The Science Behind Dramatically Better Conversations | Charles Duhigg | TED

0:05 So I'm going to ask you to participate in an experiment,

0:10 which is that when you leave this room, when you go out into the world,

0:14 today, tomorrow, whenever you feel like it,

0:16 I'd like you to ask and answer one question of someone who's a stranger.

0:22 You might meet them on the bus or walking down the street.

0:25 And I'm going to show you the question

0:27 that I'm going to ask you to ask and answer.

0:29 The question is: When was the last time you cried in front of someone?

0:34 Now just out of curiosity,

0:35 how many of you are really excited about this experiment?

0:38 No hands went up whatsoever.

0:41 And that makes sense, right?

0:43 Because, like, there can be nothing that seems

0:45 more intimidating or less fun than finding a stranger,

0:48 asking them when they've cried in front of someone else,

0:51 and then telling them about the time you cried in front of someone else.

0:54 But I'm going to try and convince you over the next

0:57 few minutes that this experiment is not only worth doing,

1:00 it’s worth doing whenever you can.

1:01 Because it will make your life better.

1:04 And to explain how I got to this, I have to tell

1:06 you a little bit of a story about me and my wife.

1:09 A few years ago, we got into this bad pattern.

1:11 We've been married for 20 years,

1:13 but I would come home from a long day at the office.

1:15 I was a reporter at "The New York Times" at that point,

1:18 and I would start complaining about my day,

1:20 about how I'm not appreciated enough.

1:21 And my wife, very reasonably, would offer me some great advice.

1:24 She would say something like, “Why don’t you take your boss out to lunch,

1:28 and you guys can get to know each other a little bit better?"

1:31 And instead of being able to hear her, I would get even more upset.

1:34 I would say things like, "Why aren't you supporting me?

1:37 You should be outraged on my behalf." And she would get

1:39 upset because I was attacking her for giving me good advice.

1:42 Anyone ever had an experience like this?

1:44 It was not a good situation.

1:46 And so I started talking to researchers who were studying communication.

1:50 I asked them, why am I getting into this pattern?

1:52 And they said, "You're making a mistake." We're

1:54 living through this golden age of understanding communication,

1:57 really for the first time because

1:59 of advances in neural imaging and data collection.

2:01 And they said, one of the big things that we've learned is

2:04 that we tend to think of a discussion as being just one conversation, right?

2:08 We're talking about one thing, my day,

2:10 or the kids' grades, what to have for dinner.

2:12 But what they said is that actually,

2:13 each discussion contains many different conversations.

2:18 And in general, these conversations tend to fall into one of three buckets.

2:22 There's these practical conversations,

2:24 where we're talking about what's this all about.

2:27 What are we really discussing?

2:28 But then there's emotional conversations where

2:30 we're talking about how do we feel.

2:32 And my goal is to share with you my feelings,

2:34 and I don't want you to solve them.

2:36 I want you to empathize.

2:38 And then there's conversations that are social conversations about who we are,

2:42 the social identities that are important to us,

2:45 how we relate to each other and to society.

2:47 And what the researchers said is what we've learned is

2:49 that if people are having different conversations at the same moment,

2:53 they can't really hear each other, they can't really connect.

2:57 And in fact, this is exactly what was happening with me and my wife.

3:00 I was coming home and having an emotional conversation,

3:03 my wife was responding with a practical conversation.

3:05 They are both legitimate conversations.

3:07 But because we weren’t having the same conversation at the same moment,

3:11 we weren't really communicating with each other.

3:14 And within neurology and psychology,

3:16 this insight is known as the matching principle,

3:18 which says that successful communication requires recognizing what kind

3:22 of conversation is occurring and then matching each other.

3:25 But how do we do that?

3:27 Well in schools, they’ve actually taught teachers to do this.

3:30 If you are a school teacher,

3:32 you'll probably learn at some point that if a student comes up

3:35 to you with a problem or they want something to talk about, you should ask them,

3:39 "Do you want to be helped," which is a practical conversation.

3:42 "Do you want to be hugged," which is an emotional conversation.

