Supercommunicators, page 10
Put another way, if you want to have a successful conversation with someone, you don’t have to ask them about their worst memories or how they prepare for telephone calls. You just have to ask them to describe how they feel about their life—rather than the facts of their life—and then ask lots of follow-ups.
Questions about facts (“Where do you live?” “What college did you attend?”) are often conversational dead-ends. They don’t draw out values or experiences. They don’t invite vulnerability.
However, those same inquiries, recast slightly (“What do you like about where you live?” “What was your favorite part of college?”), invite others to share their preferences, beliefs, and values, and to describe experiences that caused them to grow or change. Those questions make emotional replies easier, and they practically beg the questioner to reciprocate—to divulge, in return, why they live in this neighborhood, what they enjoyed about college—until everyone is drawn in, asking and answering back and forth.
“It might seem hard to reframe questions in a way that’s vulnerable,” Epley told me. “But it’s actually pretty easy once you start looking for it. Like when I’m on a train, talking with people commuting to work, I might ask them, ‘What do you do for a living?’ And then I might say, ‘Do you love that job?’ or ‘Do you have something else you dream of doing?’ And right there, you’re two questions in, and you’ve gotten to somebody’s dreams.”
What’s more, these kinds of deeper questions can help fight the unfair discrepancies in how men and women, as well as other groups, are allowed to express emotions. In part, these kinds of questions succeed because they allow vulnerable replies without mandating them. They don’t seem pushy or out of place within, say, an office. But they undermine double standards by nudging people to think a bit more about how to respond. “One reason women are penalized for talking about emotions is because it plays into stereotypes,” said Madeline Heilman, a professor of psychology at NYU who studies gender and bias. Humans tend to be cognitively lazy: We rely on stereotypes and assumptions because they let us make judgments without thinking too hard. “So when a woman talks about her emotions, it can be damaging because it gives listeners permission to assume a stereotype—women are overly emotional—is true.” But studies show that when women, as well as other underrepresented groups, ask deep questions, “it can cause people to reevaluate how they see you,” said Heilman. When we ask a meaningful question such as “What’s the best part of working here?,” it pushes the listener to think before replying, and “that’s sometimes enough to get them to start questioning their assumptions, and start listening more,” Heilman said.
There was one other key finding in the Harvard study of speed daters: Follow-up questions are particularly powerful. “Follow-ups are a signal that you’re listening, that you want to know more,” one of the researchers, Michael Yeomans, told me. Follow-up questions make reciprocity easier (“Your favorite part of college was ultimate frisbee? Me too! Do you still love to play?”). “They allow self-disclosure without it seeming like self-obsession,” said Yeomans. “It makes a conversation flow.”
This is how to ask emotional questions in the real world: Ask someone how they feel about something, and then follow up with questions that reveal how you feel. It’s the same framework for emotional connection described before, but in a slightly different guise: If we ask questions that push people to think and talk about their values, beliefs, and experiences, and then reciprocate with emotions of our own, we can’t help but listen to one another. “The best listeners aren’t just listening,” said Margaret Clark, the Yale psychologist. “They’re triggering emotions by asking questions, expressing their own emotions, doing things that prompt the other person to say something real.”
THE JOY OF RECIPROCITY
“As I mentioned,” Epley told the room of hedge funders, “you’ve been paired with someone you don’t know for a ten-minute conversation.” Many of the attendees had flown in for this event and had never met each other before. Epley explained that he was conducting an experiment, and each person would need to ask and answer a few specific questions with their partner: “If a crystal ball could tell you the future, would you want to know?” “For what do you feel most grateful?” And “Can you describe a time you cried in front of another person?”
Epley could have started out slow—with a question like “Where did you go on your last vacation?”—before going deep. The Arons, in creating the Fast Friends Procedure, had assumed they needed to start with shallower questions.
But Epley suspected that assumption was wrong. He hypothesized that deep, vulnerable questions were easier to ask—and more enjoyable to answer—than most people realized. Now he had a chance to test his theory out.
Before the conversations began, Epley asked everyone to take out their phones for a quick survey that would gauge how uncomfortable they anticipated this discussion would be. The data, as it flowed in, provided a clear answer: People were dreading this exercise. They thought “they wouldn’t like their partner very much, wouldn’t enjoy the experience much, and it would be pretty awkward,” Epley told me.
Next, everyone paired off with their partners and began talking. Epley couldn’t hear most of what was said, but after a few minutes, he saw someone wiping tears from his face. Not long after, a man and a woman hugged. After ten minutes, he asked everyone to stop. They ignored him. Epley tried again. “Excuse me,” he said, louder this time. “Could you please end your conversations?” Finally, after twenty minutes, Epley managed to quiet the room.
At this point, the participants pulled out their phones and completed another survey about how uncomfortable the conversation had actually been. As the data was collected, Epley asked them to describe what had occurred.
