Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

by Charles Duhigg

When Beau Sievers joined the Dartmouth Social Systems Lab in 2012, he still looked like the musician he had been a few years earlier.

“Why people ‘click’ with some people, but not others, is one of the great unsolved mysteries of science,”

Wheatly explained, it feels wonderful, in part because our brains have evolved to crave these kinds of connections. The

scholars at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany had studied the brains of guitarists playing Scheidler’s Sonata in D Major.

But when they segued into a duet, the electrical pulses within their craniums

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.

“extent of speaker-listener neural coupling predicts the success of the communication,”

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010.

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

Taking part in a conversation—debating what they had seen, discussing plot points—had caused their brains to align.

High centrality participants, Sievers and his coauthors wrote in their results, were much more “likely to adapt their own brain activity to the group,”

What’s This Really About?, How Do We Feel?, and Who Are We? Each

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.

Supercommunicators know how to evoke synchronization by encouraging people to match how they’re communicating.

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

It is important to note that matching isn’t mimicry.

“Do you want to be helped, hugged, or heard?”

“Stories bypass the brain’s instinct to look for reasons to be suspicious,” said Emily Falk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. We

So the researchers began looking for other variables that might explain what separated happy couples from unhappy marriages. One thing they had noticed was that many couples—both happy and unhappy—sometimes mentioned tussles over “control” when asked to describe their fights. “He always wants to control me,” one woman told scientists during an interview. “He wants to trap me, get me to say things I don’t want to say.”

Once the Love Shrinks arrived at this realization—in addition to proving we are listening, we must seek to control the right things—and a host of other insights, they began overhauling how marriage therapy is done.

The group’s moderators had been trained to serve as “models of curiosity, civility and careful listening” and to work to “establish conversational norms.” But online, the moderators discovered, those approaches sometimes fell short. They tried to emphasize various listening techniques. They tried to train people to speak with civility. But it proved less useful online than it had in person in D.C. There were all the normal problems of online communication: Comments intended as sarcasm but read the wrong way; garbled phrasing that implied an offense the writer never intended; posts that seemed innocent to some but like fighting words to others. And one problem, in particular, that kept popping up was the same issue that marriage researchers had found was derailing spouses: On Facebook, people kept trying to control one another. These struggles for control weren’t the only thing disrupting conversations—but when they emerged, they tore dialogues apart. Some Facebook participants, for instance, tried to control what others were allowed to say, which opinions were permitted, what emotions could be expressed:

“They think listening means debating, and if you let someone else make a good point, you’re doing something wrong. But listening means letting someone else tell their story and then, even if you don’t agree with them, trying to understand why they feel that way.”

Humans have been speaking to each other for more than a million years and communicating via written language for more than five millennia. Over that time, we’ve developed norms and nearly unconscious behaviors—the lilt in our voice when we

answer a phone; the sign-off in a letter signaling our fondness for the reader—that make communication easier. In contrast, we’ve only been communicating online since 1983. Relatively speaking, the norms and behaviors for talking over the internet are still in their infancy.

Online, however, communication tends to be fast and unthinking, unedited and sometimes garbled, without any of the clues that our voices provide, or the thoughtfulness that formal correspondence allows.

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. All of these, of course, are also useful tactics when we’re speaking face-to-face. Many of them are obvious, things we learned as kids. But online, they’re easy to forget because we’re typing fast, texting between meetings, hitting send or post without rereading...

“psychological benefits,” the 2021 study reads, including “increased self-esteem and a sense of community.”

The researchers—Michael Slepian and Drew Jacoby-Senghor—found there were

But there was one behavior, in particular, that consistently made people uncomfortable and upset: If a speaker said something that lumped a listener into a group against her or his will, the discussion would likely go south.

“When someone says you don’t belong, or they put you in a group you don’t appreciate, it can cause extreme psychological discomfort,”

Studies have shown that when people confront identity threats, their blood pressure can rise, their bodies can become flooded with stress hormones, they begin looking for ways to escape or fight back.

Of the more than 1,500 participants who took part in their study, only 1 percent had not encountered a recent identity threat.

“Participants on average had experienced 11.38 identity threats in the past week,” they wrote in their 2021 paper in Social Psychology and Personality Science.

“Across 40 percent of our observations, participants felt threatened on a single identity, and 60 percent represent perceivin...

