Why Conversations Go Wrong

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. One of the most famous comedy sketches of the 20th century is built on a simple misunderstanding.

We'll just pretend that we're organizing a baseball team here at the Retired Actors' Home, and I am the manager.

It's the routine from Abbott and Costello, Who's on First?

Well, let's see now. We have on our team, we have Who's on First, What's on Second, I Don't Know Who's on Third. That's what I want to find out, the guys' names.

Huh?

That's what I want to find out, the guys' names. I'm telling you, Who's on First, What's on Second, I Don't Know Who's on Third.

The duo first performed The Stooges wrote the sketch in the 1930s and continued to refine it over the next 2 decades. They rarely did it the same way twice.

You know the guys' names on the baseball team? Yes.

Well, go ahead. Who's on first?

Yes. I mean the guy's name.

Who? The guy playing first. Who?

The guy playing first base.

Who?

The guy at first base.

Who is on first?

Why are you asking me for?

I don't know.

Part of what makes the skit funny is that we are in on the joke. But what happens when the joke's on us? When real-life conversations go off the rails because of miscommunication or a misunderstanding, it's no laughing matter.

There are so many things that could misfire: the pace at which you speak, how you get to the point, the rhythms, the intonation patterns, humor. That is a minefield. How do you let people know that you're joking and that you're teasing?

This week on Hidden Brain, How the unthinking patterns in the way we express ourselves can cause unneeded pain and conflict, and how we can learn to talk and listen better. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, This is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Quick question. Do people come to you for answers at work? Maybe you're managing projects, training new hires, or just the one everyone relies on. That's leadership. Through UVA Darden's Part-Time MBA in Rosslyn, we help professionals like you turn real-world experience into recognized leadership credentials without stepping away from your career. Whether you work in healthcare, education, government, or business, This is how you take the next step. Learn more at darden.virginia.edu/ptmba. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. You say tomato, I say tomato. If you travel abroad, you instinctively know that the customs in other countries are different. People have different ways of saying hello and goodbye, different rules for conversations with friends. In recent decades, the linguist Deborah Tannen has discovered that many of us don't need to travel to exotic lands to experience the bewilderment and confusion of cross-cultural communication. We can experience those very same feelings when we talk to our own siblings, parents, partners, friends, and colleagues. She studies why this happens and how we can all have better conversations with the people in our lives. Deborah Tannen, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Such a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

You were born in Brooklyn, New York. Your parents were immigrants, one from Poland, one from Russia. They were both very alert to the ways people use language, but also alert to subtleties in human relationships. Can you tell me a little bit about the conversations you had at home and also the conversations you sometimes had About those conversations?

Yes. Both told stories about people and also how people— things people had said and how people use language. My father, in particular, was really attuned to subtleties of language. I remember one time he was telling me about an aunt that he had particularly liked. He said, now, there was this expression Chas v'chalila, which is something like heaven forbid. And he said, but she said chalila v'chas. And he said, I remember it because nobody else said it that way. So he had that attunement to subtleties of language. And my mother was very interested in relationships. She was an electrologist. It's removal of unwanted hair. And she would always be telling us about the stories her patients had told her that day. And so that combination of Attunement to language and to relationships kind of came together for me.

So years later, you grew up, you got married. Your husband was Greek, and you were living in Greece. You've written that your conversation styles were very different, especially when it came to being direct with one another. Can you give me an example or two of how this worked, Deborah?

Yes. I would ask him a question, John's having a party. Do you want to go? And he would say something like, okay. Now, to me, okay is not an answer. I want to go or I don't want to go. So, I would say, are you sure you want to go? And he would say, why don't you make up your mind? Now, where did that come from? And this is one that I actually went on and tested. And sure enough, the Greeks that I interviewed and gave them this example were most likely to say The wife wouldn't ask unless she wanted to go, and she wouldn't double-check unless she wasn't happy with the decision.

Deborah was intrigued by the many ways people understood and misunderstood each other. Eventually, she returned to the United States and began a PhD in linguistics. One Thanksgiving, she decided to do some research by recording a conversation with friends.

I wonder how our grandparents and parents felt about Thanksgiving.

2 were from California, one was from the UK. Deborah and 2 others were New Yorkers.

It was simply my best friend, his brother, his former wife, and 2 of his friends who were in town.

Remember where WINS used to be?

No.

They built a big huge skyscraper there.

No, where was that?

Right where Central Park West met Broadway.

Is that Columbus Circle?

