Dr. Alison Wood Brooks | The Science of Conversation & the Art of Being Ourselves | Talks at Google

Hello, everyone. Hope you're having an awesome day so far. My name is Brandon Li. I'm on the Google Lens team here, and it is my honor and privilege to be your host for today's event. Welcome to Talks at Google. Well, folks— Well, folks, we've got, I think, a Fascinating topic for today's discussion. We're going to be having a conversation about conversations. Now, quick poll, show of hands, do we have any software engineers in the room today? Okay, excellent. Good to see we still exist in 2025. Now, it's no secret that a lot of us went into this line of work to minimize human contact. But as a lot of us found out, it turns out that talking to each other is still a huge part of our day-to-days and our jobs. The good news is that conversation is something that we can actually all get better at. And we have an expert here with us today to show us how. So without further ado, I'd love to say a few words about our guest. Our guest joins us here today from Harvard Business School, where she's the O'Brien Associate Professor of Business Administration. She's recently put out a new book on your chairs, Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. And about this book, I think it speaks volumes that Angela Duckworth, who is already an excellent conversationalist and my personal favorite podcast host, has this to say about the book. This book has raised my game as a conversationalist. I'm recommending it to everyone I know. And finally, our guest has been featured in places like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. And her findings have even been referenced in the Pixar movie Inside Out 2. Please give a warm Googly welcome to Dr. Alison Wood Brooks.

Thank you.

That's so nice. Thank you, guys.

Good to have you with us, Alison. I must say, this is the most prepared I've probably ever felt for an interview. I was reading your book, and it kind of felt like I had a coach with me telling me what I needed to do.

Cheerleader and coach.

Cheerleader.

Yes.

Thank you for that. So I wanted to kick us off by taking us back in time a bit to a time before Alison Wood Brooks became a behavioral scientist. And I was curious, if I were to ask this past Alison, Alison, what do you think makes a good conversationalist? What do you think she would have said?

Oh my gosh. I love questions like this that take you back in time to a different version of yourself. So I'm going doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. So before I was a behavioral scientist, well, I was born an identical twin. I loved playing sports, playing basketball and soccer growing up. I also love music. Very serious oboe player, you guys. But I think, you know, hobbies aside, I've always really loved people. I may be one of the only academics who is truly extroverted. I think I've always been fascinated by that there are people out there that just seemingly are really good at conversation, fixated on what are the things that they're doing that make their conversations more exciting and more intriguing and more engaging, more productive, more efficient. Even if I wouldn't have used those words probably, I think I would have said something like there are just Some people I love talking to. And I think we all feel that way. And so later, when I did become a behavioral scientist, maybe it's no surprise that I became obsessed with trying to figure out what are those people doing.

That's great. And I think your book does an awesome job of demystifying some of those things and combating what you call the myth of naturalness. There's actually things that we can learn, right?

Yeah.

So I think 2 of the things that struck me when reading your book are, number one, The number of people willing to have their conversations recorded for science. And number 2, so with your findings, some of them are things that, you know, we hear them, it's like, oh, that kind of makes sense. But a lot of the things are actually fairly counterintuitive, right? But importantly, backed by the research. So could you kick us off by maybe just like sharing one or 2 of the findings that you found particularly exciting for you or that you feel like are game changers?

Oh my gosh, where do we begin?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think when you think of behavioral science, you summarized it really well. What I am always trying to find are these things that are like a little bit surprising. So at first you go, oh, and then you're like, of course, right? So it's like an idea that's been rolling around in the back of your mind, this fuzzy thing that someone can come in and with data and evidence and sort of confirm or disconfirm that suspicion that many people have maybe had about what they've seen in the world. So an example for me, one of the things we talk about in the book are topics. Something that blew my mind recently is that I think certainly I walked around with this lay belief. I think a lot of us walk around with this lay belief that in order to have a deep conversation, you need to stay on a topic for a long time and really explore it deeply, maybe get really personal about it, really reflect. When we study conversation, many conversations at large scale, what you realize is actually good conversationalists are achieving depth on topics and moving across them quickly. So it doesn't— staying on a topic longer does not actually mean you're getting deeper on it, but some people are better at extracting the meaningful content from a topic more quickly by asking follow-up questions, by revealing more about themselves, by just being better sort of listeners trying to look for the best golden nuggets that emerge from their partner. It's almost like they're better curators of topics. And then as soon as it starts to feel like, OK, those golden nuggets— we've extracted most of the golden nuggets from this thing, we've got to move on to something else. And so good conversationalists achieve both depth and breadth of topics. That blew my mind. Do you want me to keep going?

Oh, yeah, feel free.

Another thing that I think is helpful in practice that we've learned about question asking is you'll often see, like, on LinkedIn or there's even— there's this New York Times article that this journalist just— I was emailing with yesterday where she's like, well, what questions should we ask our moms on Mother's Day? Which is a great topic, great idea. Everybody should be calling their moms on Mother's Day and asking good questions. But my point to her when I wrote back was the question that you start with. So something like, if you could go back in time, who were you friends with when I was a baby? That's a great question. It's going to start you down a really interesting tree branch. But everything that comes after it may be even more important. Are you listening to what she says? Are you searching for points in her emotional tone that are particularly exciting or intriguing? Or maybe she's feeling uncomfortable about something, and can you pick up on that and then take a deeper dive in it with follow-up questions? Can you reveal something about your own life that Helps to relate to those feelings in her. So I think the sort of starting point of a topic or a conversation is just one turn. And conversations are actually hundreds of turns. So thinking about how that cascade unfolds can be very, very valuable.

