Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

by Charles Duhigg

Felix would ask the scientists questions, and occasionally talk about himself. When someone revealed something personal, Felix would reciprocate with a story from his own life. One scientist mentioned problems he was having with a teenage daughter, and Felix responded by describing an aunt he couldn’t seem to get along with, no matter how hard he tried. When another researcher asked about Felix’s childhood, he explained that he had been painfully shy—but his father had been a salesman (and his grandfather a con man), and so, by imitating their examples, he had eventually learned how to connect with others. As they got close to the end of their scheduled time together, a professor of psychology chimed in. “I’m sorry,” she said, “this has been wonderful, but I don’t feel any closer to understanding what you do. Why do you think so many people recommended we talk to you?” “That’s a fair question,” Felix replied. “Before I answer, I want to ask: You mentioned you’re a single mom, and I imagine there’s a lot to juggling motherhood and a career. This might seem unusual, but I’m wondering: What would you tell someone who’s getting a divorce?” The woman went silent for a beat. “I guess I’ll play along,” she said. “I have lots of advice. When I separated from my husband—” Felix gently interrupted. “I don’t really need an answer,” he said. “But I want to point out that, in a room filled with professional colleagues, and after less than an hour of conversation, you’re willing to talk...

Questions about facts (“Where do you live?” “What college did you attend?”) are often conversational dead-ends. They don’t draw out values or experiences. They don’t invite vulnerability. However, those same inquiries, recast slightly (“What do you like about where you live?” “What was your favorite part of college?”), invite others to share their preferences, beliefs, and values, and to describe experiences that caused them to grow or change. Those questions make emotional replies easier, and they practically beg the questioner to reciprocate—to divulge, in return, why they live in this neighborhood, what they enjoyed about college—until everyone is drawn in, asking and answering back and forth. “It might seem hard to reframe questions in a way that’s vulnerable,” Epley told me. “But it’s actually pretty easy once you start looking for it. Like when I’m on a train, 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.”

There was one other key finding in the Harvard study of speed daters: Follow-up questions are particularly powerful. “Follow-ups are a signal that you’re listening, that you want to know more,” one of the researchers, Michael Yeomans, told me. Follow-up questions make reciprocity easier (“Your favorite part of college was ultimate frisbee? Me too! Do you still love to play?”). “They allow self-disclosure without it seeming like self-obsession,” said Yeomans. “It makes a conversation flow.” This is how to ask emotional questions in the real world: Ask someone how they feel about something, and then follow up with questions that reveal how you feel. It’s the same framework for emotional connection described before, but in a slightly different guise: If we ask questions that push people to think and talk about their values, beliefs, and experiences, and then reciprocate with emotions of our own, we can’t help but listen to one another. “The best listeners aren’t just listening,” said Margaret Clark, the Yale psychologist. “They’re triggering emotions by asking questions, expressing their own emotions, doing things that prompt the other person to say something real.”

“It is easier to judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers,” the nineteenth-century thinker Pierre-Marc-Gaston de Lévis wrote, and yet he stayed silent on which questions, exactly, should be asked. Science has provided guidance: Ask others about their beliefs and values. Ask them about experiences and those moments that caused them to change. Ask how they feel, rather than about facts. Reframe your questions so they are deeper. Ask follow-ups. And as people expose their vulnerabilities, reveal something about yourself. It will be less uncomfortable than you imagine. It will be more fascinating than you think. And it might lead to a moment of true connection.

We exhibit emotional intelligence by showing people that we’ve heard their emotions—and the way we do that is by noticing, and then matching, their mood and energy. Mood and energy are nonlinguistic tools for creating emotional connection. When we match someone’s mood and energy, we are showing them that we want to align. Sometimes we might want to match someone exactly: If you are laughing joyfully, I’ll laugh joyfully as well. At other moments, we might want to demonstrate that we see their emotions (“You seem sad”) and, rather than match them precisely, offer our help (“What will cheer you up?”). But in each case, we’re sending a message: I hear your feelings. This clear desire to connect is an essential step in helping us bond. This same pattern shows up in other nonverbal behaviors, as well. When we’re crying, or smiling, or scowling, we believe others hear us when they respond with a similar energy and mood. They don’t need to cry with us—but they need to match our arousal and valence. That’s what makes us believe they understand what we’re feeling. If they seem to be behaving similarly to us on the surface, but their mood and energy is different, something feels off. “Your facial expressions might be the same, and the words you are saying might be almost exactly the same—nearly everything might be the same—but if your valence is different, you’ll know you aren’t feeling the same thing,” said Elfenbein.

This is challenging when I’m in a room full of students all with different moods and energies.

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. So how do we achieve this kind of mutual understanding? 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 other, and then the emotional conflict underneath.

Sometimes people didn’t even seem to realize they were trying to exert control. “I’m seeing the same dudes posting over and over again with the same long drawn-out gun rhetoric and it’s really off-putting,” one woman wrote. Her intent was to express her frustration, but it came off like an attempt to restrain who was allowed to speak: “I’m most interested in hearing from other women,” she wrote. “I am not at all interested in hearing from men.” Sometimes, when we try to exert control, we don’t realize we’re doing it. We think we’re simply stating our opinion, or offering advice, and don’t understand that others will perceive it as attempting to strong-arm a conversation’s direction.