The science behind dramatically better conversations | Charles Duhigg | TEDxManchester

I'm going to ask you uh to participate in an experiment which is that when you leave this room when you go out into the world today tomorrow whenever you feel like it I'd like you to ask and answer one question of someone who's a stranger you might meet them on the bus you might meet them walking down the street and I'm going to show you the question that I'm going to ask you to ask an answer the question is when was the last time you cried in front of someone now just out of curiosity how

many of you are really excited about this experiment not no hands went up whatsoever and that makes sense right because like there can be nothing that seems more intimidating or less fun than finding a stranger asking them when they've cried in front of someone else and then telling them about the time you cried in front of someone else but I'm going to try and convince you over the next few minutes that this experiment is not only worth doing it's worth doing whenever you can because it will make your life better and to explain how I

got to this I have to tell you a little bit of a story about me and my wife um few years ago we got into this bad pattern we've been married for 20 years but I would come home from a long day at the office I was a reporter at the New York Times at that point and I would start complaining about my day about how I'm not appreciated enough and my wife very reasonably would offer me some great advice she would say something like why don't you take your boss out to lunch and you

guys can get to know each other a little bit better' and instead of being able to hear her I would get even more upset and I would say things like why aren't you supporting me you should be outraged on my behalf and she would get upset because I was attacking her for giving me good advice this was not anyone ever have an experience like this it was not in a good good situation and so I went and I started talking to researchers who were studying communication I asked them why am I getting into this pattern

and they said well you're making a mistake we're living through this golden age of understanding communication really for the first time because of ADV and neural Imaging and data collection and they said one of the big things that we've learned is that we tend to think of a discussion as being just one conversation right we're talking about one thing my day or the kids grades what to have for dinner but what they said is that actually each discussion contains many different conversations and in general these conversations tend to fall into one of three buckets there's

these practical conversations where we're talking about what's this all about what are we really discussing but then there's emotional conversations where we're talking about how do we feel and my goal is to share with you my feelings and I don't want you to solve them I want you to empathize and then there's conversations that are social conversations about who we are the social identities that are important to us how we relate to each other and how we relate to society and what the researchers said is what we've learned is that if people are having different

conversations at the same moment they can't really hear each other they can't really connect and in fact this is exactly what was happening with me and my wife right I was coming home and having an emotional conversation my wife was responding with a practical conversation they are both legitimate conversations but because we weren't having the same conversation at the same moment we weren't really communicating with each other and within neurology and psychology this insight has become so important that it's become known as the matching principle which says that successful communication requires recognizing what kind of

conversation is occurring and then matching each other but how do we do that well in schools they've actually taught teachers to do this they if you are a school teacher and you'll probably learn at some point that if a student comes up to you with a problem or they want something they want to talk about you should ask them do you want to be helped which is a practical conversation do you want to be hugged which is an emotional conversation or do you want to be heard which is a social conversation and it seems to

work it seems like if you ask students what they need they'll tell you but of course that is hard to do in real life right if you go up and you ask ask someone at work if they want to hug the HR might get involved so you might not want to do that but luckily there is another way of doing this for all of us normal people which is to ask questions and in particular to ask a certain type of question a special question what's known as a deep question a deep question is something that

invites us to talk about our values or our beliefs or our experiences and that can sound a little intimidating but it's actually much easier than it sounds for instance instead of asking someone where do you work work you could ask them what do you love about your job instead of asking someone where did you go to high school you could say what was high school like wait what did you learn there what what changed you there but differently instead of asking about the facts of someone's life we should ask them how they feel about their

life because when we do they tend to reveal to us who they really are they tend to tell us what they want not only out of this conversation but how they hope that we'll see them and how they want to see us what matters to them most in fact what studies show us is that this is so powerful because these kinds of questions allow us to be vulnerable and vulnerability and reciprocal vulnerability when we hear vulnerability and we become vulnerable in in return is the key to allowing us to connect with other people and to

explain how this works I want to tell you a story about this guy Dr bear Adai Dr Adai is a cancer surgeon in New York City he specializes in prostate cancer removing prostate T prostate tumor removing cancer tumors from prostates and he has this kind of interesting job because every single day a patient will come into his office asking he thinks for medical advice and what he will tell them is you should not get surgery the the the prostate is located so close to the to the nerves that control urination and sexual function that it's

a relatively risky surgery and what's more most prostate tumors they grow very very slowly it's actually one of the slowest growing forms of cancer in existence there's a saying among doctors that if you have an old patient with prostate cancer he's going to die of old age before the cancer kills him and so doct and I would have these patients come in and you would tell them look I don't think you should do anything in fact I think you should do this thing called active surveillance what we're going to do is we're going to take

