Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

by Charles Duhigg

Whenever someone said something emotional—even when they didn’t realize their emotions were on display—Felix had reciprocated by voicing feelings of his own. All those small choices they had made, he explained, had created an atmosphere of trust.

how we ask a question sometimes matters more than what we ask. We’re better off, it seems, acknowledging social differences, rather than pretending they don’t exist. Every discussion is influenced by emotions, no matter how rational the topic at hand. When starting a dialogue, it helps to think of the discussion as a negotiation where the prize is figuring out what everyone wants. And, above all, the most important goal of any conversation is to connect.

This book, then, is an attempt to explain why communication goes awry and what we can do to make it better. At its core are a handful of key ideas. The first one is that many discussions are actually three different conversations. There are practical, decision-making conversations that focus on What’s This Really About? There are emotional conversations, which ask How Do We Feel? And there are social conversations that explore Who Are We? We are often moving in and out of all three conversations as a dialogue unfolds.

Our goal, for the most meaningful discussions, should be to have a “learning conversation.” Specifically, we want to learn how the people around us see the world and help them understand our perspectives in turn.

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.

High centrality participants tended to ask ten to twenty times as many questions as other participants.

Miscommunication occurs when people are having different kinds of conversations. If you are speaking emotionally, while I’m talking practically, we are, in essence, using different cognitive languages. (This explains why, when you complain about your boss—“Jim is driving me crazy!”—and your spouse responds with a practical suggestion—“What if you just invited him to lunch?”—it’s more apt to create conflict than connection: “I’m not asking you to solve this! I just want some empathy.”)

Supercommunicators know how to evoke synchronization by encouraging people to match how they’re communicating. Psychologists who study married couples, for instance, have found that the happiest spouses frequently mirror each other’s speaking styles. “The underlying mechanism that maintains closeness in marriage is symmetry,” one prominent researcher, John Gottman, wrote in the Journal of Communication. Happy couples “communicate agreement not with the speaker’s point of view or content, but with the speaker’s affect.” Happy couples ask each other more questions, repeat what the other person said, make tension-easing jokes, get serious together. The next time you feel yourself edging toward an argument, try asking your partner: “Do you want to talk about our emotions? Or do we need to make a decision together? Or is this about something else?”

The importance of this insight—that communication comes from connection and alignment—is so fundamental that it has become known as the matching principle: Effective communication requires recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring, and then matching each other. On a very basic level, if someone seems emotional, allow yourself to become emotional as well. If someone is intent on decision makin...

the first goal in a learning conversation is identifying what kind of dialogue we’re seeking—and then looking for clues about what the other parties want.

When a student comes to a teacher upset, for instance, the teacher might ask: “Do you want to be helped, hugged, or heard?”

What’s This Really About? has two goals: The first is to determine what topics we want to discuss—what everyone needs from this dialogue. The second is to figure out how this discussion will unfold—what unspoken rules and norms we have agreed upon, and how we will make decisions together.

The best negotiators didn’t battle over who should get the biggest slice of pie. Rather, they focused on making the pie itself larger, finding win-win solutions where everyone walked away happier than before.

The What’s This Really About? conversation is a negotiation—only the goal is not to win, but to help everyone agree on the topics we’ll discuss, and how we’ll make decisions together.

understanding the difference between the practical logic of costs and benefits and the empathetic logic of similarities was critical. Some patients came in with analytical questions and asked for data. They were clearly in a practical, analytical mindset—and so he knew they would be persuaded through evidence: studies and data. But other patients told Ehdaie stories about their pasts and their anxieties. They talked about their values and beliefs. These patients were in an empathetic mindset. So Ehdaie knew he needed to persuade them through compassion and stories.

We achieve this in four ways: By preparing ourselves before a conversation; by asking questions; by noticing clues during a conversation; and by experimenting and adding items to the table.

if anything, his parents’ perspective taking had made it clear to Epley, at that moment, how much they didn’t understand about him. When they tried to commiserate, when they shared stories of their own adolescent mistakes, all Epley heard was adults who had no idea what it was like to be a teenager nowadays.

maybe the best you can do is ask questions. Ask about people’s lives, about what they’re feeling, about their hopes and fears, and then listen for their struggles, disappointments, joys, and ambitions.

there was only one method the Arons tested that could reliably help strangers form a connection: A series of thirty-six questions that, as Elaine and Arthur Aron later wrote, elicited “sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure.” These questions eventually became known as the Fast Friends Procedure, and grew famous among sociologists, psychologists, and readers of articles with headlines such as “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love.”

The Fast Friends Procedure worked only if participants took turns asking each other questions. In a separate experiment, each participant was instructed to answer all thirty-six questions in a row while their partner listened, and then trade places. Volunteers said the experience was awkward and boring. No one felt close afterward. But when the Arons, in their experiment, told people to go back and forth and “share your answer with your partner, then let him or her share their answer to the same question with you,” people started to bond. “Reciprocity is critical,” Arthur Aron told me. “It’s one of the most powerful forces in the world. If you don’t have reciprocity, then people aren’t matching each other’s emotional ups and downs.”