I like the phrase that you use sometimes to describe it— searching for treasure. It's like a little light bulb goes off. It's like there's something here. And you want to keep going for it. Not to force it, but to kind of go with what it's giving you. But you also talk about how there's some upfront work that you can do before the conversation. This is one of your more— maybe not controversial, but a little bit harder for people to accept— preparing topics. Do you want to tell us a bit about that?

Yeah. You've done a great job. Look at your screen. You've got so many great— there's highlighting, you guys. It's amazing. So of course, most great conversations are a combination of forethought in whatever form that you like to plan or prepare, And then flexibility once you're in it. I've always been a sort of habitual topic prepper, not in a formal sense, but I just really like thinking about people when we're apart. And I find it very helpful to push yourself to think, like, I know I'm going to see this person tomorrow. What will actually make our conversation— what will be fun to talk about? What do we need to talk about? What does this person need from me right now? I've always found that to be a helpful mindset. And I was surprised to learn when I started teaching my class called TALK at Harvard, that not everybody is thinking that way. Not everybody is doing that cognitive work. And so we wanted to run experiments to see, like, what if you push people to do it? What if you push people to just come up with a couple bullet points before every conversation of possible topics they could talk about? So do a little bit of topic prep. And what we found is— confirmed my instinct, which is When you nudge people to prep topics even for 30 seconds before a conversation starts, it makes it much more enjoyable. You feel less anxious during it because you don't have those little panics where you're like, oh God, I know we need to talk about something else. I don't know what that should be. It's a little creativity task, so it just takes a little bit of that pressure off. There are fewer disfluencies like ums and uhs and stutters and pauses. And you're more likely to land on mutually interesting topics. When you're doing those little creativity tasks, our instinct leads us to often talk about things in our environment. So like, let's talk about the food that's on the table in front of us, or maybe we'll gossip about a person standing nearby. That's not necessarily the best thing to talk about with that person, right? You should be thinking about what do they need, what do I need, let's talk about those things. So the reason this finding, even though it's sort of Robustly helpful to people. The reason the finding feels a little controversial is because many people don't want to do it. You ask them to prep topics and they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this feels super rigid, woman. Why are you— why are you making me think ahead or write something down before I call my mom or before I talk to my bestie? I should just know what— I'm going to know what to talk about with people I'm close to especially. And not— sort of going a step beyond I will know is I should know because that's what a good relationship is. That's what good conversation is. And it gets back to this idea of myth of naturalness. We have this belief that good conversationalists are not only good writ large, they're good on the spot spontaneously. They're coming up with these jokes and like ideas and topics and questions like right then and there. And when you actually start studying lots of conversationalists at scale, you start to realize that's not true. Good conversationalists are very often quite prepared, even if you can't observe that preparation.

There's a lot to probe a little bit further there. And I imagine some of us in the room resonate with some of the objections. But I actually wanted to ask— I'm a little curious— how did you even think to research this question? Because that's not the most obvious hypothesis I would have thought about, like, you know, does preparing topics help with conversation? Like, I've never even considered that as, like, an option.

Totally. So when I— at some point around 2015, maybe about a decade ago, I realized that there were whole fields that seemed to be about conversation. So social psychology, communication. And as a behavioral scientist trained in, like, that world, I also realized, but nobody's actually gone to the trouble of recording people actually talking to each other. And then using new tools that had emerged technologically, like natural language processing and machine learning, to analyze transcript data at large scale. So it felt like it was both a methodological opportunity of like, oh, we can do this better. We can actually study what people are saying to each other and how they're thinking and feeling while they do it descriptively, right? Like describing what are people doing at very large scale. Once you get into what are people doing, you start to realize, oh, there's so much room for improvement here. When you look under the hood, conversation is incredibly messy. There are so many flops and fumbles and collisions and problems and little difficult moments. Then you start to think, okay, what are the little life hacks? What are the mindsets? What are the things that will be most helpful? to the most people across most different conversation contexts. And so then we start testing using experiments different interventions. And so topic prep is an example. You can— we've also tried, like, just tell people to talk about more topics. So covering, moving more quickly, asking more questions, asking more specific types of questions, trying to incorporate more laughter. Any little behavior that in your mind you're like, oh, I love when people do that.

Mm-hmm.

I love compliments. I love when people say thank you. If you can nudge people to go in with a mindset to do those things more, often they are able to do it, and it makes their conversations much, much better.

Yeah, I think I can relate to this idea of somehow having this instinct of it needing to be organic. But as I reflected on it, there's other areas in our lives where we do preparation, and we don't see it as a bad thing. So one that came to mind was like, If you travel with some friends, for example, it's helpful to have someone who's looked up what restaurants we should eat at. You don't necessarily want to walk into the first one that you went into. But with conversation, I think there's this kind of like— our culture really prizes authenticity and being organic. But I think another aspect of it, which I'd be curious to get your thoughts on, is I wonder if there's also this fear of coming across like we have an agenda or like we're trying to manipulate somebody.

Yeah.

There's a lot of perception in conversation as well, right? So does it matter if the other person knows that you've prepared topics? Or even if you whip out a sheet of paper with stuff you pre-prepared, does it still work to have those things prepared?