3:45 Or "Do you want to be heard," which is a social conversation.

3:48 And it seems to work.

3:49 It seems like if you ask students what they need, they'll tell you.

3:53 But of course that is hard to do in real life, right?

3:56 If you go up and you ask someone at work if they want a hug,

3:59 HR might get involved, so you might not want to do that.

4:02 But luckily, there is another way of doing this for all of us normal people,

4:07 which is to ask questions and in particular, to ask a certain type of question,

4:11 a special question, what’s known as a “deep

4:14 question.” A deep question is something

4:16 that invites us to talk about our values or our beliefs or our experiences.

4:21 And that can sound a little intimidating,

4:23 but it's actually much easier than it sounds.

4:25 For instance, instead of asking someone, where do you work?

4:28 You could ask them, what do you love about your job?

4:30 Instead of asking someone, where did you go to high school?

4:33 You could say, what was high school like?

4:36 What did you learn there?

4:38 What changed you there?

4:41 Put differently, instead of asking about the facts of someone's life,

4:45 we should ask them how they feel about their life.

4:48 Because when we do, they tend to reveal to us who they really are.

4:54 They tend to tell us what they want, not only out of this conversation,

4:57 but how they hope that we'll see them and how they want to see us,

5:00 what matters to them most.

5:03 In fact, what studies show us is that this is so

5:05 powerful because these kinds of questions allow us to be vulnerable.

5:10 And vulnerability and reciprocal vulnerability— when

5:14 we hear vulnerability and we become vulnerable

5:16 in return— is the key to allowing us to connect with other people.

5:21 And to explain how this works, I want to tell you a story about this guy, Dr.

5:25 Behfar Ehdaie.

5:26 Dr.

5:26 Ehdaie is a cancer surgeon in New York City.

5:29 He specializes in prostate cancer,

5:32 removing prostate tumor, removing cancer tumors from prostates.

5:37 And he has this kind of interesting job because every

5:40 single day a patient will come into his office asking,

5:43 he thinks, for medical advice.

5:45 And what he will tell them is:

5:47 “You should not get surgery.” The prostate is located so

5:52 close to the nerves that control urination and sexual function,

5:56 that it's a relatively risky surgery.

6:00 And what's more, most prostate tumors, they grow very, very slowly.

6:04 It's actually one of the slowest-growing forms of cancer in existence.

6:08 There's a saying among doctors that if

6:09 you have an old patient with prostate cancer,

6:12 he's going to die of old age before the cancer kills him.

6:15 And so Dr.

6:16 Ehdaie would have these patients come in and he would tell them,

6:19 "I don't think you should do anything.

6:21 In fact, I think you should do active surveillance.

6:24 We're going to take a blood sample every six months,

6:26 we're going to do a biopsy every two years,

6:28 and if the tumor seems to change, we'll do an MRI,

6:30 And if we have to, we can do the surgery.

6:32 But otherwise no radiation, no surgery.

6:35 It's going to be OK.

6:37 And these patients would listen to him, and then they would go home,

6:40 and they would discuss it with their spouse,

6:42 and then they would walk in the next day and insist on having the surgery.

6:46 They would say, "I absolutely want you to cut me open,

6:48 take the tumor out as fast as possible." And for Dr.

6:51 Ehdaie, this was bewildering, right?

6:53 He thought these would be the easiest conversations of his life.

6:56 He’s telling people that they don’t have to have surgery, and he’s a surgeon.

6:59 He told me that, “When this happens again and again and again,

7:03 you start to realize, this isn't a problem with my patients.

7:07 This is a problem with me.

7:10 I'm doing something wrong." And so he goes to these folks,

7:14 these professors at the Harvard Business School,

7:16 and he asks them for advice on what to do differently.

7:19 And they said, "Look, the biggest mistake that you're making is

7:22 you are starting this conversation all wrong.

7:24 You are starting by assuming that the patient walks

7:27 into your exam room looking for advice and looking for medical solutions.

7:31 But you don't know if that's true.

7:33 You're not asking them any questions.