Right on Columbus Circle. Here's Columbus Circle.

Now it's the Huntington Hartford Museum.

Huntington Hartford, right?

No, no, no.

And what I found, first of all, was that I could not study the conversational styles of each of the people who was there because it was difficult for the Californians to get the floor. He's a sociologist who's so brilliant.

You have to read him.

Which one?

A silence?

All of them. And I had to conclude that I was getting a chance to observe the conversational styles of the 3 New Yorkers, but not of the others, because they were not able to exercise their natural conversational styles. It's not that they never spoke, but they couldn't be part of the back and forth, give and take, because anytime Anyone talks to anyone, we need a sense of how long a pause we think is normal between turns. And the New Yorkers' sense of how long a pause was normal was shorter. And so while the Californians, and even more the British woman, while they were just waiting for a normal pause so that they could come in, one of the New Yorkers would get the sense, uh-oh, you know, they have nothing to say. We might as well fill this pause. What's to analyze?

There hasn't been one misunderstanding. We've all understood each other perfectly.

What do you mean by that?

I want to pause for a moment and just look at what you actually did as you were analyzing the conversation because once you had this recording in hand, it took you 2 and a half months to transcribe this 3-hour conversation. How much detail were you trying to capture?

I wanted to capture everything that I was aware of that I had perceived. So I made notes in the transcription whether a person said the or thee. But I had a stopwatch and measured the number of seconds between words when it was a perceptible pause. And I had it checked by the people who had been part of the conversation. They listened to it and checked it for me.

What I find really insightful and remarkable here is that it actually took that level of care and precision and detail for you to actually realize that there was something happening beneath the surface of the conversation, the way people said certain things. What was the insight that you took away, Deborah, about the ways in which conversational styles affected how conversations unfolded and how people perceived one another?

Well, one of the insights is that you have to look more deeply to see what the intentions were and how The way one person speaks is actually influenced by how another person speaks. Some people might have concluded the New Yorkers are interrupting because they're starting to talk when someone else is speaking. Well, sometimes we talk along as a way of showing enthusiasm. We're so interested, we don't wait for you to stop. We talk along. May I show you how it's with Rubinstein once?

Yeah, we did together.

That's right, we did together.

Wasn't it incredible?

Oh, it was like a good— Who's this?

Rubinstein's hand. We shook hands with Rubinstein. And he had his red stubby hands?

They were like—

Famous concert hands. They were like putty.

Really?

Completely soft and limp. If we do that with someone who thinks one voice goes at a time, if you begin speaking while I'm speaking, that means you're interrupting and I'll stop. Well, who created that interruption? It took 2 people, someone to start and someone to stop. Another aspect of the style of the New Yorkers, it isn't the job of a speaker to make sure that other people get the floor. You might say it's a sign of respect. You trust other people to get the floor if they want. And so if someone tried to bring up a topic and others were speaking and they didn't stop for them, They would try again. And if it still wasn't picked up, they would try again.

So should we do that? Should we start with the lady who was asked? I'm going to get a camera, right?

Okay.

Did you hear?

We have to say boy, girl, boy. Boy, girl, boy. Did you hear about the lady who was asked?

What?

Did you hear about the lady who was asked?

And there was one example where one of the New Yorkers— it wasn't me— tried 7 times before he got his turn to say what he wanted to say. The Californians wouldn't do that. If they tried to say something and it wasn't picked up, they gave up.

Did you notice things about your own conversational style in that recording? Because for the first time, probably, you were actually slowing down and listening to yourself speak.

Yes, yes, I did. In some cases, I was kind of embarrassed when I saw the effect of my ways of speaking. An example of that is what I ended up calling machine gun questions. So I was talking to my friend Carl. He's my best friend. But one of the guests was a friend of his who was visiting from Los Angeles. His name was Chuck. So I was trying to be friendly to Chuck and make him feel welcome here. So the truth is, I knew the answers to these questions because Carl had told me, but I was trying to be nice to Chuck and give him the floor. And the conversation went something like this. I said, you from LA? Do you live in LA?

Yes.

You visiting?

You visiting here?

Yes. What do you do there?

What do you do there?

I work at Disney.

You're a writer? Artist? Yeah, I write advertising copy. And it was one after another, and this high-pitched clipped syntax. And when I listened to the tape, I realized It was having the opposite effect of what I expected. He wasn't taking the floor and he wasn't talking. And I talked to him about it afterwards. I'm still in touch with all these people who were there. He was just caught off guard by the rapidity of my questions. So, but that's a permanent full-time thing you have?

