We Need to Talk
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What skills do we need to improve our conversations?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At various points in our lives, all of us turn to coaches and trainers. If you're a student athlete, you might need a coach to improve your tennis stroke or soccer footwork. If you need to take up a musical instrument in your 30s, you'll need the help of a piano teacher or guitar instructor. If you decide you want to learn a new language in your 50s, you sign up for classes with an expert in that language. But there are lots of domains in our lives where many of us never dream of recruiting the help of a coach. That's because we feel we are masters in those domains already. We don't need a coach to help us breathe or walk or talk. Or do we? Just because we've done something a long time doesn't mean we are doing it right. Just because we feel we are skilled at something doesn't mean we don't have plenty of room for improvement. Today on the show, we focus on a skill that seems so commonplace that many of us fail to see how difficult it is to do well.
We're going to look at how we engage in conversation and the things we can do to get better at it. Learning to talk This week on Hidden Brain. When discussing the children in our lives, we say they learn to talk at age one or two. For the late bloomers, maybe it's three or four. We make it sound as if learning to talk is something we master early and then practice without a problem as adults. But it turns out that most of us have a lot to learn when it comes to having conversations that are dynamic, engaging, and meaningful. Alison Woodbrooks is a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School. For many years now, she has studied the science of conversation. Alison Woodbrooks, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thank you so much for having me.
Alison, when you were younger, you went on a blind date that was memorable for all the wrong reasons. Can you paint me a picture of what your life was like at the time and who this mystery man was?
Yes, I was living in New York City and I was set up on a blind date by a friend. It might have been the only blind date that I've been on in my life. Um, and it was, uh, with a man who had a job, a good job, great job in finance. He had gone to a good college. He'd played football in college and I had seen photos of my friend had shown me photos of this guy and he was, you know, so handsome. So I was excited. I went and I met him. downtown for dinner at this sort of busy, bustling, loud restaurant slash bar. And I settle into the table and off we go.
So he, in some ways, is the real life version of that popular meme that's been going around, which says, I'm looking for a man in finance, trust fund, six, five blue eyes.
Exactly. I don't know about the trust fund, but truly everything else, this was this sort of Adonis of a man that so many women, I think, are hoping to meet. Yes.
All right. So that's very optimistic and hopeful. So what happens when the dinner gets underway?
So I settle into this table at this buzzy restaurant in New York City downtown. And I mean, across from me at this table is this beautiful man. And I'm so excited. And we just launch into a launch into conversation. Now, the whole point point of a first date is to get to know each other. So I am pelting him with questions. Where is he from? What's his family like? What was his college like? What was it like to play football there? Tell me more about your football career. What's your job like now? Where do you live? Do you have lots of friends in the city? So I'm asking him lots of questions. And I realized that 10 minutes have gone by and he has not asked me a single thing about myself. Wow. 10 minutes.
And I realize at this point that this has been a complete sort of absence of question asking in my direction. And at that point, you sort of have this out-of-body experience, and I'm floating over the table looking at you. looking down at this conversation game that's now afoot. And you start to play this little game where you're like, how many questions can I ask this person before they ask a single question back to me? Like, how far can I push this? And I think he doesn't really realize that I'm now playing this game. And he certainly doesn't realize how badly he's losing the game. And another 10 minutes go by. 20 minutes, he has asked me nothing about myself.
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