The science behind dramatically better conversations | Charles Duhigg | TEDxManchester — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00Transcriber: Abdulrahman Sallam Reviewer: Raúl Higareda
2. 0:00(Applause)
3. 0:06I’m going to ask you to participate in an experiment,
4. 0:11which is that when you leave this room, when you go out into the world,
5. 0:14today, tomorrow, or whenever you feel like it,
6. 0:17I’d like you to ask and answer one question of someone who’s a stranger.
7. 0:22You might meet them on the bus or walking down the street.
8. 0:26I’m going to show you the question I’m going to ask you to ask and answer.
9. 0:29The question is,
10. 0:30“When was the last time you cried in front of someone?”
11. 0:35Now, just out of curiosity,
12. 0:36how many of you are really excited about this experiment?
13. 0:40No hands went up whatsoever. And that makes sense, right?
14. 0:43Because there can be nothing that seems more intimidating or less fun
15. 0:48than finding a stranger, asking them when they’ve cried in front of someone else,
16. 0:51and then telling them about the time you cried in front of someone else.
17. 0:55But I’m going to try and convince you
18. 0:57that this experiment is not only worth doing,
19. 0:59it’s worth doing whenever you can, because it will make your life better.
20. 1:05To explain how I got to this,
21. 1:06I’ve to tell you a little bit of a story about me and my wife.
22. 1:09A few years ago, we got into this bad pattern.
23. 1:11We’d been married for 20 years, but I’d come home from a long day at the office,
24. 1:15I was a reporter at the New York Times at that point,
25. 1:18and I’d start complaining about my day, about how I’m not appreciated enough.
26. 1:21And my wife, very reasonably, would offer me some great advice.
27. 1:25Like, “Why don’t you take your boss out to lunch?
28. 1:27You guys can get to know each other better.”
29. 1:30And instead of being able to hear her, I would get even more upset.
30. 1:33And I would say things like,
31. 1:35“Why aren’t you supporting me? You should be outraged on my behalf.”
32. 1:38And she would get upset
33. 1:39because I was attacking her for giving me good advice.
34. 1:42This was not... Anyone ever had an experience like this?
35. 1:45It was not a good situation.
36. 1:47And so, I started talking to researchers who were studying communication.
37. 1:50I asked them, “Why am I getting into this pattern?”
38. 1:53They said, “Well, you’re making a mistake.”
39. 1:55We’re living through this golden age of understanding communication,
40. 1:58really for the first time,
41. 1:59because of advances in neural imaging and data collection.
42. 2:02They said one of the big things that we’ve learned
43. 2:04Is that we tend to think of a discussion as being just one conversation.
44. 2:08We’re talking about one thing: my day, or the kids’ grades,
45. 2:11or what to have for dinner.
46. 2:12But what they said is that actually,
47. 2:14each discussion contains many different conversations.
48. 2:19In general, these conversations tend to fall into one of three buckets.
49. 2:23There’s these practical conversations, where we’re talking about
50. 2:26what this is all about, what we’re really discussing.
51. 2:29But then there’s emotional conversations, where we’re talking about how we feel,
52. 2:33and my goal is to share with you my feelings,
53. 2:35and I don’t want you to solve them, I want you to empathize.
54. 2:39And then there’s social conversations
55. 2:41about who we are, the social identities that are important to us,
56. 2:44how we relate to each other and to society.
57. 2:47And what the researchers said is that we’ve learned
58. 2:50if people are having different conversations at the same moment,
59. 2:54they can’t really hear each other.
60. 2:56They can’t really connect.
61. 2:58And this is exactly what was happening with me and my wife, right?
62. 3:01I was coming home and having an emotional conversation.
63. 3:03My wife was responding with a practical conversation.
64. 3:06They are both legitimate conversations,
65. 3:08but because we weren’t having the same conversation at the same moment,
66. 3:12we weren’t really communicating with each other.
67. 3:15And within neurology and psychology, this insight has become so important
68. 3:18that it’s become known as the matching principle,
69. 3:21which says that successful communication
70. 3:23requires recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring
71. 3:26and then matching each other.
72. 3:28But how do we do that?
73. 3:29Well, in schools, they’ve actually taught teachers to do this.
74. 3:32If you are a school teacher, you’ll probably learn at some point
75. 3:36that If a student comes to you with a problem or something to talk about,
76. 3:40you should ask them, “Do you want to be helped?”
77. 3:42which is a practical conversation.
78. 3:43“Do you want to be hugged?” which is an emotional conversation.
79. 3:46Or “Do you want to be heard?” which is a social conversation.
80. 3:49And it seems to work.
81. 3:51It seems like if you ask students what they need,
82. 3:54they’ll tell you.
83. 3:55But of course, that is hard to do in real life, right?
84. 3:58If you go up and ask someone at work if they want a hug,
85. 4:01the HR might get involved, so you might not want to do that.
