Supercommunicators, page 13
SHELDON
(VERY FAST)
What’s the difference? In the winter that seat is close enough to the radiator to remain warm and yet not so close as to cause perspiration. In the summer it’s directly in the path of a cross breeze created by opening windows there and there. It faces the television at an angle that is neither direct, thus discouraging conversation, nor so far wide as to create a parallax distortion. I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point.
PENNY
(RESERVED)
Do you want me to move?
SHELDON
(STILL WORKED UP)
Well…
LEONARD
(EXASPERATED)
Just sit somewhere else!
When they filmed that scene, “the audience went wild,” Lorre said. “They were in love with Sheldon’s neuroses. I’m standing on the stage, and I look at Jimmy Burrows, who directed both of our pilots, and Jimmy looks at me, and we both look at each other with these big grins. We knew this was working. It was one of those goose bump moments.”
The writers had finally cracked the code: The characters could be bumbling and graceless and socially incompetent—and as long as they obviously tried to match one another’s mood and energy (or deliberately didn’t match), it would be clear when they were connecting or at odds. The audience would understand what they were feeling and could root for them, celebrate when they bonded, feel good when everything worked out in the end (including when—spoiler alert!—Leonard and Penny got married a few seasons later).
AFTER THE BOOM
The Big Bang Theory premiered on CBS on September 24, 2007, with more than nine million viewers. Critics, who are usually dismissive of these kinds of shows, were unusually enthusiastic. The Washington Post called it “the funniest new sitcom of the season.” Another critic told the Associated Press that the show worked because of “characters you like and believe, who can be hilarious without being heartless, and consistent without being formulaic.”
By its third season, fourteen million viewers were tuning in for every episode. By season nine, twenty million. The show would eventually earn fifty-five Emmy nominations and become one of the longest-running programs in history, lasting longer than Cheers, Friends, M*A*S*H, and Modern Family. Twenty-five million people watched the final episode in 2019.
Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady remained involved the entire time. When I asked Lorre if he ever talked to the actors about the importance of matching one another’s energy and moods, he said he didn’t have to. Good actors already understand that, he said. They know how to deliver their lines while using their bodies, inflections, gestures, and expressions to convey what’s unsaid. They know how to make sure the audience hears everything, including unspoken emotions. It’s the same reason why, in improv, players are instructed to match each other by responding with “Yes, and…” It’s what good politicians do when they tell a crowd, “I feel your pain.”
“The show was a success, I think, because the characters are lovable,” Lorre told me. “The writers loved them. The audience loved them. They made it okay to show that love.”
When we make it clear to others that we are trying to hear their emotions, when we genuinely try to match or acknowledge their moods and energy, we begin to reciprocate and entrain. We bond.
But what about when you’re in a fight with someone, or you believe in very different values? What if we’re ideologically opposed? How do we discuss How Do We Feel? when talking about our emotions is the last thing we want to do?
Paradoxically, as the next chapter explains, revealing our feelings in these moments is even more important.
Skip Notes
* As anyone who has ever read a psychology journal knows, researchers can be very particular about terms like mood and energy. For more on the language used in this chapter, please see the endnotes.
CONNECTING AMID CONFLICT
Talking to the Enemy About Guns
Melanie Jeffcoat was standing in the hallway of her high school in Las Vegas, Nevada, during the middle of her junior year, when she heard the noise, pop-pop, from inside a nearby classroom. Did someone drop some books? she wondered. Then she saw a student running. Then another. Then a third, sprinting past her, wide-eyed with fear.
At that moment she began hearing screams. Suddenly everyone was rushing into the hallway and shouting, running toward the auditorium without any real understanding of what was going on beyond overheard snippets: A gun. Mr. Piggott shot. Blood on my sneakers. It was 1982, years before the tragedies of Columbine and so many other places, before phrases like active shooter and lockdown drill would become common inside schools.
For years afterward, Jeffcoat would struggle to wrap her head around what had happened: A disgruntled student had used a handgun to shoot a history teacher and two of Jeffcoat’s classmates. The teacher had died; the students survived. In retrospect, it seemed unbelievable, a story she had heard rather than lived through. But over the next few decades, as the list of schools with similar cataclysms grew and grew and grew—Heritage High, Buell Elementary, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook—she began to realize that she had merely been early, rather than unique.
Then, in 2014, after Jeffcoat had become a parent herself, her eleven-year-old daughter sent a text in the middle of the day. There was a lockdown at her school because of a suspected shooter, she wrote. She was in gym class and students were grabbing baseball bats to defend themselves. “All I got was a golf club,” she texted her mom.
Jeffcoat was at the doctor’s office and all those old feelings—the terror and panic and helplessness—came rushing back. She jumped in her car and drove to the school. By then, the lockdown was over—it turned out to be a false alarm—but Jeffcoat found her daughter and drove her and three of her friends home. In the car, she listened to their chatter: “We would have totally died because my teacher said we should stay in the classroom.” “My teacher opened the window and told us to jump out.” “We went into the closet.” Jeffcoat was horrified. “It broke my heart to hear them talking like this was a normal part of life,” she told me. “How is this acceptable?”