7:35 What you need to do is you need

7:37 to start asking deep questions." So two weeks later,

7:40 after having this conversation, a 62-year-old man comes into Dr.

7:43 Ehdaie’s office for the first time.

7:45 He had just gotten his diagnosis of having prostate cancer.

7:49 And Dr.

7:50 Ehdaie, instead of giving him advice,

7:52 instead of telling him what he ought to do, he asks the question,

7:55 "What does this cancer diagnosis mean to you?" And the man starts talking,

8:02 about how his father had died when he was 17 years old.

8:07 And this had just been so hard for him, and it had been so hard for his mom.

8:11 And then he starts talking about his grandchildren

8:13 and his fears for the world they're inheriting,

8:16 what with climate change and everything else that's going on.

8:19 Dr.

8:19 Ehdaie had expected this guy to at least bring up cancer,

8:22 to at least mention mortality or pain, but it never came up.

8:28 And at that moment, Dr.

8:29 Ehdaie realized, because he had asked this deep question,

8:32 that this man wanted to have an emotional conversation.

8:35 He wanted to talk about how do we feel?

8:38 He needed to be hugged.

8:40 And so, Dr.

8:41 Ehdaie didn’t actually hug him.

8:43 But he did the verbal equivalent.

8:44 And then Dr.

8:46 Ehdaie says, "Look, do you mind?

8:49 There's some medical options I'd like to talk over with you.

8:52 Is that OK?" And they move into a practical conversation together,

8:56 and within seven more minutes,

8:58 the man decides to do active surveillance and never looks back.

9:01 Dr.

9:01 Ehdaie’s patients overwhelmingly now opt for active surveillance,

9:05 his advice, because of this approach.

9:08 And the thing is, we can do this in any conversation.

9:11 It doesn't have to be an important conversation,

9:13 it doesn't have to be life or death.

9:15 We can always connect more and better and in a really profound

9:20 way with the person that we're speaking to, if we want to.

9:24 Which brings me back to that experiment.

9:27 So just to remind you what you're supposed to do.

9:29 Walk out of the room, find a stranger, ask them,

9:32 "When was the last time you cried in front

9:34 of someone?" And then as soon as they answer,

9:37 you answer the question yourself, and you tell them when you last cried.

9:40 Let me just say, this experiment has been done thousands and thousands of times,

9:44 most notably by a guy named Nick Epley at the University of Chicago.

9:47 People hate this experiment.

9:50 Nobody who participates comes in and is like,

9:53 "This is going to be a great time." Instead,

9:55 what they say is, "I do not want to do this.

9:58 This sounds terrible." But they’re in an experiment,

10:02 and they basically have to do it, right, they're in the room.

10:05 They get paired with a partner, they ask the question, ask and answer.

10:08 And then Nick Epley afterwards asks them, what was that like?

10:13 And what people say are things like,

10:15 "Oh my gosh, I felt so connected to that person,

10:17 more connected than to people in other conversations in a while.

10:21 I felt more caring towards them and I felt like they

10:25 were really caring about me." So why is this so powerful?

10:28 Why is asking this question, why does it help us connect so well?

10:32 Because it's a deep question.

10:34 It allows us to say something real.

10:38 And when we ask deep questions, we figure out which of the three

10:42 conversations we're in, what we're talking about,

10:44 what everyone really wants out of this dialogue.

10:47 And that is how we connect with each other.

10:51 We are living through a time of polarization and division.

10:57 We have forgotten how to have conversations.

11:02 But there's a science to it.

11:05 There are these folks who are known as supercommunicators.

11:08 They are not special, they’re not more charismatic,

11:11 or they're not more outgoing than anyone else.

11:15 They've just learned skills that allow us to connect with others.

11:20 And they're skills that all of us can learn.

11:23 And that feeling you get after a wonderful conversation,

11:26 that glow that you experience,

11:29 our brains have evolved to give us that, to crave connection.

11:36 So I hope you go out, I hope you find a stranger,

11:40 and I hope you tell them all about

11:41 the last time you cried in front of another person.

11:44 And then tell me how it went.

11:45 Thanks.