Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

by Charles Duhigg

We all possess numerous social identities—Democrat/Republican, Christian/Muslim, Black/white, self-made millionaire/working-class—that intersect in complicated ways: I’m a gay Hindu computer engineer from the South who votes libertarian. These identities nudge us and others to make assumptions. They can subtly cause us to “exaggerate the differences between groups” and overemphasize “the similarities of things in the same group,” as one researcher from the University of Manchester wrote in 2019. Our social identities push us unthinkingly to see people like us—what psychologists call our in-group—as more virtuous and intelligent, while those who are different—the out-group—as suspicious, unethical, and possibly threatening. Social identities help us relate to others, but they can also perpetuate stereotypes and prejudice.