A few months later, when she took her daughters to a movie, Jeffcoat spent the entire time eyeing the theater’s exits, envisioning escape routes if a gunman came in. Afterward, she realized she couldn’t remember the movie’s plot.
She decided she had to do something. “I couldn’t just sit there,” she said. “If I didn’t act, the fear would eat me up.” So she joined a local group protesting gun violence. She was aware this wouldn’t be popular. “We live in the South,” she told me. “Most of my neighbors have guns.” But she attended meetings and rallies on weekends, and then took a leadership role in her local group, and then became active within regional organizations, and eventually national associations. She became a public figure in the fight for gun control, quoted in the media and sent to lobby lawmakers. “It was my life,” she said.
So it wasn’t a complete surprise when she received an invitation from a group of civic-minded organizations asking her to join a discussion about guns in Washington, D.C. The event would include advocates from both sides of the issue. The goal, the invitation explained, was not to debate. It wasn’t even, necessarily, to find common ground. Rather, it was an experiment to see if people who abhorred each other’s beliefs could have a civil conversation.
Jeffcoat was dubious. How could any conversation with these people—these gun-loving fanatics she was devoted to defeating—be civil? But then again, she had been working on this issue for years and the school shootings hadn’t stopped; in fact, they’d become more common. If nothing else, this might help her understand the other side’s arguments a little better, which she could use in lobbying. She wrote back and agreed to attend.
CONVERSATIONS AMID CONFLICT
Sometime in the past few months, there’s a good chance you’ve had a tough conversation. Perhaps it was a difficult performance review with a coworker or a squabble with your partner. It could have been a debate about politics, or a quarrel with siblings over who should host Mom during the holidays. Possibly it occurred online, with someone you’ve never met before and never will, where you traded barbs about vaccines, or sports, or parenting, or religion, or whether the final season of Lost was great or the worst. In each case, there was a conflict—opposing beliefs, values, opinions—and you and others attempted to air your disputes and, possibly, find a resolution (or, perhaps, just troll each other out of spite).
How did that conversation unfold? Did you and your spouse take turns calmly presenting facts and proposals, and then listening attentively? Did your coworker acknowledge their shortcomings and you graciously did the same? Did you dispassionately consider your siblings’ opinions when they implied you were abandoning your mother? After trading insults on Twitter, did everyone change their minds?
Or—and this, of course, is more likely—was the conversation a messy battle from start to finish, with bruised feelings, anger, defensiveness, and misunderstandings galore?
It’s not breaking news to suggest we are living through a time of profound polarization. Over the last decade, the number of Americans who say they are “deeply angry” at the other political party has increased sharply, to almost 70 percent of the electorate. Roughly half the nation believes those with differing political beliefs are “immoral,” “lazy,” “dishonest,” and “unintelligent.” Roughly four in ten self-described liberals, and three in ten conservatives, have unfriended or blocked someone on social media because of something they said. Over 80 percent of U.S. workers say they experience conflicts in the workplace.
Conflict, of course, has always been part of life. We argue in our marriages and friendships, at work and with our kids. Debate and dissent are part of democracy, domesticity, and every meaningful relationship. As the human rights activist Dorothy Thomas once wrote, “Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it.”
Today, however, it can feel like we have forgotten how to connect with each other amid our disputes. We seem, at times, unable to see beyond our anger and polarization. One way out of this morass, as previous chapters have shown, is by asking questions and listening to emotions. But sometimes, when it comes to discussing serious conflicts, asking and listening isn’t enough.
So how do we connect when our differences seem so unbridgeable?
* * *
—
The event Jeffcoat had agreed to attend in Washington, D.C., was sponsored by one of the nation’s biggest media companies, Advance Local, which had partnered with a group of journalists and civic-advocacy groups to see if there was a better way to have hard conversations.
The event’s organizers wanted to conduct an experiment: If they brought together people with different opinions, and then taught them specific communication skills, would they be able to discuss their differences without rancor and bitterness? Could the right conversation, conducted the right way, help overcome the divide?
But what hot-button topic would provide the best fodder for the experiment? As the organizers were trying to decide, there was yet another school shooting: A nineteen-year-old former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, walked onto campus with an AR-15-style rifle and opened fire, killing fourteen students and three adults. In the wake of that attack, the organizers of the experiment decided to focus on a discussion about guns, “a classically broken conversation,” as John Sarrouf, who helped design the project, put it to me. Sarrouf runs an organization devoted to reducing polarization, Essential Partners, and has followed the firearms debate for years. “There’s lots of data showing that everyone shares so many opinions about guns,” he said. For instance, the vast majority of Americans support background checks for gun purchases. Large majorities support bans on high-capacity magazines and assault-style weapons. But despite this consensus, it’s almost impossible to get Democrats and Republicans, let alone groups such as the National Rifle Association and Everytown for Gun Safety, to work—or even sit down—together. “Everyone is so focused on defending their positions,” Sarrouf said. “We thought, if we could bring these two sides together and teach them to have a different kind of conversation, maybe it would demonstrate something.”