a blood sample every six months we're going to do a biopsy every 2 years and if the tumor seems to change we'll do an MRI and if we have to we can do the surgery but otherwise no radiation no surgery it's going to be okay and these patients would listen to them and then they would go home and they would discuss it with their spouse and then they would walk in the next day and they would insist on having the surgery they would say I absolutely want you to cut me open take the tumor out

as fast as possible and for doct die this was bewildering right he thought these would be the easiest conversations of his life he's telling people that they don't have to have surgery and he's a surgeon he told me that when this happens again and again and again you start to realize this isn't a problem with my patients this is a problem with me I'm doing something wrong and so he goes to these folks these professors at the Harvard Business School and he asks them for advice on what to do differently and they said well look

the biggest mistake that you're making is you are starting this conversation all wrong you are starting by assuming that the patient walks into your room into your exam room looking for advice and looking for Medical Solutions but you don't know if that's true you're not asking them any questions what you need to do is you need to start asking deep questions so two weeks later after having this conversation a 62y old man comes into Dr adi's office for the first time he had just gotten his diagnosis of having prostate cancer and Dr instead of giving

him advice instead of telling him what he ought to do he asks the question he asks the question what does this cancer your diagnosis mean to you and the man starts talking and he starts talking about how his father had died when he was 17 years old and this had just been so hard for him and it had been so hard for his mom and then he starts talking about how at work he's worried that the younger employees if they find out that he have CA has cancer they're going to start looking at him differently

they're gonna they're going to be already riding him into the grave even though he's got 20 or 30 years left on his career and then he starts talking about his grandchildren and his fears for the world they're inheriting what with climate change and everything else that's going on Dr ADI had expected this guy to at least bring up cancer to at least mention mortality or pain but it never came up and at that moment Dr Ed I realized because he had asked this deep question that this man wanted to have an emotional conversation he wanted

to talk about how do we feel he needed to be hugged and so Dr D didn't actually hug him right but he did the verbal equivalent and he started talking about how he understood that his own father had gotten sick and that it had been terrifying for them but it had also brought them together in these ways that he didn't actually anticipate and they talk about this for eight minutes just eight minutes and then Dr ADI says look do you mind there's some medical options I'd like to talk over with you is that okay and

they move into a practical conversation together and within seven more minutes the man decides to do active surveillance and never looks back Dr ADI patients overwhelmingly now opt for active surveillance his advice because of this approach and the thing is we can do this in any conversation it doesn't have to be an important conversation it doesn't have to be life or death we can always connect more and better and in a really profound way with the person that we're speaking to if we want to which brings me back to that EXP experiment so just to

remind you what you're supposed to do walk out of the room find a stranger ask them when was the last time you cried in front of someone and then as soon as they answer you answer the question yourself and you tell them when you last cried let me just say this experiment has been done thousands and thousands of times most notably by a guy named Nick Epley at the University of Chicago people hate this experiment nobody who participates comes in and is like I'm really looking this is going to be a great time in instead

what they say is I do not want to do this this sounds terrible but they're in an experiment and they basically have to do it right they're in the room they get paired with a partner they go and they ask a question ask an answer and then nickle afterwards asks them what was that like and what people say are things like oh my gosh I felt so connected to that person more connected than I to people in other conversations in a while I I felt more caring towards them and I felt like they were really

caring about me I felt like they listened so attentively and it was really easy for me to listen to what they were saying ultimately almost everyone says this is one of the best conversations that they've had in the last week the last month the last year and they say things like I'm so glad I got paired with that person because they were exactly right for me when in truth the only thing that was right is that they were a stranger and they had the right question the right kind of question to ask so why why

is this so powerful why is asking this question why does it help us connect so well because it's a deep question it allows us to say something real and when we ask Steve questions we figure out which of the three conversations we're in what we're talking about what everyone really wants out of this dialogue and that is how we connect with each other we are living through a time of polarization and division we have forgotten how to have conversations but there's a science to it there are these folks named who are known as super communicators

who they're not special they're not more charismatic or they're not they're not more outgoing than anyone else they've just learned skills that allow us to connect with others and there're skills that all of us can learn and that feeling you get after a wonderful conversation that glow that you EXP experience our brains have evolved to give us that to Crave connection so I hope you go out I hope you find a stranger and I hope you tell them all about the last time you cried in front of another person and then tell me how it

went thanks I here okay