Supercommunicators, page 26
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“a practical methodology”: Arthur Aron et al., “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 23, no. 4 (1997): 363–77. As Arthur Aron noted in response to a fact-checking inquiry, students helped collect data in this experiment.
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“We have taken great care”: The full quote is “We have taken great care in matching partners. Based on our experience in previous research we expect that you and your partner will like one another—that is, you have been matched with someone we expect you will like and who will like you.”
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A series of thirty-six questions: Some questions from the Fast Friends Procedure have been edited for brevity. The full list of thirty-six questions is:
1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest? 2. Would you like to be famous? In what way? 3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why? 4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you? 5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else? 6. If you were able to live to the age of ninety and retain either the mind or body of a thirty-year-old for the last sixty years of your life, which would you want? 7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die? 8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common. 9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful? 10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be? 11. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible. 12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be? 13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know? 14. Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it? 15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life? 16. What do you value most in a friendship? 17. What is your most treasured memory? 18. What is your most terrible memory? 19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why? 20. What does friendship mean to you? 21. What roles do love and affection play in your life? 22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items. 23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s? 24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother? 25. Make three true “we” statements each. For instance, “We are both in this room feeling…” 26. Complete this sentence: “I wish I had someone with whom I could share…” 27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for them to know. 28. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met. 29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life. 30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself? 31. Tell your partner something that you like about them [already]. 32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about? 33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet? 34. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why? 35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why? 36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how they might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.
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if a question was likely: These questions come from the first study in “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings,” which was focused on establishing small-talk conditions.
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reveal vulnerabilities: It is worth noting that there are some downsides to revealing vulnerabilities. As Margaret Clark, a psychology professor at Yale, said: “In general, it’s absolutely correct that you are not going to get people being empathic or giving you the support that you need, unless you’re vulnerable and revealing your needs and feelings and so forth. People need that in order to provide support. I can be vulnerable with a friend who really cares about me. However, there are circumstances where it’s very unwise. The most obvious one is if the other person doesn’t care about you and could use that information to take advantage of you rather than support you. You’ve got to read if the other person cares for you correctly. In the early stage of a relationship, vulnerability is good, but revealing too much too soon can go wrong. There’s a pacing to it. In developing relationships, you do want to be vulnerable and you want to maintain some self-protection.”
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“emotional contagion”: Kavadi Teja Sree, “Emotional Contagion in Teenagers and Women,” International Journal of Scientific Research and Engineering Trends 7, no. 2 (2021): 917–24.
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“10-week-old infants”: Elaine Hatfield, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson, “Primitive Emotional Contagion” in Emotion and Social Behavior, ed. M. S. Clark (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1992), 151–77.
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In a separate experiment: The one-at-a-time study mentioned in this section was not conducted by the Arons. In a fact-checking discussion, Arthur Aron clarified that subsequent experiments have revealed two things: First, one of the major factors influencing interpersonal closeness is whether someone believes the other person likes them. Second, responsiveness and reciprocity—rather than just self-disclosure—is the predominant factor in establishing a sense of closeness. “Feeling like your partner is responsive to you is a huge factor,” Aron told me.
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thirty-six questions are effective: Arthur Aron wrote: “What we know today is that the key thing is that this provides an opportunity for each party to provide meaningful responsiveness.”
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“Reciprocity is nuanced”: Professor Clark of Yale elaborated: “When my husband had a medical problem, a cousin of mine provided lots of support and didn’t talk about his own problems at all. A couple of years later, his wife got sick and he called me and was revealing what was going on and how upset he was. And then I provided the reciprocal support—two years later. The rule is not reciprocity in the moment, it’s being responsive to each other’s needs, and that responsiveness going both ways.”
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“they are more likely”: Jacqueline S. Smith, Victoria L. Brescoll, and Erin L. Thomas, “Constrained by Emotion: Women, Leadership, and Expressing Emotion in the Workplace,” in Handbook on Well-Being of Working Women (Netherlands: Springer, 2016), 209–24.
