Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

by Charles Duhigg

Some people, however, have a talent for detecting emotions, even when they’re unspoken. They exhibit an emotional intelligence that s...

It’s natural to assume these people are unusually observant, or uncommonly sensitive. Sometimes they are. But years of research indicates this is a skill anyone can develop. We can learn to identify the nonverbal clues that indicate someone’s true emotions and use these hints to understand what they are feeling.

Emotional intelligence. The concept was just then being defined by two psychologists at Yale, who argued that there was a form of “social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions.” 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.”

The reason why simply mimicking another person’s laughter, or the words they use, or their expressions doesn’t bring us closer is because it doesn’t really show anything. Simply mirroring someone doesn’t prove that we genuinely want to understand them. If you laugh loudly, and I merely smile, it won’t feel like I want to bond. It will feel like I’m uninterested, or patronizing. What matters isn’t speaking and acting alike, but rather matching one another in ways that convey the desire to align.

Mood and energy often show themselves via nonverbal cues.

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.

How did that conversation unfold? Did you and your spouse take turns calmly presenting facts and proposals, and then listening attentively? Did your coworker acknowledge their shortcomings and you graciously did the same? Did you dispassionately consider your siblings’ opinions when they implied you were abandoning your mother? After trading insults on Twitter, did everyone change their minds? Or—and this, of course, is more likely—was the conversation a messy battle from start to finish, with bruised feelings, anger, defensiveness, and misunderstandings galore?

“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it.”

So how do we connect when our differences seem so unbridgeable?

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.

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. “Say you have a couple fighting with each other about having another kid,” Heen told me. “There’s the top-level conflict—you want another child, and I don’t—that seems, at first glance, to explain why they’re fighting. But there’s also a deeper emotional issue:

They stopped trying to understand why this conflict had emerged and, instead, started plotting revenge. And most of all, everyone wanted to win, to beat the other side, to feel vindicated.

Every confrontation involves a range of feelings—anxiety, distress, a desire for retribution—that are natural. But these passions can make it impossible to discuss problems in a productive manner. “And if you don’t acknowledge the emotions, then you’ll never understand why you’re fighting,” said Heen. “You’ll never know what this fight is actually about.”

The problem, however, is that we often hate talking about our feelings during a disagreement. “People love to pretend that they can become analytical robots,” Heen said. “But, of course, no one can do that. All that happens is your emotions leak out in other ways.” Or people might recognize their own emotions, but they are loath to reveal them. They think it will give the other side an advantage or will be viewed as a weakness. They worry about revealing a vulnerability that will be weaponized by their foes. Not to mention, when we’re fighting, we usually feel stressed, which isn’t a great environment for discussing our feelings.

This is the real reason why so many conflicts persist: Not because of a lack of solutions or because people are unwilling to compromise, but because combatants don’t understand why they are fighting in the first place.

In other words, they don’t want to talk about How Do We Feel?, even though it’s the most important conversation to have.

It’s a hard task, particularly if people are discussing something—like guns—they’ve been fighting about for decades, and everyone is certain they, alone, represent righteousness, while the other side is immoral and wrong.

Are they listening, or just preparing their rebuttal? Something more is needed, an extra step. To convince others we are genuinely listening during an argument, we must prove to them that we have heard them, prove we are working hard to understand, prove we want to see things from their perspective.

When people believe that others are trying to understand their perspectives, they become more trusting, more willing “to express their thoughts and ideas.” The “sense of safety, value and acceptance” that comes from believing a partner is genuinely listening makes us more willing to reveal our own vulnerabilities and uncertainties.

If you want someone to expose their emotions, the most important step is convincing them you are listening closely to what they say.

So if a listener wants to prove they’re listening, they need to demonstrate it after the speaker finishes talking. 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 fairly simple technique—prove you are listening by asking the speaker questions, reflecting back what you just heard, and then seeking confirmation you understand—but studies show it is the single most effective technique for proving to someone that we want to hear them. 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.

Looping lets us hear others’ stories, and prove to them we’ve heard what they are saying. “When you start to undersand each other’s stories, that’s when you can start talking about what’s actually going on.”

These early studies revealed interesting patterns: Many couples were quite good at listening to each other and even proving they were listening. “That’s kind of the minimum for a marriage,” said Stanley. “If you can’t show the other person you’re listening, you probably won’t get married in the first place.” Couples might not have been looping each other, but, either through intuition or advice they had received, they had figured out how to show they wanted to understand one another. And yet, despite all that listening, America’s divorce rate was skyrocketing: In 1979, more than a million couples—triple the number from just a decade earlier—had chosen to end their marriages. The scientists wondered: If couples were so good at hearing each other and proving they heard one another, why were they still splitting up? The researchers started digging into their data. Eventually, two findings emerged. First, unsurprisingly, they confirmed that nearly every couple fought. Some couples argued frequently—about 8 percent of married Americans fight at least once a day—while others bickered only occasionally. But regardless of frequency, nearly every marriage contained some degree of conflict. The second discovery was that, for some couples, those conflicts and arguments didn’t seem to have much lasting impact. Regardless of how frequently some people battled, they said they were still fulfilled by their marriages, happy with their choice of spouse, and reported no thoughts of divorce ...

