Supercommunicators, page 2
What makes the difference?
As the next chapter explains, our brains have evolved to crave connection. But consistently achieving alignment with other people requires understanding how communication functions—and, most important, recognizing that we need to be engaged in the same kind of conversation, at the same time, if we want to connect.
Supercommunicators aren’t born with special abilities—but they have thought harder about how conversations unfold, why they succeed or fail, the nearly infinite number of choices that each dialogue offers that can bring us closer together or push us apart. When we learn to recognize those opportunities, we begin to speak and hear in new ways.
THE MATCHING PRINCIPLE
How to Fail at Recruiting Spies
If Jim Lawler was being honest with himself, he had to admit that he was terrible at recruiting spies. So bad, in fact, that he spent most nights worrying about getting fired from the only job he had ever loved, a job he had landed two years earlier as a case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency.
It was 1982 and Lawler was thirty years old. He had joined the CIA after attending law school at the University of Texas, where he had gotten mediocre grades, and then cycling through a series of dull jobs. One day, unsure what to do with his life, he telephoned a CIA headhunter he had once met on campus. A job interview followed, then a polygraph test, then a dozen more interviews in various cities, and then a series of exams that seemed designed to ferret out everything Lawler didn’t know. (Who, he wondered, memorizes rugby world champions from the 1960s?)
Eventually, he made it to the final interview. Things weren’t looking good. His exam performances had been poor to middling. He had no overseas experience, no knowledge of foreign languages, no military service or special skills. Yet, the interviewer noted, Lawler had flown himself to Washington, D.C., for this interview on his own dime; had persisted through each test, even when it was clear he didn’t have the first clue how to answer most questions; had responded to every setback with what seemed like admirable, if misplaced, optimism.
Why, the man asked, did he want to join the CIA so badly?
“I’ve wanted to do something important my entire life,” Lawler replied. He wanted to serve his country and “bring democracy to nations yearning for freedom.” Even as the words came out, he realized how ridiculous they sounded. Who says yearning in an interview? So he stopped, took a breath, and said the most honest thing he could think of: “My life feels empty,” he told the interviewer. “I want to be part of something meaningful.”
A week later the agency called to offer him a job. He accepted immediately and reported to Camp Peary—the Farm, as the agency’s training facility in Virginia is known—to be tutored in lock picking, dead drops, and covert surveillance.
The most surprising aspect of the Farm’s curriculum, however, was the agency’s devotion to the art of conversation. In his time there, Lawler learned that working for the CIA was essentially a communications job. A field officer’s mandate wasn’t slinking in shadows or whispering in parking lots; it was talking to people at parties, making friends in embassies, bonding with foreign officials in the hope that, someday, you might have a quiet chat about some critical piece of intelligence. Communication is so important that a summary of CIA training methods puts it right up front: “Find ways to connect,” it says. “A case officer’s goal should be to have a prospective agent come to believe, hopefully with good reason, that the case officer is one of the few people, perhaps the ONLY person, who truly understands him.”
Lawler finished spy school with high marks and was shipped off to Europe. His assignment was to establish rapport with foreign bureaucrats, cultivate friendships with embassy attachés, and develop other sources who might be willing to have candid conversations—and thereby, his bosses hoped, open channels for discussions that make the world’s affairs a bit more manageable.
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Lawler’s first few months abroad were miserable. He tried his best to blend in. He attended black-tie soirees and had drinks at bars near embassies. Nothing worked. There was a clerk from the Chinese delegation he met après-ski and repeatedly invited to lunch and cocktails. Eventually Lawler worked up the courage to inquire if his new friend, perhaps, wanted to earn some extra cash passing along gossip he heard inside his embassy. The man replied that his family was quite wealthy, thank you, and his bosses tended to execute people for things like that. He would pass.
Then there was a receptionist from the Soviet consulate who seemed promising until one of Lawler’s superiors took him aside and explained that she, in fact, worked for the KGB and was trying to recruit him.
Eventually, a career-saving opportunity appeared: A CIA colleague mentioned that a young woman from the Middle East, who worked in her country’s foreign ministry, was visiting. Yasmin was on vacation, the colleague explained, staying with a brother who had moved to Europe. A few days later, Lawler managed to “bump into” her at a restaurant. He introduced himself as an oil speculator. As they began talking, Yasmin mentioned that her brother was always busy, never available for sightseeing. She seemed lonely.
Lawler invited her to lunch the next day and asked about her life. Did she like her job? Was it hard living in a country that had recently undergone a conservative revolution? Yasmin confided that she hated the religious radicals who had come to power. She longed to move away, to live in Paris or New York, but for that she needed money, and it had taken months of saving just to afford this brief trip.
Lawler, sensing an opening, mentioned that his oil company was looking for a consultant. It was part-time work, he said, assignments she could do alongside her job at the foreign ministry. But he could offer her a signing bonus. “We ordered champagne and I thought she was going to start crying, she was so happy,” he told me.