The organizers posted invitations on websites and reached out to gun-control activists such as Melanie Jeffcoat, as well as gun-rights advocates. More than a thousand people responded. Dozens of them were invited to Washington, D.C., to participate in training sessions and dialogues. Afterward, the conversation moved online, and over a hundred more people were invited to participate on Facebook.
“It seemed crazy to me at first,” said Jon Godfrey, who learned about the experiment via an online ad. Godfrey served twenty years in the army and then spent a career in law enforcement. He owns between thirty and forty guns (he hasn’t counted lately, he told me). When he spoke to the experiment’s organizers, he informed them that they probably wouldn’t be interested in having him join the conversation, because he wasn’t much interested in giving up his weapons. What’s more, he suspected they were a bunch of liberals hoping to embarrass conservatives.
The organizers replied that they hoped he would come to D.C., all expenses paid. “I didn’t expect much, to be honest,” he told me. “But I didn’t have anything else going on that weekend, so I said yes, and it ended up being one of the most powerful things I’ve ever done.”
BUILDING EXCEPTIONAL COMMUNICATORS
As the organizers were designing their experiment, they were guided, in part, by the work of researchers such as Sheila Heen, a professor at Harvard Law School who has spent her life trying to understand how people connect amid conflict.
Heen’s father, a lawyer, had tutored her in the fine art of argument from a young age. Sometimes it felt as though she had to negotiate for everything: An ice cream cone, a horse, a late curfew, forgiveness when she violated that curfew. Consequently, by the time she got to college, she was a fearsome dorm-room debater. Then she enrolled at Harvard Law School and sought out Roger Fisher, who had recently written Getting to Yes, and began studying everything from the rivalries that spark civil wars to battles within companies. Eventually, she joined the Harvard faculty herself.
Heen was soon facilitating dialogues in Cyprus and among indigenous Alaskan populations. She trained appointees at the White House and justices of the Singapore Supreme Court, and advised Pixar, the National Basketball Association, and the Federal Reserve. As she moved among these different worlds, she realized that she had made a common mistake in her more youthful days: She had assumed that the goal of discussing a conflict and engaging in debate was achieving victory, defeating the other side. But that’s not right. Rather, the real goal is figuring out why a conflict exists in the first place.
Combatants—be they arguing spouses or battling coworkers—have to determine why this fight has emerged and what is fueling it, as well as the stories they are all telling themselves about why this conflict persists. They need to work together to determine if there are any “zones of possible agreement,” and have to arrive at a mutual understanding about why this dispute matters, and what’s needed for it to end. This kind of understanding, alone, won’t guarantee peace. But without it, peace is impossible.
So how do we achieve this kind of mutual understanding? The first step is recognizing that within each fight is not just one conflict, but, at a minimum, two: There’s the surface issue causing us to disagree with each other, and then the emotional conflict underneath. “Say you have a couple fighting with each other about having another kid,” Heen told me. “There’s the top-level conflict—you want another child, and I don’t—that seems, at first glance, to explain why they’re fighting. But there’s also a deeper emotional issue: I’m angry because you’re prioritizing a kid over my career or I’m scared another child will bankrupt us or I’m frustrated because you don’t seem to care what I want.” Those emotional conflicts are sometimes nebulous, difficult to pin down, but they’re also incredibly powerful—because they contain so much of the anger and disappointment driving this argument beyond the possibility of compromise. “And we know those emotions are there,” said Heen, “because whenever the couple fights, no matter how many sensible things they say, they never seem to get closer to a resolution.”
Heen sometimes would go into negotiations among politicians, or disputes within companies, and listen to people describe problems with relatively simple fixes. Then she would watch people’s emotions hijack the conversation until those fixes became impossible. People were furious, distrustful, they felt betrayed—but they rarely admitted that to the other person or, sometimes, even themselves. They stopped trying to understand why this conflict had emerged and, instead, started plotting revenge. And most of all, everyone wanted to win, to beat the other side, to feel vindicated.
This is all normal, of course. Every confrontation involves a range of feelings—anxiety, distress, a desire for retribution—that are natural. But these passions can make it impossible to discuss problems in a productive manner. “And if you don’t acknowledge the emotions, then you’ll never understand why you’re fighting,” said Heen. “You’ll never know what this fight is actually about.”
The key, Heen found, entailed getting people to express their emotions, to have a version of the How Do We Feel? conversation that allowed both sides to express the hurt and suspicion fueling the fight. The problem, however, is that we often hate talking about our feelings during a disagreement. “People love to pretend that they can become analytical robots,” Heen said. “But, of course, no one can do that. All that happens is your emotions leak out in other ways.” Or people might recognize their own emotions, but they are loath to reveal them. They think it will give the other side an advantage or will be viewed as a weakness. They worry about revealing a vulnerability that will be weaponized by their foes. Not to mention, when we’re fighting, we usually feel stressed, which isn’t a great environment for discussing our feelings.