So you eat? Yeah.

It seemed like he was being assaulted by machine gunfire. And instead of backing off, Did you go there for that purpose? And downshifting, I was putting on more and more of these questions. How'd you get that job?

My dad's worked here since 1937. Right. So the interesting thing there is that if you share a conversational style with someone, you essentially can play this game where, in other words, you can interrupt the flow of a conversation with sort of very quick machine gun exchanges, and neither party thinks of it as being obnoxious or rude. But if you don't share the same conversational styles, then the very same interruption can come across as being completely different. And clearly, over the Thanksgiving dinner, some of that was happening.

Absolutely. And by the way, these mutual negative impressions go both ways. It isn't only the ones who are talking along to show enthusiasm run the risk of being seen as rude, but people who sit there and don't do their part in the conversation, that also comes across as rude. And this is really a universal about human relations and about conversational style. If you talk to someone who shares a conversational style with you, you just talk in a way that to you makes sense. It makes sense to them. And it isn't only that they don't think you're rude. It's that they appreciate the way you are appreciating them. It is like a sign of, we get each other. This is a great conversation. A perfectly tuned conversation is a vision of sanity. A reassurance that you're a right sort of person and all's right with the world.

Deborah realized that underneath the conversations we think we're having, there are other conversations unfolding beneath the surface. Lots of us are not aware of these hidden conversations.

These things are so automatic that when things start to go wrong, we don't look at that level. You don't walk away saying, you know, that was kind of awkward because I think you expect a millisecond shorter pause than I do. You walk away saying the kind of person you are.

You're right.

You didn't want to give me a chance to talk, or you only want to hear yourself talk, or the other side, Why is the conversation with you like pulling teeth?

You write at one point, what makes misunderstandings resulting from conversational style differences so hard to clear up is that we don't have a way of talking about them. We don't think of saying, when my voice has that quality, it means I'm being friendly. Such cues are sent and perceived automatically. And I might add, they're probably sent and perceived unconsciously. If you and I are not using the same codebook about what a pause means, what a certain tone means, We might constantly misunderstand one another, even though both of us have the best of intentions.

Yes. And astonishingly, I mean, this even happens among people who are married to each other or live together or know each other very well. So here's another example of lifelong friends. I think at this point, they're in their 80s, and they've been friends since they were teens. They were walking along around a lake, and one was telling about something that she was concerned about. And then there's a duck coming along the lake with her little ducklings behind her. And the one who notices it said, oh, look at that duck. Isn't that charming? And her friend said, you're not listening to me. And she said, of course I'm listening to you. Why would you think I'm not listening to you? Well, why are you talking about the ducks?

When we come back, how these misunderstandings produce deep wounds in relationships and keep people from the happiness that is actually within their reach. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Quick question. Do people come to you for answers at work? Maybe you're managing projects, training new hires, or just the one everyone relies on. That's leadership. Through UVA Darden's Part-Time MBA in Rosslyn, we help professionals like you turn real-world experience into recognized leadership credentials without stepping away from your career. Whether you work in healthcare, education, government, or business, this is how you take the next step.

Learn more at darden.virginia.edu/ptmba.

Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive Save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Deborah Tannen is a linguist at Georgetown University. She's the author of more than a dozen books about how people talk to one another and the ways in which misunderstandings arise in conversations. Early in her career, she discovered that many of these misunderstandings were unintentional. I think you're saying something you're not saying because without being aware of it, we have different styles of conversation or different psychological orientations. Deborah, lots of academics get their work presented at conferences. Some of them write books. So you've done those things, but you've also had a TV show inspired by your ideas. For our younger or overseas listeners who are not familiar with the show, can you tell us the premise of Home Improvement?

Yes. Home Improvement was It's a situation comedy. A man who's kind of a handyman type, and he's got a relationship with his wife. And then whenever they have arguments, which they have often, the premise of the individual segments is some argument they have, he would go out in the backyard and talk over the fence to his neighbor. And the neighbor would shed light on these arguments. And it was actually told to me by the people who—

Oh, really?

produced and created this show, the neighbor's advice came out of my books.

Tim, Tim, Tim, the first step for greatness is humbling yourself.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Maybe you shouldn't try to have all the answers and instead ask more questions.

You see, Tim, a truly wise man always has more questions than answers.

