The science behind dramatically better conversations | Charles Duhigg

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Have you ever wished you could have a superpower? Well, according to author and journalist Charles Duhigg, humans already have one. Communication. We just don't always do a great job of tapping into our own superpowered potential. In his 2024 talk, Charles explains how learning how to ask the right questions is our real strength and how this can ultimately help us connect more, bridge divides, and be more comfortable talking to strangers. How to Become a Super Communicator is coming up.

0:48So I'm going to ask you to participate in an experiment, which is that when you leave this room, when you go out into the world, today, tomorrow, whenever you feel like it, I'd like you to ask and answer one question of someone who's a stranger. You might meet them on the bus. You might meet them walking down the street. The question is, when was the last time you cried in front of someone? Now, just out of curiosity, how many of you are really excited about this experiment? No hands went up whatsoever. And that makes sense, right? Because there can be nothing that seems more intimidating or less fun than finding a stranger, asking them when they've cried in front of someone else, and then telling them about the time you cried in front of someone else.

1:34But I'm going to try and convince you over the next few minutes that this experiment is not only worth doing, it's worth doing whenever you can, because it will make your life better. And to explain how I got to this, I have to tell you a little bit of a story about me and my wife. A few years ago, we got into this bad pattern. We've been married for 20 years, but I would come home from a long day at the office. I was a reporter at the New York Times at that point, and I would start complaining about my day, about how I'm not appreciated enough, and my wife, very reasonably, would offer me some great advice.

2:05She 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 things like, why aren't you supporting me? You should be outraged on my behalf. And she would get upset because I was attacking her for giving me good advice. This was not, anyone ever have an experience like this? It was not in a good, good situation. And so I went and I started talking to researchers who were studying communication. I asked them, why am I getting into this pattern?

2:32And they said, well, you're making a mistake. We're living through this golden age of understanding communication, really for the first time, because of advances in neural imaging and data collection. And they said, one of the big things that we've learned is that we tend to think of a discussion as being just one conversation, right? We're talking about one thing, my day, or the kids' grades, what to have for dinner. But what they said is that actually, each discussion contains many different conversations. And in general, these conversations tend to fall into one of three buckets. There's these practical conversations where we're talking about what's this all about?

3:07What are we really discussing? But then there's emotional conversations where we're talking about how do we feel? And my goal is to share with you my feelings, and I don't want you to solve them. I want you to empathize. And then there's conversations that are social conversations about who we are, the social identities that are important to us, how we relate to each other and how we relate to society. And what the researchers said is what we've learned is that if people are having different conversations at the same moment, they can't really hear each other. They can't really connect. And in fact, this is exactly what was happening with me and my wife, right?

3:40I was coming home and having an emotional conversation. My wife was responding with a practical conversation. They are both legitimate conversations. But because we weren't having the same conversation at the same moment, we weren't really communicating with each other. And within neurology and psychology, this insight is known as the matching principle, which says that successful communication requires recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring and then matching each other. But how do we do that? Well, in schools, they've actually taught teachers to do this. If you are a school teacher, and you'll probably learn at some point that if a student comes up to you with a problem or something they want to talk about, you should ask them, do you want to be helped, which is a practical conversation?

4:22Do you want to be hugged, which is an emotional conversation? Or do you want to be heard, which is a social conversation? And it seems to work. It seems like if you ask students what they need, they'll tell you. But of course, that is hard to do in real life, right? If you go up and you ask someone at work if they want a hug, the HR might get involved. So you might not want to do that. But luckily, there is another way of doing this for all of us normal people, which is to ask questions. And in particular, to ask a certain type of question, a special question, what's known as a deep question. A deep question is something that invites us to talk about our values or our beliefs or our experiences.

5:01And that can sound a little intimidating, but it's actually much easier than it sounds. For instance, instead of asking someone, where do you work? You could ask them, what do you love about your job? Instead of asking someone, where did you go to high school? You could say, what was high school like? Wait, what did you learn there? What changed you there? Put differently, instead of asking about the facts of someone's life, we should ask them how they feel about their life. Because when we do, they tend to reveal to us who they really are. They tend to tell us what they want not only out of this conversation, but how they hope that we'll see them and how they want to see us, what matters to them most.

5:43In fact, what studies show us is that this is so powerful because these kinds of questions allow us to be vulnerable. and vulnerability, and reciprocal vulnerability, when we hear vulnerability and we become vulnerable in return, is the key to allowing us to connect with other people. And to explain how this works, I want to tell you a story about Dr. Bafar Adai. Dr. Adai is a cancer surgeon in New York City. He specializes in prostate cancer, removing cancer tumors from prostates. And he has this kind of interesting job because every single day a patient will come into his office asking, he thinks, for medical advice.