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people tended to ask: Huang et al., “It Doesn’t Hurt to Ask,” 430. In response to fact-checking questions, Michael Yeomans, one of the researchers on this study, said that the “paper was about follow-up questions—that build on topics that go deeper.” For more on topic starters, please see Hart, VanEpps, and Schweitzer, “(Better Than Expected) Consequences of Asking Sensitive Questions,” 136–54.
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“that’s sometimes enough to get”: It’s important to note that though deep questions can undermine some stereotypes, to rid workplaces of double standards requires sustained effort and examining structural causes of bias. Heilman stressed that simply teaching people to ask a certain kind of question, alone, is not enough. For more on how to undermine these prejudices and stereotypes, please see chapters 6 and 7.
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“Follow-ups are a signal”: Michael Yeomans is now affiliated with Imperial College London.
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a few specific questions: These questions have been edited for brevity. The full list of questions can be found in Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar, and Nicholas Epley, “Overly Shallow?: Miscalibrated Expectations Create a Barrier to Deeper Conversation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 122, no. 3 (2022): 367. For this version of the experiment, the questions included: 1. For what in your life do you feel most grateful? Tell the other participant about it. 2. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, your future, or anything else, what would you want to know? 3. Can you describe a time you cried in front of another person?
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Epley suspected: Epley elaborated: “I think what our data suggests is that the runway up to the more meaningful questions can be a lot steeper than you’d guess…. Treat somebody as a close friend—that’s kind of the heuristic that I take from our work.”
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chance to test his theory: Epley emphasized that “we design experiments to test hypotheses, not ‘to show’ or ‘to prove’ anything. Designing experiments ‘to show’ a result or ‘to prove’ a belief is what propaganda looks like. So, I would say, I wanted to test our theory, with data, that deeper conversations would be more positive than people expected.” He also wrote that, although emotional contagion is one of the mechanisms making deep conversations powerful, there are other mechanisms that may be even more impactful, “such as reciprocating trust in each other, which builds over time, while also really learning meaningful things about the other person through the content of the conversation. That’s what really builds connection.”
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Epley later reported: Kardas, Kumar, and Epley, “Overly Shallow?,” 367.
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Dozens of other studies: Huang et al., “It Doesn’t Hurt to Ask,” 430; Nora Cate Schaeffer and Stanley Presser, “The Science of Asking Questions,” Annual Review of Sociology 29, no. 1 (2003): 65–88; Norbert Schwarz et al., “The Psychology of Asking Questions,” International Handbook of Survey Methodology (2012): 18–34; Edward L. Baker and Roderick Gilkey, “Asking Better Questions—A Core Leadership Skill,” Journal of Public Health Management and Practice 26, no. 6 (2020): 632–33; Patti Williams, Gavan J. Fitzsimons, and Lauren G. Block, “When Consumers Do Not Recognize ‘Benign’ Intention Questions as Persuasion Attempts,” Journal of Consumer Research 31, no. 3 (2004): 540–50; Richard E. Petty, John T. Cacioppo, and Martin Heesacker, “Effects of Rhetorical Questions on Persuasion: A Cognitive Response Analysis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 40, no. 3 (1981): 432.
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“questioners assumed”: “The Case for Asking Sensitive Questions,” Harvard Business Review, November 24, 2020.
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CHAPTER FOUR: HOW DO YOU HEAR EMOTIONS NO ONE SAYS ALOUD?
the man would take forever: In an email responding to fact-checking questions, Prady provided further detail: “Specifically it was that despite his mathematical genius (he was capable of doing things like converting from decimal to hexadecimal in his head), he was unable to process the phrase ‘quality of service.’ The formula for a tip is 15%–20% depending on ‘quality of service.’ Despite his mathematical prowess, he was unable to evaluate the human factor present in ‘quality of service.’ In fact, we once suggested he always tip 17½% and he pointed out that the odds that the service was exactly middling were infinitesimally small, and that 17½% would ensure he was nearly always over or undertipping.”