After lunch, Lawler rushed back to the office to find his boss. Finally, he had recruited his first spy! “And he tells me, ‘Congratulations. Headquarters is gonna be overjoyed. Now you need to tell her you’re CIA and you’ll want information about her government.’ ” Lawler thought that was a terrible idea. If he was honest with Yasmin, she’d never speak to him again.
But his boss explained that it was unfair to ask someone to work for the CIA without being forthright. If Yasmin’s government ever found out, she would be jailed, possibly killed. She had to understand the risks.
So, Lawler continued meeting with Yasmin, and tried to find the right moment to reveal his true employer. She became increasingly candid as they spent more time together. She was ashamed that her government was shutting down newspapers and prohibiting free speech, she told him, and despised the bureaucrats who had made it illegal for women to study certain topics in college and had forced them to wear hijabs in public. When she first sought out a job with the government, she said, she had never imagined things would get this bad.
Lawler took this as a sign. One night, over dinner, he explained that he was not an oil speculator, but, rather, an American intelligence officer. He told her that the United States wanted the same things she did: To undermine her country’s theocracy, to weaken its leaders, to stop the repression of women. He apologized for lying about who he was, but the job offer was real. Would she consider working for the Central Intelligence Agency?
“As I talked, I watched her eyes get bigger and bigger, and she started gripping the tablecloth, and then shaking her head, no-no-no, and, when I finally stopped, she started crying, and I knew I was screwed,” Lawler told me. “She said they murdered people for that, and there was no way she could help.” There was nothing he could say to convince her to consider the idea. “All she wanted was to get away from me.”
Lawler went back to his boss with the bad news. “And he says, ‘I’ve already told everyone you recruited her! I told the division chief, and the chief of station, and they told D.C. Now you want me to tell them you can’t close the deal?’ ”
Lawler had no idea what to do next. “No amount of money or promises would have convinced her to take a suicidal risk,” he told me. The only possible way forward was convincing Yasmin that she could trust him, that he understood her and would protect her. But how do you do that? “They taught me, at the Farm, that to recruit someone, you have to convince them that you care about them, which means you have to actually care about them, which means you have to connect in some way. And I had no idea how to make that happen.”
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How do we create a genuine connection with another person? How do we nudge someone, through a conversation, to take a risk, embrace an adventure, accept a job, or go on a date?
Let’s lower the stakes. What if you’re trying to bond with your boss, or get to know a new friend: How do you convince them to let down their guard? How do you show you’re listening?
Over the past few decades, as new methods for studying our behaviors and brains have emerged, these kinds of questions have driven researchers to examine nearly every aspect of communication. Scientists have scrutinized how our minds absorb information, and have found that connecting with others through speech is both more powerful, and more complicated, than we ever realized. How we communicate—the unconscious decisions we make as we speak and listen, the questions we ask and the vulnerabilities we expose, even our tone of voice—can influence who we trust, are persuaded by, and seek out as friends.
Alongside this new understanding, there’s also been a flurry of research showing that at the heart of every conversation is the potential for neurological synchronization, an alignment of our brains and bodies—everything from how fast each of us breathes to the goose bumps on our skin—that we often fail to notice, but which influences how we talk, hear, and think. Some people consistently fail to synchronize with others, even when they’re speaking to close friends. Others—let’s call them supercommunicators—seem to synchronize effortlessly with just about anyone. Most of us lie somewhere in between. But we can learn to connect in more meaningful ways if we understand how conversations work.
For Jim Lawler, however, the path toward making a connection with Yasmin seemed murky. “I knew, at most, I had one more chance to talk to her,” he told me. “I had to figure out how to break through.”
WHEN BRAINS CONNECT
When Beau Sievers joined the Dartmouth Social Systems Lab in 2012, he still looked like the musician he had been a few years earlier. Some days he would rush to the laboratory after waking up, his blond hair in a frizzy nimbus and dressed in a ratty T-shirt from some jazz fest, sprinting past campus cops who were uncertain if he was a PhD candidate or a weed dealer servicing undergraduates.
Sievers had taken a circuitous route to the Ivy League. For college, he had attended a music conservatory where he studied drumming and music production at the exclusion of pretty much everything else. Soon, however, he began to suspect that no amount of practice would deliver the rarefied status of drummers-who-can-support-themselves-by-drumming. So he began exploring other careers. He had always been fascinated by how people communicate. In particular, he loved the voiceless musical dialogues that sometimes emerged onstage. There were moments when he was improvising with other musicians and suddenly everyone would click, as if they were sharing one brain. It felt as if the performers—as well as the audience, the guy at the mixing board, even the bartender—were suddenly all in sync. He sometimes felt the same thing during great late-night discussions, or successful dates. So he signed up for a few psychology classes, and, eventually, applied to a PhD program with Dr. Thalia Wheatley, one of the foremost neuroscientists researching how humans connect with one another.