6:22And what he will tell them is, you should not get surgery. The prostate is located so close to the nerves that control urination and sexual function that it's a relatively risky surgery. And what's more, most prostate tumors, they grow very, very slowly. It's actually one of the slowest growing forms of cancer in existence. There's a saying among doctors that if you have an old patient with prostate cancer, he's going to die of old age before the cancer kills him. And so doctor and I would have these patients come in and he would tell them, look, I don't think you should do anything. In fact, I think you should do this thing called active surveillance.

7:00What we're going to do is we're going to take a blood sample every six months. We're going to do a biopsy every two years. And if the tumor seems to change, we'll do an MRI. And if we have to, we can do the surgery, but otherwise no radiation, no surgery. It's going to be okay. And these patients would listen to him, and then they would go home, and they would discuss it with their spouse, and then they would walk in the next day, and they would insist on having the surgery. They would say, I absolutely want you to cut me open, take the tumor out as fast as possible. And for Dr. Dye, this was bewildering, right?

7:30He thought these would be the easiest conversations of his life. He's telling people that they don't have to have surgery, and he's a surgeon. he told me that when this happens again and again and again you start to realize this isn't a problem with my patients this is a problem with me i'm doing something wrong and so he goes to these folks these professors at the harvard business school and he asks them for advice on what to do differently and they said well look the biggest mistake that you're making is you are starting this conversation all wrong you are starting by assuming that the patient walks into your room into your exam room looking for advice and looking for medical solutions.

8:08But you don't know if that's true. You're not asking them any questions. What you need to do is you need to start asking deep questions. So two weeks later, after having this conversation, a 62-year-old man comes into Dr. Adai's office for the first time. He had just gotten his diagnosis of having prostate cancer. And Dr. Adai, instead of giving him advice, instead of telling him what he ought to do, he asks the question, he asks the question, what does this cancer diagnosis mean to you? And the man starts talking, and he starts talking about how his father had died when he was 17 years old. And this had just been so hard for him, and it had been so hard for his mom.

8:48And then he starts talking about his grandchildren and his fears for the world they're inheriting, what with climate change and everything else that's going on. Dr. Adai had expected this guy to at least to bring up cancer, to at least mention mortality or pain, but it never came up. And at that moment, Dr. Adai realized, because he had asked this deep question, that this man wanted to have an emotional conversation. He wanted to talk about, how do we feel? He needed to be hugged. And so Dr. Adai didn't actually hug him, right? But he did the verbal equivalent. And then Dr. Adai says, look, do you mind?

9:26There's some medical options I'd like to talk over with you. Is that okay? And they move into a practical conversation together, and within seven more minutes, the man decides to do active surveillance and never looks back. Dr. Adai's patients overwhelmingly now opt for active surveillance, his advice, because of this approach. And the thing is, we can do this in any conversation. It doesn't have to be an important conversation. It doesn't have to be life or death. We can always connect more and better and in a really profound way with the person that we're speaking to if we want to. Which brings me back to that experiment.

10:04So just to remind you what you're supposed to do, walk out of the room, find a stranger, ask them, when was the last time you cried in front of someone? And then as soon as they answer, you answer the question yourself and you tell them when you last cried. Let me just say, this experiment has been done thousands and thousands of times, most notably by a guy named Nick Epley at the University of Chicago. People hate this experiment. Nobody who participates comes in and is like, I'm really looking, this is going to be a great time. Instead, what they say is, I do not want to do this. This sounds terrible.

10:38But they're in an experiment, and they basically have to do it, right? They're in the room. They get paired with a partner. They go and they ask the question, ask an answer. And then Nick Epley afterwards asks them, what was that like? And what people say are things like, oh my gosh, I felt so connected to that person, more connected than to people in other conversations in a while. I felt more caring towards them, and I felt like they were really caring about me. So why? Why is this so powerful? Why is asking this question, why does it help us connect so well? Because it's a deep question. It allows us to say something real.

11:15And when we ask deep questions, we figure out which of the three conversations we're in, what we're talking about, what everyone really wants out of this dialogue. And that is how we connect with each other. We are living through a time of polarization and division. We have forgotten how to have conversations. But there's a science to it. There are these folks who are known as super communicators, who they are not special, they're not more charismatic, or they're not more outgoing than anyone else. They've just learned skills that allow us to connect with others. And they're skills that all of us can learn.

12:00And that feeling you get after a wonderful conversation, that glow that you experience, our brains have evolved to give us that, to crave connection. So I hope you go out, I hope you find a stranger, and I hope you tell them all about the last time you cried in front of another person. And then tell me how it went. Thanks.

12:28That was Charles Duhigg speaking at TEDx Manchester in 2024. If you're curious about Ted's curation. Find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmanivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faze-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. Thank you.