding and empathy and also tougher feedback or like more direct communication in the same breath. And that's so much easier for people to receive than just saying like, well, you didn't think about any topics beforehand. Of course it didn't go well. And so dividing yourself into multiple parts in the moment can be very, very helpful. What is situation modification? That's another thing you recommend when shit gets tense. Yeah. Situation modification is a fancy phrase that just means like change something. Change anything about the environment. Invite a third person to pull up a chair, dim the lights, put on some music, walk outside, take a break.

1:20:25Alison Wood Brooks:Any little modification that you can make in the situation will change the timbre of the interaction. And these small changes have a bigger effect on our mood and how safe we feel. than you think. So situation modification is something that psychologists talk about with emotion regulation. How do we regulate our emotions? How do we change our environment to make it a more conducive place to talk about the things we need to talk about? I had a colleague who would get really uncomfortable when students came to their office and would cry. They're in their formative years of their lives, so they come and talk to us about all kinds of hard things.

1:21:03Alison Wood Brooks:And he was like, I never know what to do when they cry in my office. And I was like, here's a situation modification. Try and have a box of Kleenex on your desk. And if they start to cry, you could ask them if they need one. Like, that's a pretty good way to make them feel more comfortable. And like crying is normal, like you're ready for it. And so he does that now. He has found it quite helpful. Picking up on that word helpful, you have given us an enormous number of helpful tips and tactics and techniques, and there are many, many more inside the book. So let me ask a final, very practical question.

1:21:42Given the sheer volume of ideas that you've shared with us, how do we start integrating this into our lives?

1:21:50Alison Wood Brooks:This was the biggest challenge in developing this course and writing the book is that it really is a sort of compendium of ideas of like tactics and approaches and mindsets and tools. And I feel very overwhelmed when I see like, here are the 36 things that you need to do to get better at conversation. And that's why we've boiled it down to just four things, right? That's why, and it's why the talk framework seems so simple on the outside. But when you dive into it, there's like a lot going on under the hood. My students at Harvard asked this question at the end of the course, how do I remember all of these things?

1:22:29Alison Wood Brooks:I give them silicone bracelets to wear that say topics asking levity and kindness almost as an associative memory a reminder of what we've learned together short of wearing a physical reminder of them I think the best thing you can do is practice and that's what's so beautiful about conversation we get opportunities to practice all day long every day and so in your next conversation I challenge you or anyone to try prepping two or three topics and see how it goes. When you're prepping those topics, try making them more personalized about the person you're going to see. In the conversation after that, try just asking more follow-up questions, right?

1:23:11Alison Wood Brooks:Like each time, if you give yourself a little challenge and see how it goes, you can run these little experiments in your own life and see what works for you and what doesn't. Great stuff. Before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of your new book and anything else, including records by the lights that we should know about and access. Maybe I should do it too soon. The book is called Talk, The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. There is a workbook that you can download for free from my website, allisonwoodbrooks.com has lots of conversation topics and exercises to do with your colleagues and family members.

1:23:51Alison Wood Brooks:And I play in a band called The Lights based in Boston. come check us out. New album coming in a couple of months. Are there existing albums that we can find on Spotify? There are. We released our first one last summer. The website is thelights.band. Such a pleasure to talk to you, Dr. Alison Woodbrooks. Thank you for your time. Dan, you're amazing. What a question asker you are. Thanks for having me. Appreciate that.

1:24:18Thanks again to Alison Woodbrooks. Love that conversation. Before we go, just a quick reminder. If you sign up at danharris.com, you will get a companion meditation for this episode on the art of listening and companion meditations for all of our Monday Wednesday episodes henceforth. And you'll also get the ones that we've created for all of the episodes dating back to June. And if you sign up at danharris.com, you will get invited to our soon-to-be weekly live guided meditation sessions, which I'm very excited about. But one other thing, I'm doing an IRL in-person meditation session for a whole weekend in October, October 24th through October 26th.

1:24:59We call it Meditation Party. We do it at the Omega Institute, which is north of NYC. And you can sign up at eomega.org. There's a link in the show notes. And I do this with 7A Selassie, Jeff Warren, and this year, Fosu Jones-Korte. So we'd love to see you there. eomega.org meditation party October 24th. Finally, I want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer.

1:25:35DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

1:25:49This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.