Let's imagine that you have this beautiful little screen with all these questions and highlights. But instead of doing this in front of your colleagues at Google, we were doing it with your family or with your coolest friends. Would they be like, Brandon, you're such a nerd. You're trying to push your agenda. What are you doing? This is supposed to be casual. There are all kinds of variables that shift from one conversation to the next depending on who's there, what the goals are, what the lighting is like, who's in the room. Doing conversation well is such a delicate act of co-creation and it requires tremendous Self-awareness, so like reading yourself. How am I feeling? What do I want out of this? Mind reading, like I need to figure out what are your goals here? What are you trying to do? What's the point? Why did you say yes to this? And then room reading, right? Of reading all of the cues of who's in the room and what they care about. That's a really complicated skill and is incredibly important. Yeah. You mentioned that you going on like a trip with friends, it's often helpful to have somebody— who actually does have an agenda. Topic prep is particularly helpful in groups. So most of the book focuses on one-on-one conversation, but group conversation takes all of the sort of coordination puzzles and problems and challenges, and they multiply exponentially as soon as a third person pulls up a chair, let alone like a bus full of people at a bachelor party.

Yeah.

So as much as we might tease people who seemingly are too intense and are like devising an itinerary or an agenda, We really should be thanking them because without it, everybody is going to pair off in subgroups. Nobody is going to know what the goals are, what the timeline is. And so when you go in and you're like, this is supposed to be so fun, so we're just going to be super casual about it, it actually leads to sort of coordinational chaos. And you need sort of a plan in order to, once you get to a thing, actually enjoy being together and feeling confident in what the purpose is.

Yeah. I actually personally have an issue sometimes that my wife points out, which is assuming the worst in people, that they would think that you have bad intentions or something. And I think this sort of thing, we can frame it as an act of care even. I've taken the time to think about you.

Yes.

Yeah, so absolutely. You mentioned mind reading. And as you pointed out, there's a lot of nuances when it comes to conversation because people are complex, and therefore conversations are complex. The topic of mind reading I found interesting because it came up in a couple different contexts in your book. The first one is in this coordination game, we implicitly need to do some amount of mind reading where we can't explicitly ask for every single thing. But at the same time, you pointed out how trying to put ourselves in somebody else's shoes is actually really difficult for us and we're often very bad at it. So sometimes it's actually better to just ask the person directly. A lot of this information, we have to kind of read and consider very carefully. Like, how do these things that feel like they're at tension come together? So could you say a bit about how that works?

Yeah. So what you're alluding to is this belief that we are capable of perspective-taking, right? That you hear that phrase all the time, like, oh, I need to take his perspective, or she didn't take his perspective. Humans actually can't— aren't good at guessing what other people are thinking. Even my identical twin sister, who has the same DNA as me and very same upbringing, it is striking— I see her often— it is striking how often I don't know what she is thinking. And it's really important. The only way that I could know what she's thinking or feeling is by asking her, right? Conversation is the medium by which— the only way we can actually hear directly, sort of download someone else's mind and their experiences. In the book, I talk about this study where It's so amazing. It's by Boaz Kezar, who's a psychologist at the University of Chicago. He had people sit back to back and say scripted phrases out loud so that one person would say something like, what are you doing here? And then the other person had to guess that person's intentions just based on the inflection of their voice. That person guessing thought they were wildly overconfident. This person was told what their intention was, and then they had to guess from a predetermined list. There were like 4 options, and they get it wrong. They are no better than chance at guessing what that person's intention was supposed to be. The best part of this study is that they then did it in another language. So they had people saying the phrases only in Chinese, and non-Chinese speakers listening and trying to interpret their intentions. And still, just based on the sort of prosodic cues related to how that person's delivering that line in another language, the listener still feels wildly overconfident that they know what that person means. They know what that person is accusing them of. And they just don't. We actually don't have a better than chance way of knowing other people's intentions.

I want to touch on questions really quickly as well. So questions, you mentioned earlier as another thing that you studied. Questions are something really near and dear to my heart. I think we should all ask more questions. And I think a situation that maybe some of us in the room find ourselves in is we're in a meeting, and then one person starts talking, and the other person starts responding, and they have a lot to say, but they've misunderstood what the first person is talking about. And then you're kind of left there thinking, if only they had asked a question.

Yeah.

Could you talk to us a bit about the power of questions?

Yeah. And what you're alluding to— questions— top-line advice is just like we should all be trying to ask more questions. That's a very healthy mindset. And even holding that mindset will lead you to ask good questions. When you tell people to ask more questions, they often ask more follow-up questions, which are just a superhero of question types. It shows that you're listening to someone, that you heard what they said, that you're curious to know more. All of those things show your partner that you care about them, and you're more likely to uncover actually more accurate information and deeper information. The meeting scenario is a fun one. It would have helped if that second speaker would have asked a question to clarify before they launched in. But also, there are people observing that can also ask a question or sort of call out, oh, I think there was a misunderstanding here. That's called a repair side sequence. Repair is incredibly important. I think we hear about repair often in, like, public discourse around apologizing, which is wonderful. The last whole chapter in the book is about apologies. They're an incredibly powerful tool in our toolkit. But what linguists often focus in on are more micro-repairs, these little moments in conversation where you're like, oh, I think maybe we are using the same phrase in a different way, or we're using different phrases to mean the same thing, Or you said, you made this joke and I was laughing at it because I thought you were being sarcastic, but others are laughing because they thought you were being sincere. Like, there are all of these ways that we misunderstand each other. And it's quite helpful to have that moment of courage and sort of call out the misunderstanding or just ask to clarify. And that little sidebar of repair is like a little sidebar. You clarify the thing and then get right back to Sometimes our fear is that that sidebar is going to take too long, like it's going to distract us, carry us away on a digression, or just be sort of like rude or weird. But actually, it usually only takes 2 turns of the conversation, and then you can get right back into the meat of whatever you were talking about.