“Why people ‘click’ with some people, but not others, is one of the great unsolved mysteries of science,” Wheatley wrote in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass. When we align with someone through conversation, Wheatly explained, it feels wonderful, in part because our brains have evolved to crave these kinds of connections. The desire to connect has pushed people to form communities, protect their offspring, seek out new friends and alliances. It’s one reason why our species has survived. “Human beings have the rare capacity,” she wrote, “to connect with each other, against all odds.”
Numerous other researchers have also been fascinated by how we form connections. As Sievers began reading science journals, he learned that in 2012, scholars at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany had studied the brains of guitarists playing Scheidler’s Sonata in D Major. When the musicians played their guitars separately, with each person focused on their own musical score, their neural activity looked dissimilar. But when they segued into a duet, the electrical pulses within their craniums began to synchronize. To the researchers, it appeared as if the guitarists’ minds had merged. What’s more, that linkage often flowed through their bodies: They frequently began breathing at similar rates, their eyes dilated in tandem, their hearts began to beat in similar patterns. Frequently even the electrical impulses along their skin would synchronize. Then, when they stopped playing together—as their scores diverged or they veered into solos—the “between-brain synchronization disappeared completely,” the scientists wrote.
Sievers found other studies showing this same phenomenon when people hummed together, or tapped their fingers side by side, or solved cooperative puzzles, or told each other stories. In one experiment, researchers at Princeton measured the neural activity of a dozen people listening to a young woman recount a long and convoluted tale about her prom night. As they monitored the speaker’s brain alongside the brains of her listeners, they saw the listeners’ minds synchronize with the narrator, until they were all experiencing the same feelings of stress and unease, joy and humor, at the same time, as if they were telling the story together. What’s more, some listeners synchronized particularly closely with the speaker; their brains seemed to behave nearly precisely like her brain. When questioned afterward, those tightly aligned participants could distinguish between the story’s characters more clearly and recall smaller details. The more people’s brains had synchronized, the better they understood what was said. The “extent of speaker-listener neural coupling predicts the success of the communication,” the researchers wrote in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010.
SUPERCOMMUNICATORS
These and other studies make clear an essential truth: To communicate with someone, we must connect with them. When we absorb what someone is saying, and they comprehend what we say, it’s because our brains have, to some degree, aligned. At that moment, our bodies—our pulses, facial expressions, the emotions we experience, the prickling sensation on our necks and arms—often start to synchronize as well. There is something about neural simultaneity that helps us listen more closely and speak more clearly.
Sometimes this connection occurs with just one other person. Other times, it happens within a group, or a large audience. But whenever it happens, our brains and bodies become alike because we are, in the language of neuroscientists, neurally entrained.
As researchers have scrutinized how entrainment occurs, they have discovered that some people are particularly skilled at this kind of synchronization. Some individuals are consistently better at connecting.
Scientists like Sievers don’t call these people supercommunicators—they prefer terms like high centrality participant or core information provider—but Sievers knew what these kinds of people looked like: They were the friends everyone called for advice; the colleagues elected to leadership positions; the coworkers everyone welcomed into a conversation because they made it more fun. Sievers had performed onstage with supercommunicators, had sought them out at parties, had voted for them. He had even, at times, achieved moments of supercommunication himself, usually without understanding exactly how.
None of the studies Sievers read, however, seemed to explain why some people were better at synchronization than others. So Sievers decided to stage an experiment to see if he could figure it out.
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To begin, Sievers and his colleagues gathered dozens of volunteers and asked them to watch a series of movie clips that were designed to be difficult to understand. Some, for example, were in a foreign language. Others were brief scenes from the middle of a film, completely decontextualized. To make the clips even harder to follow, the researchers had removed all audio and subtitles, so what participants saw were confusing, silent performances: A bald and irate man in strained conversation with a blond heavyset fellow. Are they friends or enemies? In another, a cowboy takes a bath while a second man observes from the doorway. Is he a sibling? A lover?
The volunteers’ brains were monitored as they watched these clips, and researchers saw that each person reacted slightly differently. Some were confused. Others were entertained. But no two brain scans were alike.
Then, each participant was assigned to a small group and told to answer a few questions together: “Is the bald man angry at the blond man?” “Is the man in the doorframe sexually attracted to the man in the bath?”
After the groups spent an hour discussing their answers, they were put back into the brain scanners and shown the same clips.
This time, the researchers saw that participants’ neural impulses had synchronized with those of their groupmates. Taking part in a conversation—debating what they had seen, discussing plot points—had caused their brains to align.
However, there was a second, even more interesting discovery: Some of the groups had become much more synchronized than others. The brains of these participants looked strikingly alike during the second scan, as if they had all agreed to think precisely the same way.