If you want to connect with someone, ask them what they are feeling, and then reveal your own emotions. If others describe a painful memory or a moment of joy, and we reveal our own disappointments or what makes us proud, it provides a chance to harness the neurochemicals that have evolved to help us feel closer. It creates an opportunity for emotional contagion.

if you want to have a successful conversation with someone, you don’t have to ask them about their worst memories or how they prepare for telephone calls. You just have to ask them to describe how they feel about their life—rather than the facts of their life—and then ask lots of follow-ups.

talking with people commuting to work, I might ask them, ‘What do you do for a living?’ And then I might say, ‘Do you love that job?’ or ‘Do you have something else you dream of doing?’ And right there, you’re two questions in, and you’ve gotten to somebody’s dreams.”

People with emotional intelligence knew how to build relationships and empathize with colleagues, as well as regulate their own emotionality and the emotions of those around them. “These individuals,” the Yale researchers wrote in the journal Imagination, Cognition and Personality in 1990, “are aware of their own feelings and those of others. They are open to positive and negative aspects of internal experience, are able to label them, and when appropriate, communicate them…. The emotionally intelligent person is often a pleasure to be around and leaves others feeling better. The emotionally intelligent person, however, does not mindlessly seek pleasure, but rather attends to emotion in the path toward growth.”

people laughed because they wanted to connect with the person they were speaking with.

We laugh, in other words, to show someone that we want to connect with them—and our companions laugh back to demonstrate they want to connect with us, as well.

Laughter, and other nonlinguistic expressions such as gasps and sighs, or smiles and frowns, are embodiments of the matching principle, which says that we communicate by aligning our behaviors until our brains become entrained.

If we chuckle only slightly at someone’s joke, while they laugh uproariously, we’ll both see it as a sign that we’re not in sync—or, worse, that one of us is trying too hard, or the other is not trying hard enough.

One of the reasons supercommunicators are so talented at picking up on how others feel is because they have a habit of noticing the energy in others’ gestures, the volume of their voices, how fast they are speaking, their cadence and affect. They pay attention to whether someone’s posture indicates they are feeling down, or if they are so excited they can barely contain it. Supercommunicators allow themselves to match that energy and mood, or at least acknowledge it, and thereby make it clear they want to align. They help us see and hear our feelings via their own bodies and voices. By matching our mood and energy, they make it obvious they are trying to connect.

These distinctions helped McGuire differentiate between those who he suspected could easily bond emotionally with others, and those who, when stresses got high, were more likely to turn inward or become defensive or combative.

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.

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 othe...

If we want to show someone we’re paying attention, we need to prove, once that person has stopped speaking, that we have absorbed what they said. And the best way to do that is by repeating, in our own words, what we just heard them say—and then asking if we got it right.

It’s a formula sometimes called looping for understanding.[*] The goal is not to repeat what someone has said verbatim, but rather to distill the other person’s thoughts in your own words, prove you are working hard to understand and see their perspective—and then repeat the process, again and again, until everyone is satisfied.

“There’re lots of conflicts that don’t have solutions,” Stanley told me. “But when everyone feels in control, the conflict sometimes just fades away. You spoke your mind, your partner heard you, and you find something to work on together, and the issue stops feeling like such a big deal.”

When talking online, remember to… Overemphasize politeness. Numerous studies have shown that online tensions are lessened if at least one person is consistently polite. In one study, all it took was adding thanks and please to a series of online arguments—while everything else stayed the same—to reduce tensions. Underemphasize sarcasm. When we say something in a wry tone, it signals an irony our audience usually understands. When we type something sarcastic online, we typically hear these same inflections within our heads—but the people reading our comments do not. Express more gratitude, deference, greetings, apologies, and hedges. Studies demonstrate that when we are grateful (“That comment taught me a lot”), or solicitous (“I would love to hear your thoughts”), or preface comments with a greeting (“Hey!”), or apologize in advance (“I hope you don’t mind…”) or hedge our comments (“I think…”), online communication gets better. Avoid criticism in public forums. In another study, researchers found that giving negative feedback online backfires much more than in real life. It pushes people to write more negative things, and to start criticizing others more frequently. When we criticize others publicly online, we make bad behavior into a digital norm.

These kinds of environmental shifts point to what is needed for a successful Who Are We? conversation: First, try to draw out your conversational partners’ multiple identities. It’s important to remind everyone that we all contain multitudes; none of us is one-dimensional. Acknowledging those complexities during a conversation helps disrupt the stereotypes within our heads. Second, try to ensure everyone is on equal footing. Don’t offer unsolicited advice or trumpet your wealth or connections. Seek out topics where everyone has some experience and knowledge, or everyone is a novice. Encourage the quiet to speak and the talkative to listen, so everyone is participating. Finally, look for social similarities that already exist. We do this naturally when we meet someone new and start searching for people we know in common. But it is important to take those connections a step further and make our commonalities more salient. Our similarities become powerful when they are rooted in something meaningful:

Participants who ended up happy all had “warm adult relationships” with numerous people. They had good marriages, were close to their children, and had invested in strong friendships. The people “who flourished found love,” one researcher observed, “and that was why they flourished.”

On the other hand, people who had not invested in relationships—who had prioritized their careers over families and friends or had struggled to connect for other reasons—were mostly miserable.