Yeah. And what you're talking about, it kind of feels like there's this collaborative element of some conversations. And so before today, I had mentioned this event to a few friends, and a very common reaction I got is like, are you nervous? This person's an expert on conversation. She's going to be noticing all your mistakes. She's going to be grading you in her head. And honestly, I don't really feel that much of that. And I think part of it is because you're very approachable. But also, I think I realized that one of the effects of great conversationalists is they bring out the best in other people to some extent, and they make you feel like a great conversationalist too. And it kind of makes me think of if anyone's done partner dancing, like salsa or something, a good so-called leader is supposed to give some cues for where you're trying to go next. Could you say a bit more about the conversation equivalence of that concept?

Yeah. First, I'd like to give you an A+ from this Harvard professor. It's a common thing that I hear from people They'll often say, like, oh, but I'm so nervous to talk to you. And I'm like, no, of all people in the world, I understand the depth of complexity and difficulty of this thing that we're doing. And I want us to succeed at it so much. I'm going to help you as much as possible and not judge you. Right? Like, this is a huge part of it, is pushing your brain that was built to do negative social judgment to not do that. And it becomes even harder when people say things that you don't immediately agree with. And still we need to push ourselves to affirm how they're feeling, learn as much as we can about why they've come to believe something, tease apart what's the data underlying that thing, and so that you can possibly have a future together where you could actually like work on untangling the puzzle together. Yes. Okay. So your— but your question is about co-creation essentially, right? It's like this partnership dance. That's exactly right. We don't go through life actually making a series of pitches. I think a lot of people actually believe that. When I talk to the entrepreneurs at HBS, I feel like I need to jump up and down and be like, I know you've been trained to pitch your deck. But you're pitching to human minds who all have preferences and real needs and desires and things that they're looking for. Life is a series of conversations. It is not a series of one-way pitches to nobody. So asking questions about what people actually want and need first is going to help you if at any point you feel like, OK, now is the moment that I actually need to be persuasive or try to pitch something and be influential to someone else. But until that point, you really need to do this dance of like, I need to learn as much as I can about you and your mindset and what you care about. And I think what you described, which is like you're there to help each other do as best that you can in that moment, that's such a healthy approach. It's very tied to the K of the TALK acronym, kindness, which is like our brains are built to be egocentric and self-centered. That's just— we're built for survival. We're built to focus on all this information we know about our own perspective. So to the extent that we can push ourselves in every conversation to just relentlessly try to focus on the other person and think about what are they wanting right now? Why is Brandon nodding his head right now? How is he feeling? What can I do to make this the most exciting and great for him and for everybody else here? That takes a push in your brain. It goes against our nature, and it makes everything better. It makes it feel like I'm on your side. I've got your back. I work with some really amazing freestyle rappers. I have them come to my class. They started a Broadway show many years ago called Freestyle Love Supreme together with Lin-Manuel Miranda before Hamilton, before all of that. That first was Freestyle Love Supreme. And I love it because they're just such gifted improvers and really we're not teaching my students to beatbox and rap. They're so good at showing the students what you need to be good at freestyle is good collaboration. And so before they go on stage, they always come over. They go to everybody, and they just whisper to them, I've got your back.

Mm.

They did it to me. And honestly, I don't think I've ever felt more warm and loved in my life. Right before you go on stage, you say, I've got your back. That's how everyone wants to feel in every interaction. And I think that's what good conversationalists Make others feel that way. Show other people that that's where they're coming from, even when they're mad, even when they don't agree with what you're saying.

Yeah. I love that. It's not even just the specific words or phrases that you say, but setting the tone for what's to come.

Yep.

We've been touching on every great framework needs a great acronym. You have this acronym, TALK, in your book. And we've kind of implicitly covered some of the different letters. So topics, asking, levity, and kindness. And it strikes me that whenever we include things into a group, we are implicitly excluding other things, right?

Yeah.

So I'm curious, what didn't make the cut? So I'm thinking of things like knowledgeability, I don't know, cultural awareness, mastery of language. I'm sure all these play some sort of role, but What things did you not include because they're either not as important or not as important as we think?

Oh my gosh. OK, first of all, I have to get it off my chest. I'm not a fan of acronyms. I don't love them in general. But I really love this one because it's simple. You can remember it. Because when we go into a conversation and you look under the hood, we're confronting a really vast ocean of complexity of the things And I really despise when people are like, here are the 20 things you need to do to— or 40 things that you should be working on. So I think this acronym honestly captures a pretty comprehensive approach to all conversations. That is a very ambitious thing to try and do.

Yeah.