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Computer programmers, they decided: In response to a fact-checking inquiry, Prady explained, “The decision to not make them computer programmers was twofold. First, in the time that had passed since my time in the software industry, it had evolved from garage start-ups to big Microsoft-sized businesses, and we didn’t want the characters engaged in business. Second, the specific work of programming, which involves staring at screens and typing, is difficult to depict on television and might be boring for the viewer.” Prady felt strongly that it should be emphasized that the vocation of programming, itself, is not boring, “Nothing could be further from the truth—programming is exhilarating.”
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be the kind of people: For background on The Big Bang Theory, I am indebted to Jessica Radloff, The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2022); “There’s a Science to CBS’ Big Bang Theory,” USA Today, April 11, 2007; “Why the Big Bang Theory Stars Took Surprising Pay Cuts,” Hollywood Reporter, March 29, 2017; “TV Fact-Checker: Dropping Science on The Big Bang Theory,” Wired, September 22, 2011; Dave Goetsch, “Collaboration—Lessons from The Big Bang Theory,” True WELLth, podcast, June 4, 2019; “The Big Bang Theory: ‘We Didn’t Appreciate How Protective the Audience Would Feel About Our Guys,’ ” Variety, May 5, 2009; “Yes, It’s a Big Bang,” Deseret Morning News, September 22, 2007.
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“you have an entire lifetime”: The Big Bang Theory, season 3, episode 1, “The Electric Can Opener Fluctuation,” aired September 21, 2009.
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“People’s emotions are rarely”: Daniel Goleman, “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ,” Learning 24, no. 6 (1996): 49–50.
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shot the pilot: “The Big Bang Theory Creators Bill Prady and Chuck Lorre Discuss the Series—And the Pilot You Didn’t See,” Entertainment Weekly, September 23, 2022.
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Were the physicists innocent: Prady said that “I think the audience was protective of [Sheldon and Leonard] and felt that the characters around them, especially Katie, represented danger for them. We were surprised at how protective test audiences were of Leonard and Sheldon.”
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Their body language: Judith A. Hall, Terrence G. Horgan, and Nora A. Murphy, “Nonverbal Communication,” Annual Review of Psychology 70 (2019): 271–94; Albert Mehrabian, Nonverbal Communication (United Kingdom: Routledge, 2017); Robert G. Harper, Arthur N. Wiens, and Joseph D. Matarazzo, Nonverbal Communication: The State of the Art (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1978); Starkey Duncan, Jr., “Nonverbal Communication,” Psychological Bulletin 72, no. 2 (1969): 118; Michael Eaves and Dale G. Leathers, Successful Nonverbal Communication: Principles and Applications (United Kingdom: Routledge, 2017); Martin S. Remland, Nonverbal Communication in Everyday Life (Los Angeles: Sage, 2016); Jessica L. Tracy, Daniel Randles, and Conor M. Steckler, “The Nonverbal Communication of Emotions,” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 3 (2015): 25–30.
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lulls us into ignoring: In response to fact-checking inquiries, Professor Judith Hall of Northeastern University said that this process of “overlooking” nonverbal signals is complex, “as many nonverbal signals and leakages do penetrate, nonconsciously, into our brains. We might choose to ‘ignore’ something while the cues have actually been registered at a nonconscious level. Then, of course, sometimes we do actually miss cues.”
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psychiatrist named Terence McGuire: I interviewed Terence McGuire in 2017. He passed away in 2022, and as a result was not able to participate in fact-checking for this chapter. For fact-checking purposes, the contents of this chapter, as it applies to NASA and McGuire, were shared with NASA, which confirmed some details but declined to comment on specifics regarding candidate interviews, and with McGuire’s daughter, Bethany Sexton, who confirmed the details in this chapter, including the methods McGuire used in analyzing candidates. In addition, I spoke to numerous people who worked with McGuire, as well as people who have worked with NASA in screening astronaut applicants. I am also indebted to: “This Is How NASA Used to Hire Its Astronauts 20 Years Ago—And It Still Works Today,” Quartz, August 27, 2015; “The History of the Process Communication Model in Astronaut Selection,” SSCA, December, 2000; T. F. McGuire, Astronauts: Reflections on Current Selection Methodology, Astronaut Personality, and the Space Station (Houston: NASA, 1987); Terence McGuire, “PCM Under Cover,” Kahler Communications Oceania.