The mere possibility of identity threat frequently stops people from talking about Who Are We? In a 2021 study, 70 percent of participants said they saw real risks to participating in a dialogue about race, even with friends. “Black

Conversations about who we are—and who we want to be—are essential if we hope society will change.

But before the discussion started, the individuals in this group received a quick training: “We want to take some time to share some things that we’ve learned [about] conversations about race with friends of different racial groups,” these participants were told. “Sometimes it feels normal to talk about race, and sometimes it can feel a bit awkward or uncomfortable at first. And that’s reasonable, because people have different experiences. However you feel is okay.” Then the participants were asked to briefly write down “some benefits you think can happen from talking about race with friends of different racial groups.” They were asked “What, if anything, might get in the way of you and a friend experiencing these benefits?” Finally, they were instructed to describe what they could “do to help overcome these obstacles, and experience these benefits.”

Of course, they couldn’t call them rules. Rules were verboten at Netflix! So Myers and her team called them guidelines. As they began conducting employee workshops, hosting conversations with various divisions, and offering training sessions for leaders on diversity and inclusion, the guidelines were always made clear: When discussing issues of identity, no one is allowed to blame, shame, or attack anyone else. It is okay to ask questions, if they are asked in good faith.[*2] Goals were detailed at the beginning of each session—“Do your best to connect with compassion and courage”; “Embrace the discomfort and sense of not knowing”—and conversations were structured by moderators through reminders such as “I want to bring our attention to some things that were just said” or “Some people are very emotional about this issue; maybe we can all take a breath.”

Ask yourself: What do you hope to accomplish? What do you most want to say? What do you hope to learn? What do you think others hope to say and learn? If we have elucidated goals before a discussion, we’re more likely to achieve them. How will this conversation start? How will you ensure that everyone has a voice and feels they can participate? What is needed to draw everyone in? What obstacles might emerge? Will people get angry? Withdrawn? Will a

hesitancy to say something controversial prevent us from saying what’s necessary? How can we make it safer for everyone to air their thoughts? When those obstacles appear, what’s the plan? Research shows that being preemptively aware of situations that make us anxious or fearful can lower the impact of those concerns. How will you calm yourself and others if the conversation gets tense, or encourage someone who has gone quiet to participate more? Finally, what are the benefits of this dialogue? Are they worth the risks? (The answer usually is yes.) When people get angry or upset, or it’s easier to walk away, how will you remind yourself and others why this dialogue is so important?

As a conversation begins: First, establish guidelines. It is useful to make clear the norms—for instance, no one is allowed to blame, shame, or attack others. The goal is to share our feelings, not litigate who is at fault. It is also helpful to define if asking questions is okay, and if there are some kinds of inquiries—about, say, very personal topics, or particularly sensitive issues—that require some forethought. We should affirm that everyone is encouraged to speak, that everyone belongs in this discussion, and perhaps identify someone to serve as a moderator to make sure everyone is given space. Finally, it is useful to ask people to speak about their own experiences and describe their own stories. Don’t generalize. Don’t solve or diminish others’ problems, unless they ask for help. When a colleague describes something painful, listen, and tell them you’re sorry it happened. Acknowledge what they felt. Second, draw out everyone’s goals. You likely have some aims in mind. Share them. Then, ask others what they hope to get out of this discussion. Identify emotional goals (“I want to make sure we stay friends” or “I need to get something off my chest”); and practical goals (“I’d like to walk away from this with a plan”); as well as group goals (“It’s important to me that we all show compassion for each other”). Finally, acknowledge, and keep acknowledging, that discomfort is natural—and useful. We will misspeak. We will ask naïve questions. We will say things we didn’t ...

Another researcher put it more bluntly: “The most important influence, by far, on a flourishing life is love.”

Not romantic love, but, rather, the kinds of deep connections we form with our families, friends, and coworkers, as well as neighbors and people from our community. “Love early in life facilitates not only love later on, but also the other trappings of success, such as prestige and even high income. It also encourages the development of coping styles that facilitate intimacy, as opposed to ones that discourage it.”

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. Take John Marsden, for example. When he was forty-three years old—with...

I’m growing old. Realize for the first time the reality of death. Feel I may not achieve what I wanted. Not sure I know how to...

Tensions at work ar...