The science behind dramatically better conversations

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

which is that when you leave this room,

when you go out into the world,

today, tomorrow, whenever you feel like it,

I'd like you to ask and answer one question

of someone who's a stranger.

You might meet them on the bus

or walking down the street.

And I'm going to show you the question

that I'm going to ask you to ask and answer.

The question is:

When was the last time you cried in front of someone?

Now just out of curiosity,

how many of you are really excited about this experiment?

No hands went up whatsoever.

And that makes sense, right?

Because, like, there can be nothing that seems more intimidating

or less fun than finding a stranger,

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

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

But I'm going to try and convince you over the next few minutes

that this experiment is not only worth doing,

it’s worth doing whenever you can.

Because it will make your life better.

And to explain how I got to this,

I have to tell you a little bit of a story about me and my wife.

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

We've been married for 20 years,

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

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

and I would start complaining about my day,

about how I'm not appreciated enough.

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

She would say something like,

“Why don’t you take your boss out to lunch,

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

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

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

You should be outraged on my behalf."

And she would get upset because I was attacking her for giving me good advice.

Anyone ever had an experience like this?

It was not a good situation.

And so I started talking to researchers

who were studying communication.

I asked them, why am I getting into this pattern?

And they said, "You're making a mistake."

We're living through this golden age of understanding communication,

really for the first time

because of advances in neural imaging and data collection.

And they said, one of the big things that we've learned

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

We're talking about one thing, my day,

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

But what they said is that actually,

each discussion contains many different conversations.

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

There's these practical conversations,

where we're talking about what's this all about.

What are we really discussing?

But then there's emotional conversations

where we're talking about how do we feel.

And my goal is to share with you my feelings,

and I don't want you to solve them.

I want you to empathize.

And then there's conversations that are social conversations

about who we are,

the social identities that are important to us,

how we relate to each other and to society.

And what the researchers said is what we've learned

is that if people are having different conversations at the same moment,

they can't really hear each other, they can't really connect.

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

I was coming home and having an emotional conversation,

my wife was responding with a practical conversation.

They are both legitimate conversations.

But because we weren’t having the same conversation

at the same moment,

we weren't really communicating with each other.

And within neurology and psychology,

this insight is known as the matching principle,

which says that successful communication requires recognizing

what kind of conversation is occurring and then matching each other.

But how do we do that?

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

If you are a school teacher,

you'll probably learn at some point

that if a student comes up to you with a problem

or they want something to talk about,

you should ask them, "Do you want to be helped,"

which is a practical conversation.

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

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

And it seems to work.

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

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

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

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

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

which is to ask questions

and in particular, to ask a certain type of question,

a special question, what’s known as a “deep question.”

A deep question is something that invites us to talk about our values

or our beliefs or our experiences.

And that can sound a little intimidating,

but it's actually much easier than it sounds.

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

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

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

You could say, what was high school like?

What did you learn there?

What changed you there?

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

we should ask them how they feel about their life.

Because when we do,

they tend to reveal to us who they really are.

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

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

what matters to them most.

In fact, what studies show us is that this is so powerful

because these kinds of questions allow us to be vulnerable.

And vulnerability and reciprocal vulnerability --

when we hear vulnerability and we become vulnerable in return --

is the key to allowing us to connect with other people.

And to explain how this works, I want to tell you a story about this guy,

Dr. Behfar Ehdaie.

Dr. Ehdaie is a cancer surgeon in New York City.

He specializes in prostate cancer,

removing prostate tumor,

removing cancer tumors from prostates.

And he has this kind of interesting job

because every single day a patient will come into his office asking,

he thinks, for medical advice.

And what he will tell them is: “You should not get surgery.”

The prostate is located so close to the nerves

that control urination and sexual function,

that it's a relatively risky surgery.

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

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

There's a saying among doctors that if you have an old patient

with prostate cancer,

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

And so Dr. Ehdaie would have these patients come in

and he would tell them, "I don't think you should do anything.

In fact, I think you should do active surveillance.

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

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

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

And if we have to, we can do the surgery.

But otherwise no radiation, no surgery.

It's going to be OK.

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

and they would discuss it with their spouse,

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

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

take the tumor out as fast as possible."

And for Dr. Ehdaie, this was bewildering, right?

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

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

He told me that, “When this happens again and again and again,

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

This is a problem with me.

I'm doing something wrong."

And so he goes to these folks,

these professors at the Harvard Business School,

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

And they said, "Look, the biggest mistake that you're making

is you are starting this conversation all wrong.

You are starting by assuming

that the patient walks into your exam room

looking for advice and looking for medical solutions.

But you don't know if that's true.

You're not asking them any questions.

What you need to do is you need to start asking deep questions."

So two weeks later, after having this conversation,

a 62-year-old man comes into Dr. Ehdaie’s office

for the first time.

He had just gotten his diagnosis of having prostate cancer.

And Dr. Ehdaie, instead of giving him advice,

instead of telling him what he ought to do,

he asks the question,

"What does this cancer diagnosis mean to you?"

And the man starts talking,

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

And this had just been so hard for him,

and it had been so hard for his mom.

And then he starts talking about his grandchildren

and his fears for the world they're inheriting,

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

Dr. Ehdaie had expected this guy to at least bring up cancer,

to at least mention mortality or pain,

but it never came up.

And at that moment, Dr. Ehdaie realized,

because he had asked this deep question,

that this man wanted to have an emotional conversation.

He wanted to talk about how do we feel?

He needed to be hugged.

And so, Dr. Ehdaie didn’t actually hug him.

But he did the verbal equivalent.

And then Dr. Ehdaie says,

"Look, do you mind?

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

Is that OK?"

And they move into a practical conversation together,

and within seven more minutes,

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

Dr. Ehdaie’s patients overwhelmingly now opt for active surveillance,

his advice, because of this approach.

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

It doesn't have to be an important conversation,

it doesn't have to be life or death.

We can always connect more and better

and in a really profound way with the person that we're speaking to,

if we want to.

Which brings me back to that experiment.

So just to remind you what you're supposed to do.

Walk out of the room, find a stranger, ask them,

"When was the last time you cried in front of someone?"

And then as soon as they answer, you answer the question yourself,

and you tell them when you last cried.

Let me just say, this experiment has been done thousands

and thousands of times,

most notably by a guy named Nick Epley

at the University of Chicago.

People hate this experiment.

Nobody who participates comes in and is like,

"This is going to be a great time."

Instead, what they say is, "I do not want to do this.

This sounds terrible."

But they’re in an experiment,

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

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

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

And what people say are things like,

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

more connected than to people in other conversations in a while.

I felt more caring towards them

and I felt like they were really caring about me."

So why is this so powerful?

Why is asking this question,

why does it help us connect so well?

Because it's a deep question.

It allows us to say something real.

And when we ask deep questions,

we figure out which of the three conversations we're in,

what we're talking about,

what everyone really wants out of this dialogue.

And that is how we connect with each other.

We are living through a time of polarization and division.

We have forgotten how to have conversations.

But there's a science to it.

There are these folks who are known as supercommunicators.

They are not special,

they’re not more charismatic,

or they're not more outgoing than anyone else.

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

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

And that feeling you get after a wonderful conversation,

that glow that you experience,

our brains have evolved to give us that,

to crave connection.

So I hope you go out,

I hope you find a stranger,

and I hope you tell them all about the last time you cried

in front of another person.

And then tell me how it went.