Topics and asking focus on the informational content. Are we raising the topics that actually pursue the goals we mean to pursue? Are we using the interactivity through question asking to get to the information we need or able to sort of keep things— information private that we don't want to share? Then you move into levity and kindness, and that moves into the more relational, emotional things that humans deeply care about. I was first recruited to Harvard to teach negotiation. And honestly, that class is amazing, but it is missing that sort of relational, emotional side of life that are really important. It almost presumes that everybody's walking through the world just wanting to persuade other people to agree with them, when in fact I think we pursue a lot of goals like having fun, filling time, just being together, showing love to somebody else, teaching our children valuable things that are not about persuasion at all. But they are about levity, kindness, being together. Feeling the sort of full heaviness of our humanity together. So to answer— so I'm dodging your question a bit. I do think the TALK acronym captures the almost full landscape of conversation. Now, there are other chapters in the book, right? So there is a chapter about group conversation where, like, how do we take these maxims and use them when things get even more complicated? There's a chapter on difficult moments. So how can we possibly remain kind and asking great questions or not asking questions that are too intrusive when we're really disagreeing or confronting difficult moments. And then the final chapter is about apologies. There are also 2 chapters that I dropped from the book at the last moment that I would be happy to share with you. Do you want to hear about them?

Yeah, please.

OK, relevant. Yeah, a little insider secrets. One of them was about silence. And so I think there could be an argument made that When you're working with an acronym called TALK, it a little bit implies that talking more is always better, which is obviously not the case. So much of the social world lives in our silences with each other, in our pauses, in the time we spend with other people not talking, in shared glances and other things that we do with people we're in really meaningful relationships with where we don't need to say anything at all. So the communication that sort of happens between the lines, I think, is really, really important. I dropped it because I think it's a whole separate book, you guys. So stay tuned. The other chapter that I dropped at the last second was about talking in the digital age. And I think that will maybe not be surprising to people here. Technology is evolving so quickly and in such exciting ways that I felt like any chapter that I wrote in this book would be outdated in like a week. In fact, while this book took 5 years to write, so while I was working on it, ChatGPT came along. AI became a thing. It's— so I just felt like, okay, I really want this book to be timeless. But I have so many thoughts about how to apply the talk maxims, not just face-to-face, but using digital tools, how our devices are affecting us, what AI is going to do, what we've learned through this science of conversation with humans and how we can use that as inputs into I think this is a great survey of some of your work.

And obviously, we're just scratching the surface. I would really encourage folks to read the book through. But something that I find useful to do sometimes is to test the limits of a concept, right?

Love it.

And I know no better way to do that than would you rather questions. You're familiar with the concept?

Do you have to keep it PG-13?

Oh, my questions are PG-13.

It's up to you how you want to answer.

All right, so I'm going to pose 2 people to you, and you're going to tell me who you would rather talk to.

In academia, we call this conjoint analysis, by the way.

Conjoint analysis.

I think that's the same thing. We'll find out. We'll find out. Yes.

All right. Someone who makes uncomfortable eye contact or is looking at their phone while talking to you.

I prefer uncomfortable eye contact.

We can make that happen.

In fact, in my class, I— so much so that I have my students sit across from each other and look straight into each other's eyes for 4 minutes. Exactly. Someone's slapping their hands over their face like, no. It's horrifying to them. If you try it, which I urge you to do with a loved one or a friend, Even a stranger, maybe. It's an incredibly intimate experience. Weird, but you kind of go through moments of, like, laughing because it's so weird and awkward, and then often my students, like, cry by the end. It feels like this really connective thing with another human being. There's a really beautiful YouTube clip, actually, where they bring people together who don't speak the same language and make them have 4 minutes of sustained eye contact, and by the end, many of them are crying. Many of them are, like, refugees, and they feel really loved and connected. Anyway.

So eye contact.

Eye contact.

All right, next one. Someone with lots of interesting stories but rarely asks you questions, or someone who asks a lot of questions but rarely shares anything about themselves?

Questions. Every time. I don't like storytellers. Other people do. That's just me as a person, not me as a scientist. And if you are a storyteller and like sharing stories, I think it's really important to be attuned to how people are reacting to you. If people are interested and excited about what they're hearing, they tend to use back-channel feedback. So like literally sort of interrupting with like, oh no, oh my gosh, no, huh, what? So they're sort of like cheering you on. In the absence of that from your listener, you can almost assume that they're not interested.

Mm-hmm.

And it's more often the case that people are pretending, listening politely to long stories. Especially if they're not personally relevant, than being actually excited about hearing them.

Makes sense. Makes sense. All right, third one. Someone who is direct but may offend you with what they say, or someone who is respectful and sensitive but it's hard to know what they're thinking?

Oh, I love all of those people. I think I prefer people who are respectful and hard to read. And I would take it on as a personal project to connect with them personally. to really figure them out privately.

Mm-hmm.

I love a challenge. I love people who are hard to sort of crack into. And I love asking questions and sort of making people feel safe in answering them. I think the other flavor, people who are very, very direct and have the potential of hurting, there is this often a very common trade-off of Directness and cruelty. I think often people lean too far in the direction of directness at the cost of harm.

Yeah. I feel like that's what I've heard is a pretty common misinterpretation of radical candor, where it's just like an excuse to be mean.

Yes. Yes. I actually talked about this with the— there's like this podcast born out of radical candor. And we talked about this very thing. It's like they worry that people interpret radical candor as To quote Taylor Swift, being cruel for the sake of being honest is not what radical candor means.

Right.

Yeah.

All right, last one. And we'll make this one an audience question. So you guys can answer first, and hopefully it doesn't influence your answer. So person A is someone who you find hilarious, or someone who isn't that funny but laughs at all your jokes. OK. All right. Who likes person A? All right. Person B?

Wow.