“That was amazing,” one participant said. He had been unenthusiastic about the exercise at first, he explained, but something had happened once the crying question was asked: He had replied as honestly as he could by describing the funeral of a close cousin. And then his partner had leaned in, gripped his shoulder, and begun comforting him, telling him it was okay, tearing up himself. Then, his partner had started revealing things about himself—intimate, personal things—without prompting. “This was the best conversation I’ve had in months,” the man said.
When Epley later reported on this and other iterations of the experiment in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2021, he wrote that participants “consistently expected their conversations to be more awkward, and to lead to weaker connections and less happiness, than they actually did.” He has conducted versions of this exercise with students, strangers in public parks, politicians, lawyers, tech employees, and people recruited online. Each time, the results are the same: The data shows people feel “significantly more connected to their deep conversation partner” after asking and answering just a few questions. The sense of vulnerability that comes from “sharing personal information about one’s past experiences, preferences or beliefs,” and saying things aloud that “leave people feeling more vulnerable to others’ evaluations,” causes participants to feel “more connected,” “more caring,” and “to listen attentively.” When Epley looked to see if there were distinctions in the experiences of men and women, he found no meaningful gender differences, he told me. From the wealthiest financiers to the most distant online strangers, “we all crave real connections,” Epley said. We all want to have meaningful conversations.
Dozens of other studies from the University of Utah, the University of Pennsylvania, Emory, and elsewhere have found that people who ask lots of questions during conversations—particularly questions that invite vulnerable responses—are more popular among their peers and more often seen as leaders. They have more social influence and are sought out more frequently for friendship and advice. Any of us can do this in nearly any setting or conversation, be it with a roommate, a coworker, or someone we just met. We simply need to ask people how they feel and reciprocate the vulnerability they share with us.
In one experiment, researchers instructed participants to ask strangers and friends questions such as “Have you ever committed a crime?” The researchers found that “questioners assumed that asking sensitive questions would make their conversation partners uncomfortable and would damage their relationships. But in fact, we consistently found that askers were wrong on both fronts.” Asking deep questions is easier than most people realize, and more rewarding than we expect.
EMOTIONAL DIALOGUES ARE THE HARDEST TO MATCH
When I first telephoned Epley to interview him for this book, I had a long list of topics I wanted to cover, from his research to the last time that he had cried in front of another person. (The previous day, he told me. He had been talking about his kids at lunch.)
Within minutes, however, Epley redirected our conversation, steering it with question after question of his own. He asked me why I had decided to become a journalist, what had gotten me interested in this topic, my experiences living in California during the pandemic. I kept trying to get back to my list of questions, the straightforward, practical ones about his work. But he kept asking, and then following up with deeper and deeper inquiries, until I found myself telling him about my family, about a brother who had run into legal problems, about my hopes this book might help people understand one another a little better. I talked nonstop about myself—which is not what you’re supposed to do as a journalist.
“I’m sorry I’m asking so many questions,” Epley said at one point. “I don’t mean to waste your time.” But it didn’t feel like a waste. The conversation felt important.
We know it is critical to understand what kind of conversation we’re having, and that it’s necessary, at a discussion’s start, to establish ground rules and determine what kinds of logic we’ll use to make choices together.
But that’s not enough to create a real, lasting bond. For that, we need emotional connection. Emotional dialogues are vital because they help us figure out who we’re talking to, what’s going on inside their heads, what they value most. A How Do We Feel? conversation can seem anxiety producing. It can sometimes seem easier to pretend we don’t hear the emotion in someone’s voice, or to glide past a disclosure, rather than acknowledge a vulnerability and reveal ourselves in return. But emotions are how we connect.
When my father died a few years ago and I told people I had recently attended his funeral, some of them offered their condolences. But almost no one asked me any questions. Instead, they quickly moved on to other subjects. The truth was, I was desperate to talk about what I had been through, about my dad, about the eulogies that had made me so proud and sad, about how it feels to know I won’t be able to call him with good news. His death was one of the most important—most emotional and profound—events in my life. I would have treasured someone asking, “What was your dad like?” But outside of my closest friends and family, no one asked anything, either because they didn’t know how, or because it felt impolite, or they didn’t know I wanted to talk, or because they worried that, if I answered, they wouldn’t know what to say next.
“It is easier to judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers,” the nineteenth-century thinker Pierre-Marc-Gaston de Lévis wrote, and yet he stayed silent on which questions, exactly, should be asked. Science has provided guidance: Ask others about their beliefs and values. Ask them about experiences and those moments that caused them to change. Ask how they feel, rather than about facts. Reframe your questions so they are deeper. Ask follow-ups. And as people expose their vulnerabilities, reveal something about yourself. It will be less uncomfortable than you imagine. It will be more fascinating than you think. And it might lead to a moment of true connection.
However, sometimes it is hard to find the language for our emotions, and so we express our feelings not through our words, but our bodies, vocal inflections, sighs, and laughs. How do we become emotionally intelligent listeners when people aren’t speaking clearly? How do we hear vulnerabilities when we’re talking about everything except how we feel?
Skip Notes
*1 A full list of the Fast Friends Procedure questions can be found in the endnotes.
*2 The troubling discrepancies in who is allowed to show vulnerability in various settings have important implications. For more, please see the endnotes.