One thing they had noticed was that many couples—both happy and unhappy—sometimes mentioned tussles over “control” when asked to describe their fights.

Couples’ anxieties about control showed up in other ways, as well. Researchers noticed that many divorces happened after major life changes, in part because these changes had triggered a sense of losing control.

We all crave control, of course. And while there are many factors that determine if a romantic relationship succeeds or flounders, one is whether the relationship makes us feel more in control of our happiness, or less.

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happy couples tended to focus, instead, on controlling themselves, their environment, and the conflict itself.

Happy couples, for instance, spent a lot of time controlling their own emotions. They would take breaks when they felt themselves growing angry. They worked hard to calm down through deep breathing, or by writing down how they were feeling rather than shouting it, or by falling back on habits—using “I statements”; reciting a list of what they loved about each other; bringing up happy memories—that they had practiced during less angry times. They tended to speak more slowly, so they could stop, midsentence, if something came out harsher than they intended. They were more likely to defuse tensions by changing the subject or making jokes.

“Happy couples slow down the fight,” said Karney. “They exert a lot more self-control and self-awareness.”

(In marriage therapy, this is called kitchen-sinking, a particularly destructive pattern.)

One advantage of focusing on these three things—controlling oneself, the environment, and the boundaries of the conflict—is that it allowed happy spouses to find things they could control together. They were still fighting. They still disagreed. But, when it came to control, they were on the same side of the table.

If we focus on controlling ourselves, our environment, and the conflict itself, then a fight often morphs into a conversation, where the goal is understanding, rather than winning points or wounding our foes. Control isn’t the only thing that matters, of course, but if spouses don’t feel like they share control, it’s difficult for an argument to end, or a relationship to flourish.

This insight also has significance in other realms: During any conflict—a workplace debate, an online disagreement—it’s natural to crave control. And sometimes that craving pushes us to want to control the most obvious target: The person we’re arguing with. If we can just force them to listen, they’ll finally hear what we’re saying. If we can force them to see things from our point of view, they’ll agree we’re right. The fact is, though, that approach almost never works. Trying to force someone to listen, or see our side, only inflames the battle. Instead, it is far better to harness our craving for control so that we’re working together, cooperating to find ways to lower the temperature and make this fight smaller.

This explains why looping for understanding is so powerful: When you prove to someone you are listening, you are, in effect, giving them some control over the conversation. This is also why the matching principle is so effective: When we follow someone else’s lead and become emotional when they are emotional, or practical when they have signaled a practical mindset, we are sharing control over how a dialogue flows.

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.

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.

Conflicts don’t usually resolve quickly. “It’s hard to metabolize another person’s perspective in just one conversation,” Sheila Heen told me. “It takes a while, and so we usually have to revisit the conversation, again and again, until we can hear everything each person is saying.” But this iterative process can easily go off the rails if we feel unsafe, or if it seems other people aren’t listening, or if they’re trying to control what we’re allowed to say. That’s when hurt and anger seep in, resentment builds, the conflict starts to spiral. But when we look for things we can control together, a path forward becomes easier to see.

“social identities”: The self-images we all form based on the groups we belong to, the people we befriend, the organizations we join, and the histories we embrace or shun.

Social identities, as one psychology textbook explains, are “that part of our self-concept that comes from our membership in social groups, the value we place on this membership, and what it means to us emotionally.” Our social identities emerge from a blend of influences: The pride or defensiveness we feel based on the friends we’ve chosen, the schools we’ve attended, the workplaces we’ve joined. It’s the obligations we feel because of our family legacies, how we grew up, or where we worship. All of us have a personal identity, how we think of ourselves apart from society. And all of us have a social identity, how we see ourselves—and believe others see us—as members of various tribes.

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.

“And then, when a patient disagrees with you, you start thinking of them as backwards or wrong.”

But that required two things: First, he needed to figure out how to address the stereotypes inside his own head—and the heads of other physicians—that made them see the vaccine resistant as ignorant and irresponsible. Second, he needed to have conversations where patients felt respected, and everyone saw one another as members of a common tribe.

The existence of this stereotype generated just enough anxiety and distraction to slow them down, which translated into lower scores.

effect stereotype threat, and since those first experiments in the late 1990s, hundreds of other studies have both confirmed its existence and examined its pernicious effect. Simply knowing that a stereotype exists can influence how we behave. For Black students, or women in advanced math courses, or many others, “it is the mere existence of the stereotype about their identity’s abilities in society that threatens them, not necessarily the racism of the people around them,” Steele said. Even if no one in the student’s orbit is prejudiced, the student can still be undermined by the knowledge that a stereotype exists, and that their performance “could be taken, because of the stereotype and its effect on people’s thinking, as confirmation of the stereotype.”

Social identities can change how we act, even if we don’t intend them to, even if we wish they didn’t. These identities can push us to double-check our answers or arrogantly tell a patient “I know better than you.”