Deborah, I want to play you another clip from Home Improvement. Jill, who's the wife, has prepared a surprise romantic dinner. She gets on the phone and asks Tim to come home. He says he'll be back in 15 minutes, but he ends up staying the whole evening at a bar with his friends. Here's what happens when he comes home.

Honey, I'm really sorry, but the guys and I got in some real serious discussions about, um, relationship things, you know, men-women stuff, sharing feelings.

Pretty heavy stuff.

I spent 2 days planning this evening. Do you have any idea how long it's been since we had a quiet, romantic evening together? I was on the phone.

Why don't you say come home?

I wanted to surprise you. Good night.

Come on, Jill.

I don't go out with these guys every night.

What's making you so angry?

I am angry because you said you were going to be home in 15 minutes and then you weren't.

Because I'm flirting with you like crazy on the phone, you didn't even notice.

And most of all, Because I went to all this trouble for nothing. I spent the whole evening by myself, and now you're stuck with a plate of cold food. Oh, don't worry about me.

I ate at the bar.

So unpack what just happened here, Deborah.

I think the trouble could be traced to the conversation where she feels that she communicated in her way of speaking to him that she was flirting, that she was trying to set up a romantic atmosphere. And then didn't tell him directly, come home, I have a surprise for you, or, it's really important you come home tonight. He said he'll be home in 15 minutes. Fine. She took him at his word.

He—

and this is such a common cultural difference between women and men, if you think of women's and men's ways of speaking as cultural differences. He expected that his wife would just tell him directly. And so his antennae were not rolled out. for picking up those hints. And he feels falsely accused. You didn't tell me there was a special reason for me to come home, so how could I know? What do you expect me to be, a mind reader?

And we talked about this earlier as well, sort of the difference between people who prefer their speech to be direct and people who prefer to use more indirect speech. You have something called the birthday present routine that illustrates this idea. What is it?

People who tend to be direct don't understand why anyone would be indirect. But sometimes they can understand it if you think of the birthday present routine. You want the person you love and who loves you to give you a birthday present that you would want because it's a sign that they care, that they are willing to take the trouble to figure out what to get you. that they know you well enough to pick the right thing. Now, you could say, well, why don't you just tell them what you want? That would guarantee that you get what you want. You might get what you want, but you don't get all those other things that you want. Evidence that they care, evidence that they know you well enough to know what you would want. And so that is how indirectness works in other contexts as well. And I think it's so important to point out, first of all, it's not always women and men. And there are, in the conversations with my husband, I was the one who was more likely to be direct. He was the one more likely to be indirect. So there's a lot of cultural differences, regional differences, ethnic differences, all kinds of other influences.

Yep.

The way we say what we mean seems so obviously the way to do it that you really have to learn to step back and say, could this person that I love be using a different style? We think that because we Speak the same language, and we think because we love each other or we like each other or we're relatives, we should understand each other.

When misunderstandings arise in close relationships as a result of these underlying differences in communication styles, it can sometimes send a big message to both parties: this relationship isn't working. Deborah mentions a real-life example she heard of a couple driving in a car.

And she had said to him, are you thirsty, dear? Would you like to stop for a drink? And he wasn't, so he said no. And then later it turned out that she was annoyed because she had wanted to stop. And his feeling, kind of like the Home Improvement example, was, why didn't she tell me? Why does she play games with me? Why do I have to be a mind reader? And I said, you know, I suspect that when your wife said, are you thirsty? Would you like to stop for a drink? She probably was not expecting a yes/no answer. She probably expected something like, I don't know. How do you feel about it?

Yeah.

And then she could say, I don't know. How do you feel about it? She was communicating that she didn't want to make a demand. She wanted to know how it would be with him. Now, why would she think she has to do that? And why would he not think so? My guess is that his style says you can just throw out an idea. If I don't like it, I'll tell you. So, you start specific and you work your way out. Other people, and she seems to be one who does it this way, you start vague and work your way in.

You cite the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who talks about something called the message and the metamessage. Can you explain those terms to me?