OK. I don't know if I believe all of you. How about for you?

I raised my hand for the second one. But I love them both so much. We need them all. I talk about this in the levity chapter and so much with my students. I'm very good friends with 2 scholars at Stanford named Naomi Bagdonas and Jennifer Acker. They have a book, if you haven't read it, it's called Humor, And in it, they present these 4 humor styles that vary on 2 dimensions: highly expressive versus subtle, and then sort of affiliative versus aggressive. And their argument is wherever you are, if you're very expressive or very subtle, very affiliative or very aggressive, all 4 of those humor styles are valuable. And we should all be trying to create moments of levity when we can, when it feels appropriate. But also, we should be trying to appreciate when other people are attempting levity because it takes a lot of courage and sort of competence to actually pull it off. And it's in service— sometimes I think humor and levity can feel sort of superfluous, like it's this extra thing that we're doing on top of the real work of conversation or the real work of work. When you actually study humor and levity, you realize that it is this conversational thing that is in service of all of the important goals that we're working towards. Like it is this spirit of play That is a very important antecedent to creativity and safety and making decisions and trusting each other and all the good things that we need in the recipe for success for very serious goals. So even though it seems unserious, it's very important.

I just realized if you couldn't see it on camera, 90% of the room took the hilarious person. But on the topic of levity, I wanted to shift us a little bit to making this practical, applying some of these findings. And I was curious, like, you know, in like a workplace corporate setting, sometimes it can feel fairly sanitized.

Yes.

So do you have any suggestions on how to bring levity into that sort of setting?

I'm tempted for us to stand up and just do some like weird improv exercises together. I feel like that would be too excluding our digital friends if people are going to watch this later. There are so many things that you can do to lighten the mood and Anything, any move doesn't even have to be funny. So for those of you who are like, I'm not funny, I'll never be funny, it's cool. You can still take advantage of levity because you can do things that are completely unfunny, like changing the topic. You've been changing topics raucously during this conversation, and I love it. It makes it so fun and engaging and interesting. We have lots of examples of other conversations that are the opposite of that. You stagnate way too long on a topic, and all of the good juice was like in the first 30 seconds. That's a real problem because you need to be engaged in order to make progress together and continue to feel engaged. OK. So levity moves, just changing the topic a little bit more frequently. Warmth moves, like giving compliments and telling people that when you feel grateful to people, actually say it out loud.

Mm-hmm.

Like, I'm so grateful that you prepped and that you are willing to interview me here today. That's so amazing. I'm so grateful that everyone took time out of their day to come and share this space together. That's so incredible. And I don't think we hear people say those things like really authentically and sincerely enough. That's a levity move. And then of course, like lots of humor. So there's all kinds of— I'm not convinced that we know how to teach people to be funnier of all sort of talk things. But you can try some of the moves that we see funny people making. Usually it's a mindset. I think we have this belief that you should try and be funny. That usually leads you to like tell stories people aren't actually interested in. Sometimes it leads you to make jokes that are a little too aggressive. So instead of trying to be funny, the better advice or mindset is to try to make it fun.

Mm-hmm.

Like find the fun. Focusing on the other people. Like what would be fun about this for Brandon? Like what if— I should have brought like tennis rackets and we could have like hit tennis balls back and forth to each other. What would make it fun for you guys? Oh, probably standing up and doing like a weird thing would make it fun and memorable. A little bit weird, but memorable. So that goal of finding the fun rather than being funny.

Yeah. And I think it's really powerful when a leader models that as a cultural thing.

Totally. And it's in these little fleeting moments on the edges of our conversations, but those little micro-moments are quite meaningful.

Last couple from me, and then we'll have some time for audience questions. But another kind of maybe application to our setting is help us to make our design reviews better. So we have this thing called design reviews where It's very common where we have either a document that people comment on offline, or we'll meet in a group setting and discuss it. And with the nature of this sort of thing, sometimes there's disagreements, right? Because— and we want to encourage that because that's how you can challenge ideas and make sure that they're the right ones, right? But there's better and worse ways, I'm sure, to approach that, and there's higher and lower status people in the room. So I was curious if you can Give us some advice for people in both of those positions for how to navigate that situation.

Yeah. Disagreement is difficult to navigate no matter who you are. One sort of top-line piece of advice is making sure you don't omit the first part of the sentence, which is like, I can see why you've come to think that's a good idea. Or like, that's— like, I would love to hear more about what you're thinking on this. Or like, oh, I can see why you're getting excited about this. Right? The affirmation, validating their feelings and like, the work that they're doing first before you go on to actually say, like, but I don't think it's a good one. Like, I don't think that's what we should pursue. Our instincts instead lead us to just go to the, like, no place. But that first bit of validation is incredibly important to maintain trust and to show someone, like, even if I'm going to go on and vehemently disagree with you, I still care about you and believe in you as a person. I got your back, right? Like, it's okay. It's just this thing. So that validation piece is important. Then you bring— but you bring in these status dynamics, right?

Yeah.

Status is this inherent sort of puppeteer in all of our interactions, particularly in the workplace, because we actually have formal roles that sort of dictate our status hierarchy. We also have unspoken things like race, gender, age, competence, training, all of these variables that influence our subjective judgments of status. How much do I like and admire you? How much am I required to like and admire and respect you? That are at play, particularly in group conversations. What I would like to point out that I found surprising in this research and in this work is status hierarchies change. They're dynamic. And what I've learned is that they're dynamic at the topic level.