86. 4:05But luckily, there is another way of doing this for all of us normal people,
87. 4:09which is to ask questions
88. 4:11and in particular, to ask a certain type of question,
89. 4:14a special question known as a deep question.
90. 4:17A deep question is something that invites us to talk about our values
91. 4:20or our beliefs or our experiences.
92. 4:23And that can sound a little intimidating,
93. 4:25but it’s actually much easier than it sounds.
94. 4:27For instance, instead of asking someone, “Where do you work?”
95. 4:30you could ask them, “What do you love about your job?”
96. 4:32Instead of asking someone, “Where did you go to high school?”
97. 4:35you could say, “What was high school like?
98. 4:38What did you learn there? What changed you there?”
99. 4:43Put differently, instead of asking about the facts of someone’s life,
100. 4:47we should ask them how they feel about their life.
101. 4:50Because when we do, they tend to reveal to us who they really are.
102. 4:56They tend to tell us what they want, not only out of this conversation,
103. 4:59but how they hope that we’ll see them and how they want to see us,
104. 5:03what matters to them most.
105. 5:05In fact, what studies show us is that this is so powerful
106. 5:08because these kinds of questions allow us to be vulnerable,
107. 5:12and vulnerability and reciprocal vulnerability,
108. 5:16when we hear vulnerability and we become vulnerable in return,
109. 5:19is the key to allowing us to connect with other people.
110. 5:24To explain how this works,
111. 5:25I want to tell you a story about this guy, Doctor Behfar Ehdaie.
112. 5:28Dr. Ehdaie is a cancer surgeon in New York City.
113. 5:32He specializes in prostate cancer, removing prostate tumors...
114. 5:36Removing cancer tumors from prostates.
115. 5:39And he has this kind of interesting job,
116. 5:42because every single day a patient will come into his office
117. 5:45asking, he thinks, for medical advice,
118. 5:48and what he will tell them is, “You should not get surgery.”
119. 5:52The prostate is located so close
120. 5:54to the to the nerves that control urination and sexual function
121. 5:58that it’s a relatively risky surgery.
122. 6:02And what's more, most prostate tumors, they grow very, very slowly.
123. 6:06It’s actually one of the slowest growing forms of cancer in existence.
124. 6:10There’s a saying among doctors
125. 6:11that if you have an old patient with prostate cancer,
126. 6:14he’s going to die of old age before the cancer kills him.
127. 6:18And so Dr. Ehdaie would’ve these patients come in and he’d tell them,
128. 6:21“Look, I don’t think you should do anything.
129. 6:23I think you should do active surveillance.
130. 6:25What we’re going to do is take a blood sample every 6 months,
131. 6:28we’re going to do a biopsy every 2 years,
132. 6:30and if the tumor seems to change, we’ll do an MRI,
133. 6:32and if we’ve to, we can do the surgery, but otherwise, no radiation, no surgery,
134. 6:37it’s going to be okay.”
135. 6:39And these patients would listen to him,
136. 6:41and then they’d go home and they’d discuss it with their spouse,
137. 6:45and then they’d walk in the next day and they’d insist on having the surgery.
138. 6:48They’d say, “I want you to cut me open, take the tumor out as fast as possible.”
139. 6:52And for Dr. Ehdaie, this was bewildering, right?
140. 6:55He thought these would be the easiest conversations of his life.
141. 6:58He’s telling people that they don’t have to have surgery, and he’s a surgeon.
142. 7:02He told me that when this happens again and again and again,
143. 7:05you start to realize this isn’t a problem with my patients.
144. 7:10This is a problem with me. I’m doing something wrong.
145. 7:14And so he goes to these professors at the Harvard Business School,
146. 7:18and he asks them for advice on what to do differently.
147. 7:20And they said, “Well look, your biggest mistake
148. 7:23is you are starting this conversation all wrong.
149. 7:26You are starting by assuming that the patient walks into your exam room
150. 7:30looking for advice and looking for medical solutions.
151. 7:33But you don’t know if that’s true, you’re not asking them any questions.
152. 7:37What you need to do is you need to start asking deep questions.”
153. 7:41So two weeks later, after having this conversation,
154. 7:43a 62-year-old man comes into Dr. Ehdaie’s office for the first time.
155. 7:47He had just gotten his diagnosis of having prostate cancer.
156. 7:51And Dr Ehdaie, instead of giving him advice,
157. 7:53instead of telling him what to do,
158. 7:55he asks the question,
159. 7:58“What does this cancer diagnosis mean to you?”
160. 8:03And the man starts talking.
161. 8:04And he starts talking about how his father had died when he was 17 years old.
162. 8:09And this had just been so hard for him, and it had been so hard for his mom.
163. 8:14And then he starts talking about how at work he’s worried
164. 8:17that the younger employees, if they find out that he has cancer,
165. 8:21they’ll look at him differently.
