Read here the full transcript of Charles Duhigg’s talk titled “The Science Behind Dramatically Better Conversations” at TEDxManchester 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Experiment
I’m going to ask you to participate in an experiment. When you leave this room and go out into the world today, tomorrow, or 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 or walking down the street. I’m going to show you the question, and then I’m going to ask you to ask and answer it. 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? Not surprisingly, no hands went up whatsoever. And that makes sense, right? There can be nothing that seems more intimidating or less fun than finding a stranger, asking them when they cried in front of someone else, and then telling them about the time you cried in front of someone else.
But 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.
A Personal Story
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’d 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. My wife, very reasonably, would offer me some great 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?”
Instead of being able to hear her, I would get even more upset. 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 a good situation. Has anyone ever had an experience like this?
The Science of Communication
So I went and started talking to researchers who were studying communication. I asked them, “Why am I getting into this pattern?” 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. They said one of the big things 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, or what to have for dinner. But what they said is that actually, each discussion contains many different conversations.
In general, these conversations tend to fall into one of three buckets:
Practical conversations: Where we’re talking about what this is all about, what we’re really discussing.
Emotional conversations: Where we’re talking about how we feel. My goal is to share my feelings, and I don’t want you to solve them. I want you to empathize.
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.
What the researchers said is that we’ve learned if people are having different conversations at the same moment, they can’t really hear each other. They can’t really connect.
The Matching Principle
In fact, this is exactly what was happening with me and my wife. I 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.
Within neurology and psychology, this insight has become so important that it’s become known as the matching principle, which says that successful communication requires recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring and then matching each other.
Deep Questions: The Key to Connection
But how do we do that? Well, in schools, they’ve actually taught teachers to do this. If you are a school teacher, you’ll probably learn at some point that if a student comes up to you with a problem or they want something they want to talk about, you should ask them: “Do you want to be helped?” (which is a practical conversation), “Do you want to be hugged?” (which is an emotional conversation), or “Do you want to be heard?” (which is a social conversation). 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. If you go up and ask someone at work if they want a hug, 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 known as a deep question.
A deep question is something that invites us to talk about our values or our beliefs or our experiences, and 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? 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.
In 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.
Dr. Behfar Ehdaie’s Story
To explain how this works, I want to tell you a story about Dr. Behfar Ehdaie. Dr. Ehdaie is a cancer surgeon in New York City. He specializes in prostate cancer, removing cancer tumors from prostates. He has this kind of interesting job, because every single day a patient will come into his office asking, he thinks, for medical advice, and 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. What’s more, most prostate tumors 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.
So Dr. Ehdaie 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. What 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.”
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.”
For Dr. Ehdaie, this was bewildering. He 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.
The Power of Deep Questions in Medical Practice
So he goes to these professors at the Harvard Business School, and he asks them for advice on what to do differently. 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 exam room looking for advice and looking for medical solutions. But 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.”
Two weeks later, after having this conversation, a 62-year-old man comes into Dr. Ehdaie’s office for the first time. He had just gotten his diagnosis of having prostate cancer. And Dr. Ehdaie, 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. He starts talking about how his father had died when he was 17 years old. This had been so hard for him. It had been so hard for his mom. Then he starts talking about how, at work, he’s worried that the younger employees, if they find out that he has cancer, they’re going to start looking at him differently. They’re going to be already writing him into the grave, even though he’s got 20 or 30 years left on his career. And then he starts talking about his grandchildren and his fears for the world they’re inheriting, with climate change and everything else that’s going on.
Dr. Ehdaie had expected this guy to at least bring up cancer, to at least mention mortality or pain, but it never came up. At that moment, Dr. Ehdaie realized, because he had asked this deep question, that this man wanted to have an emotional conversation. He wanted to talk about how they feel. He needed to be hugged.
So Dr. Ehdaie didn’t actually hug him, but he did the verbal equivalent. He started talking about how he understood that his own father had gotten sick and that it had been terrifying for them, but it had also brought them together in these ways that he didn’t actually anticipate. They talk about this for eight minutes, just eight minutes.
And then Dr. Ehdaie says, “Look, do you mind? There’s some medical options I’d like to talk over with you. Is that okay?” And they move into a practical conversation together. Within seven more minutes, the man decides to do active surveillance and never looks back. Dr. Ehdaie’s patients overwhelmingly now opt for active surveillance, his advice, because of this approach.
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. So 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 says, “I’m really looking forward to this, this is going to be a great time.” Instead, what they say is, “I do not want to do this, this sounds terrible.”
But they’re in an experiment, they basically have to do it. They’re in the room, they get paired with a partner, they go and they ask a question, ask and 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 I’ve been to people in other conversations in a while. I felt more caring towards them, and I felt like they were really caring about me. I felt like they listened so attentively, and it was really easy for me to listen to what they were saying.”
Ultimately, almost everyone says this is one of the best conversations that they’ve had in the last week, the last month, the last year. And they say things like, “I’m so glad I got paired with that person, because they were exactly right for me,” when in truth, the only thing that was right is that they were a stranger and they had the right question, the right kind of question to ask.
The Science of Connection
So 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. And 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 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.
And 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.