Mm-hmm.

So when you're talking about a certain topic, like the people in the room who have consensus around their expertise are probably higher status, but then the topic shifts and that status hierarchy can get rearranged. We move from— we're talking about conversation. Here I am all haughty-taughty like the expert. We start talking about tennis or emergency medicine. Boy, I better start asking more questions than sort of saying what I believe. And I think those sort of conversational dynamics should shift at the topic level. When you find yourself dynamically in a high-status position, just a bit of awareness can go a long way. Your goal there is to, yes, share your expertise when you think it has a value to add, but often our instincts lead us to be so blustery and fill so much airtime with our expertise that you don't leave space for other people. It's really important to always be thinking, how in this group can I also be making the low-status people in the hierarchy feel welcome so that when they do have a good idea and something to add, they actually say it? They feel comfortable saying it.

Yeah.

Then on the flip side of that, when you're at the low part of the status hierarchy, first of all, such a tough place to be. It is actually a much more limited position. When you say things, they're more likely to be judged negatively, as less valuable. You have this narrower range of things that you can say. If you don't say anything, you're not actually contributing to the group probably, and maybe people won't come to know what your expertise is. So it's this really tricky bind. Some of the talk strategies can be incredibly empowering. You don't need to actually have any expertise. To be an expert at conversation itself. So as a group conversation is unfolding, for example, if you know the goal of that meeting is to make a decision by the end and you've got all these blustery coworkers who are getting off topic, you can just say something like, hey, remember our goal here was to make this decision in the next 20 minutes. Just wanted to be a timekeeper. Just wanted to keep us on task. Those kinds of nudges are themselves valuable to the group. even if you don't have a substantive thing to add there.

And then the last one from me. So you've been teaching this class for like 7 years, it sounds like.

Yeah.

And I was curious what the reception to your book has been, because I'm sure you've heard from people who aren't represented in your class normally, right? So what's that been like?

Yeah. My class is very diverse. So it's a lot of international folks. Age range from like 27 to 40. So I do— I feel like I get a diverse range of humanity in my classes and a big sample. However, they're all Harvard students, right? Like they're all already sort of high achievers. It's why I was so excited to write this book was to reach a wider swath of people who won't be able to come to Harvard or to Google and learn these things. It has been so moving and meaningful to see it connecting with different audiences. I'll give some examples. I've really been excited to hear that lots of parents are co-reading the book with their teenagers. I think a lot of parents these days are very worried that their kids are not learning social skills in the way that their parents did and maybe not well in general. So that has been really fun to hear about, that it's like this meaningful life experience for families. Another audience that I hoped would get onto it and seems to be really excited about it is the autism community. So there are lots of sort of pockets of the autism community that are finding the book so intriguing and helpful, and the strategies are helping people both as individuals and in these groups. Also around the world, right? So most of the data that we have so far, because the science of conversation is relatively new, right? Aristotle— they were studying public speaking for centuries, but we were really only able to start studying real transcripts at large scale over the last 10 years. So the science is quite new. So that means that most of the samples are skewed towards US populations, just by— like, that's how US scholars work. It's harder to get international samples. So when people in India and Greece and Egypt start reading this book, it's so helpful to hear the things that I hoped would transcend culture and international boundaries— borders. actually do, like it's like these fundamental things about being human and about, yes, we are all choosing topics. Yes, we're all making these choices to ask questions or not. We're all making these little moves about levity. We're all trying to bring this mindset to focus and listen. That transcends location. And then it's fun to hear like on the edges, they're like, yeah, but we do backhanded compliments a little bit differently here. So these— where are the sort of cultural differences and differences in preference often around like directness? And how many questions is too many? Those sorts of things.

Well, thank you for all that, Alison. We're going to take some questions from the audience now. So we'll do a couple from the room. There's some mics to the sides. And then we'll do a couple Dory questions as well. And as just a little extra incentive to step up to the mic, we have a limited set of these workbooks to accompany the book. So you get first dibs on those if you ask a question. So have at it.

I should have called them playbooks.

Playbooks.

It's not worky work. It's like fun.

Start over there.

I'm a little short.

OK, let's see.

All right.

I wrote it down.

So first of all, thank you so much. This was amazing. You prepped a lot by writing the book. So it was like your confidence was there. And I feel like I know you. So I loved being a part of this. I really wanted to ask you. Which skill or tactic have you incorporated which has brought you either the most joy or you've seen the most impact in incorporating into your conversations over the past few years? Oh my gosh, what a great question. It's like choosing a favorite child. I find topic prep and asking follow-up questions and callbacks to be the most helpful. So callbacks are when you've listened really intently to somebody and you've engaged with them, and then the conversation goes somewhere else, you switch to a new topic, and then you try and like call back to the earlier thing, both to show that you were listening to your partner, but also it almost brings a laugh because it's like surprising and it feels so good to your partner. They're like, oh my God, she was really listening like 15 minutes ago to that when I was talking, telling her this random thing about my mom. It's what we call long-term listening. It's not just like smiling and nodding in the moment, but using verbal content to actually say it out loud that you heard your partner. I love callbacks because you can use them within one conversation. You can also use it across many conversations in a relationship. So I can call back to the conversation I had with Brandon before this session and say, oh yeah, remember when you told me that your wife was an emergency I just thought that was so amazing and she's so brave. Being able to do that is what it means to be in a relationship with someone, to actually have listened to them and actually be thinking about something they said and then call back to it. It's just magic. So topic prep, follow-up questions, and callbacks, 3 of my faves. Thank you.