HOW DO YOU HEAR EMOTIONS NO ONE SAYS ALOUD?
The Big Bang Theory
The original pitch for The Big Bang Theory—which would eventually become one of the most successful sitcoms in history—was fairly straightforward: Let’s make a show about a group of awkward geniuses who have trouble connecting with other people unless they speak Klingon or enjoy quantum mechanics jokes.
The idea had come to the sitcom’s creators, Bill Prady and Chuck Lorre, during a brainstorming session in 2005. Prady had taken a circuitous route to Hollywood, working as a software engineer before teaming up with Lorre, a TV veteran known as “the king of sitcoms.” One day, the two men were dreaming up concepts for new shows when Prady began describing the strange and fascinating characters he had met when he was a computer programmer. There was one guy, he told Lorre, who was brilliant at writing code but terrible at human interactions. Whenever they went to lunch, the man would take forever figuring out how much to tip the server. “He would say things like ‘Well, she smiled at me, so I guess I should increase her tip by two percent, but she only refilled our water once, which means I should deduct three percent, but I don’t know how to account for the fact that she seemed a little flirty but she also forgot my name,’ ” Prady said. “It would take him twenty minutes to pay the bill. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the people part of everything.”
“I’ve never seen someone like that on TV,” Lorre told him. “Maybe there’s a show there?”
They began sketching out plots and characters. Computer programmers, they decided, were too boring—all they do is stare at screens—so they came up with a group of young physicists. They would be the kind of people who could easily explain the Born-Oppenheimer approximation and Schrödinger’s cat, but were bewildered by dating, or fell apart if someone sat in their favorite chair during Battlestar Galactica.
Each physicist would have their own sort of awkwardness. The main character, Sheldon, would be uptight, analytical, and emotionally clueless, mostly incapable of reading others’ feelings or expressing his own. Sheldon’s roommate, Leonard, would pine for a girlfriend, but be so socially inept that he would invite a woman to join him in eating Indian food by explaining that “curry is a natural laxative.” Another character, Raj, would become mute whenever a woman was present. A fourth, Howard, would be an engineer rather than a physicist—earning the others’ disdain—but speak Klingon and a little Elvish, and boast a repertoire of outrageous pickup lines. Most of all, the characters would share a common trait: A general social incompetence, a tendency to misread others’ emotions and miscommunicate their own feelings. It would be a show about how even the smartest people can struggle with the people part of everything.
Lorre and Prady pitched their idea to studio heads even before they had written the first script. Everyone loved it. These were such original characters! A pilot was ordered. However, when the writers started plotting out the initial episode, a problem emerged: “A sitcom only works if you know what the characters are feeling,” Prady told me.
Sitcoms are so fast moving, joke after joke and twist after twist, that, to succeed, the audience needs to understand each character’s emotional state as soon as they appear on screen. What’s more, “the audience needs to see the emotional relationships between the characters,” Prady said. “They have to know if two people are fighting because they hate each other, or because they love each other, or they’re pretending to hate each other because they’re actually in love.” Emotions are everything in television. “They have to be obvious,” he told me. Put differently, it’s crucial for an audience to “hear” a character’s feelings, even when those emotions aren’t spoken aloud.
That created a problem, however, because the characters in The Big Bang Theory were designed to be bad at expressing their feelings. Sheldon, for instance, viewed emotions as a nuisance, and felt the best way to assuage a friend was to point out that “you have an entire lifetime of poor decisions ahead of you.” Leonard could explain E=mc2 but couldn’t fathom why someone would get upset when he read their private diary. These kinds of misunderstandings were at the core of the show’s humor. But how do you write a compelling script when your characters are incapable of showing how they feel?
One option was simply to have them announce their feelings—to tell, not show. There’s a problem with this approach, though. “You can write dialogue like, ‘I’m mad you’re late for dinner!’ ” Prady told me. “But no one talks that way in real life.” People don’t announce their emotions. They perform them. “Someone screams, ‘I cooked you dinner and you’re welcome!,’ and that’s how you know they’re angry,” said Prady. Psychologists refer to this kind of communication as nonlinguistic emotional expressions, and they comprise a vast portion of how we convey our feelings in everyday life. “People’s emotions are rarely put into words,” wrote the psychologist Daniel Goleman. “The key to intuiting another’s feelings is in the ability to read nonverbal channels: tone of voice, gesture, facial expressions and the like.”
Lorre and Prady confronted a conundrum: They couldn’t have their characters announce what they were feeling, because that was unrealistic and made for terrible television, and they couldn’t have them show what they were feeling, because, by design, they were supposed to be bad at showing their emotions. So the writers tried juxtaposing the physicists with other, more emotionally nimble characters to establish contrasts. They created Katie, a jaded neighbor who is fresh from a breakup and whose bitter pessimism highlights the main characters’ cheerfulness. To emphasize the characters’ longing for companionship, they invented a female physicist named Gilda, whose sexual frankness—she once had sex at a Star Trek convention while in costume, she announces in the pilot—underscores the men’s naïveté.