166. 8:22They’re going to be already writing him into the grave,
167. 8:25even though he’s got 20 or 30 years left on his career.
168. 8:29And then he starts talking about his grandchildren
169. 8:31and his fears for the world they’re inheriting,
170. 8:33with climate change and everything else that’s going on.
171. 8:37Dr. Ehdaie had expected this guy to at least bring up cancer,
172. 8:41to at least mention mortality or pain,
173. 8:44but it never came up.
174. 8:46And at that moment, Dr. Ehdaie realized, because he had asked this deep question,
175. 8:50that this man wanted to have an emotional conversation.
176. 8:53He wanted to talk about how do we feel.
177. 8:57He needed to be hugged.
178. 8:59So Dr. Ehdaie didn’t actually hug him, but he did the verbal equivalent.
179. 9:03He started talking about how he understood that his own father had gotten sick
180. 9:07and that it had been terrifying for them, but it had also brought them together
181. 9:11in these ways that he didn’t actually anticipate.
182. 9:14And they talk about this for eight minutes, just eight minutes.
183. 9:18And then Dr. Ehdaie says, “Look, do you mind?
184. 9:22There’s some medical options I’d like to talk over with you.
185. 9:25Is that okay?”
186. 9:27And they move into a practical conversation together.
187. 9:29And within seven more minutes,
188. 9:31the man decides to do active surveillance and never looks back.
189. 9:34Dr. Ehdaie’s patients overwhelmingly now opt for active surveillance,
190. 9:38his advice, because of this approach.
191. 9:42And the thing is, we can do this in any conversation.
192. 9:44It doesn’t have to be an important conversation or life or death.
193. 9:49We can always connect more and better,
194. 9:52and in a really profound way, with the person that we’re speaking to,
195. 9:56if we want to.
196. 9:58Which brings me back to that experiment.
197. 10:00So just to remind you what you’re supposed to do:
198. 10:03walk out of the room, find a stranger,
199. 10:05ask them, “When was the last time you cried in front of someone?”
200. 10:08And then as soon as they answer,
201. 10:10you answer the question yourself, and you tell them when you last cried.
202. 10:13Let me just say, this experiment has been done thousands of times,
203. 10:17most notably by a guy named Nick Epley at the University of Chicago.
204. 10:20People hate this experiment.
205. 10:23Nobody who participates comes in and is like,
206. 10:26“I’m really looking... This is going to be a great time.”
207. 10:29Instead, what they say is,
208. 10:30“I do not want to do this. This sounds terrible.”
209. 10:34But they’re in an experiment and they basically have to do it.
210. 10:37They get paired with a partner,
211. 10:38they go and ask the question, ask and answer,
212. 10:42and then Nick Epley afterwards asks them, “What was that like?”
213. 10:46And what people say are things like,
214. 10:48“Oh, my gosh, I felt so connected to that person,
215. 10:50more connected than I’ve been to people in other conversations in a while.
216. 10:55I felt more caring towards them,
217. 10:57and I felt like they were really caring about me.
218. 11:00I felt like they listened so attentively,
219. 11:02and it was really easy for me to listen to what they were saying.”
220. 11:06Ultimately, almost everyone says this is one of the best conversations
221. 11:09that they’ve had in the last week, the last month, the last year...
222. 11:14And they say things like, “I’m so glad I got paired with that person,
223. 11:17because they were exactly right for me.”
224. 11:19When in truth, the only thing that was right
225. 11:21is that they were a stranger and they had the right question,
226. 11:24the right kind of question to ask.
227. 11:27So why? Why is this so powerful?
228. 11:29Why is asking this question, why does it help us connect so well?
229. 11:33Because it’s a deep question. It allows us to say something real.
230. 11:39And when we ask deep questions,
231. 11:40we figure out which of the three conversations we’re in,
232. 11:44what we’re talking about,
233. 11:45what everyone really wants out of this dialogue.
234. 11:48And that is how we connect with each other.
235. 11:52We are living through a time of polarization and division.
236. 11:58We have forgotten how to have conversations.
237. 12:03But there's a science to it.
238. 12:06There are these folks who are known as super communicators,
239. 12:09who are not special, they’re not more charismatic,
240. 12:13or they’re not more outgoing than anyone else.
241. 12:16They’ve just learned skills that allow us to connect with others.
242. 12:21And they’re skills that all of us can learn.
243. 12:24And that feeling you get after a wonderful conversation,
244. 12:27that glow that you experience,
245. 12:30our brains have evolved to give us that,
246. 12:35to crave connection.
247. 12:37So I hope you go out, I hope you find a stranger,
248. 12:41and I hope you tell them all about
249. 12:43the last time you cried in front of another person.
250. 12:45And then tell me how it went.
251. 12:47Thanks.
252. 12:48(Applause)