Let's go to this side over here.

Seconding the thank you for coming here and talking to us. This was super informative. I wanted to get back to what you said about the signals that people are sending nonverbally or with just syllables on the— are they interested or not? And I feel like with 2020 moving all of us online for our— a lot of— for a lot of our conversations and the technology cutting out when someone else speaks, I think a lot of us have stopped giving those verbal cues because you don't want to basically steal the sound from the person who's actually giving the conversation or the information at this point. What are things that have developed since? Do you have data on that? And like, what should we look out for now? And has that impacted in-person conversations in addition to the online conversations?

Fabulous question. There's great research showing that yes, talking through tech does disrupt especially those prosodic cues. The little micro pauses, micro moments that are disrupted by the tiny delays in our connection are disruptive to conversation. Or for anyone who has done a webinar and talked into the impossibly silent void and feel horrible about yourself because you're not getting anybody's giggles or Little guffaws or sniffs or anything, it is soul-crushing. It's why in-person interaction cannot be perfectly simulated, because we get so much more information. So as a scientist, we think about 3 buckets. There's words. There are— there's nonverbal information, which on the receiving end is everything that comes in through your eyes. So it's not just the person's, like, body language, facial expression, hand gesticulation, but literally the whole physical environment around them. And then the acoustic properties. So like, what are we hearing? What does their voice sound like? Is there something whirring? Is there a screen whirring right behind them? Is the air conditioning on? You can think about different forms of media as being more and less rich across those 3 categories, right? So Zoom cuts off a lot of the nonverbals. We only get a square. It cuts off a lot of the acoustic properties because we can't hear the back channel, the yeah, mm-hmm, oh, mm. Sniff, sniff. And then there are lots of channels where we only get words, text, email. When we're on the phone, we only get acoustic. We don't get nonverbal. So you could chart all things across this. As creators of these digital worlds, there are things that we can do to try and simulate face-to-face interaction. That's why we love GIFs, Bitmojis, emojis. It's why we love voice memos, all of these things that, like, on the margin make our communication more rich and get us closer to that feeling of being actually in person actually do make us feel more connected. And I think we all just will continue to struggle a little bit on Zoom and Google Meet. Yeah. Yep.

I want to take one from the Dory. So along with many other Googlers, I'm neurodivergent and find my default communication approach can be different from others. For example, very direct, unaware a topic is taboo, don't fear difficult conversations. Any tips for embracing being ourselves when it comes to hardwiring versus successful communication?

Oh, what a great topic. I too am neurodivergent in some ways. So hi, friend. So even by asking this question, Tali, is this Tali? Even by asking this question shows an immense amount of self-awareness that you're thinking about. You're aware that communication matters and different styles land differently. And it seems like you're grappling with this idea of authenticity. Can I be— to what extent should I be trying to fit in with the norms of what I think will work versus what I actually want to say? It's a question that we all grapple with regardless of whether you're neurotypical, neurodivergent, or on what vector you're neurodivergent. Ultimately, what matters is what behaviors are— what are you choosing to do and how are you making other people feel and how is it making you feel? And so I guess my answer to this would just be continue to grapple with it. This is the stuff of life. This is the social world. Try and focus as much as you can on other people because our instinct is to focus on ourselves. If you can try and push yourself to focus on how your communication is landing with the people around you, that is very meaningful. If being direct is hurtful to people, you can't be that direct. If you're disagreeing, if you're going through the world disagreeing vehemently all the time and never validating people, that's going to cause problems in your life. But I think that this is sort of the whole point of the social world is trying to figure out how we can bring our best selves to each interaction.

So I think we just have time for one more, but I do want to say that Alison's going to stick around for a meet and greet. And so I think in that case maybe I will prioritize— oh, yeah, one of the other Dory questions. And then also if you want one of these playbooks—

Yeah, we've got to hand them out to these guys.

Yes, for sure. Come find me afterwards. But, um, so last question today. Conversations flow naturally when there is a mutual topic of interest. Can you share on how to navigate when there isn't necessarily common interest, or maybe sometimes conversations become one-sided because one person wants to talk more? These conversations can become monotonous very quickly.

Oh, I love this question. Okay, a conversation is almost always a search for, like, serendipity. You're constantly relentlessly searching To find mutual interest. Sometimes those topics are easier to find than others. This is also why a lot of people get stuck in a doom loop of small talk, right? It's not that the topic itself is the problem, it's that you stay too long on things that are not mutually interesting. So we need just a little nudge of more courage to switch to something else when it becomes clear, like, oh, this isn't working. You can also go in with this mindset of, like, I'm gonna push push this conversation forward, this flow, until we find a golden nugget, until we find a thing where we're like, yes, okay, this is great. Now let's unpack this whole meaty thing. I think people are a little bit too happy to sort of swirl, circle the drain and swirl in that place, often out of actually like sincere and virtuous reasons, right? Like we're too polite. We don't want to be aggressive. We don't want to be too intrusive. We don't want to switch topics for fear that it might offend the other person, but the risk of being bored and their disinterest is actually greater. It's a sort of silent killer of conversation, so it's an actually greater risk than just those individual tiny risks that you need to take to find a better place.

Well, that's all we got time for, but one more time for Dr. Alison Wood Brooks. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Brandon. You're amazing.