Yes. The message is the meaning of the words. The metamessage is what it says about the relationship that you say these words in this way, in this context. Often we end up arguing about the message when it's the metamessage that upset us. I was walking with a colleague of mine, a woman, on college campus, and one of our older male colleagues crossed our path. And it was one of these brisk fall days in the Northeast. And she said to him, hi, where's your coat? And he said, thanks, Mom. And then as he walked away, she kind of said, what was that about? What was the metamessage of her asking, where's your coat? For her, it was a metamessage of friendliness. And if you say something about a person's welfare, You know, that shows another level of caring about them. He responded to the metamessage that this is a way a mother talks to a child, or a person in a position of authority talks to a subordinate. It points up another dynamic that often comes up with women and men, though again, can come up between any 2 people. Anytime we talk to each other, we have to balance both who's up, who's down, And are we closer or distant? And often women will walk away from a conversation asking, did this bring us closer or push us farther apart? Where men are more likely to respond to the question, did this put one of us in a one-up or a one-down position? And there's so many examples of that. A woman who was hurt that her husband called up and said, I have a friend, my high school friend is in town. I'm going to have dinner with him tonight. Oh, my God. And she said, gee, maybe I had some plans tonight. Why don't you ask how that's going to affect my plans? And he said, I can't tell my friend. I need to ask my wife for permission. Now, is checking with your wife, your spouse, the person you live with, is this about permission? Who's up? Who's down? Or is it about connection? What we do affects each other, and so we negotiate things like that.

So you write that the seeds of women's and men's style are sown in the ways they learn to use language while growing up and that we grow up in different worlds even when we grow up in the same household. What do you mean by that?

Boys and girls tend to play in sex-separate groups. The ways that they socialize, the way little girls and little boys use language and play tends to be different. Now, this is research by psychologists, anthropologists that have studied kids at play. And they have observed that girls tend to play in smaller groups, often one-on-one. Their social life often focuses on a best friend. They spend a lot of time sitting and talking. Often it's telling secrets. I collect pictures from, again, all over the world. 2 little girls, one is whispering in the other's ear. I have encountered a few pictures of boys doing that, but not many. Boys tend to play in larger groups, and it's the activity that's central. Your best friend is the one you do everything with. Marjorie Harnick-Goodwin is an anthropologist at UCLA who has observed this, that boys will often tell the other boys what to do, and that gives them status in the group. The one who tells the others what to do and they listen, he's the leader. If girls tell other girls what to do, She's bossy and they don't want to play with her. All of this, of course, has great implications for when you're adults, especially in the world of work.

The larger thing that I'm taking away from this is that all of us grow up in certain specific cultural worlds and we're often— those worlds are like the water we swim in if we're fish. I mean, they're worlds we don't even notice. We sort of assume that the entire world must be like the world in which we grew up and we sort of naively assume that others share our cultural backgrounds and cultural worldviews. And so much miscommunication happens because of that. You've talked, for example, about how when people get married, they imagine that their partners are going to be better versions of all of the best friends they've had throughout the rest of their lives. And, of course, that places significant burden on that new relationship.

Yes, yes. I often say that for girls and women, talk is the glue that holds a relationship together. And so they expect that when they— if they're heterosexual and they expect he's going to be a new and improved version of a best friend.

Mm-hmm.

He's going to tell me everything. And then you get to the end of the day and he comes home and she tells him what happened and what she did and who she talked to and what they said and what that made her think and what that made her feel. And then, how was your day? Same old rat race. Really? Didn't anything happen?

Nope.

And then they go out to dinner and they're having dinner with a number of other couples. And suddenly he's regaling the dinner party with something that happened during the day. And she feels hurt. You know, what am I, chopped liver? Why didn't you tell me this? And it seems to really be a different sense of the place of talk in a relationship. So for many guys, and I always feel uncomfortable saying women, men, when nothing is true of all women and men. We have so many other influences on our style. But often, men feel like just being together is what matters. So we can be not talking to each other, and yet we're together, and that's great. So it's a kind of public speaking and private speaking. From his point of view, when he's out with a group, he has to do his part, you know, make sure he gets the attention and the respect that he deserves. And it's a kind of display. And here's when talk— It's a kind of display. comes into its own. For many women, when you're out in public, you kind of have to be careful what you say. If you talk too much, people think you talk too much. You might say the wrong thing. You might offend somebody. Now you're home with someone you're close to. You feel comfortable. You're free to talk.

I'm wondering, as you go through life, I mean, obviously, you notice these things happening with other people. Do you notice this happening in your own life, Deborah? Do you notice moments where you basically stop and say, uh-oh, I understand I missed the metamessage Well, I'll tell you one thing that comes to mind.

This is before I was married, so it was a fellow I was dating at the time, and we were having an argument. The phone rang. Somebody called and said, turn on the television. You're on the television right now. So, we interrupted our argument, put on the television, and there I was being interviewed about conversational style.

What did you find out about conversation?

After listening to all this. And I was holding forth on something that was quite similar to what we were arguing about.

So what's the answer in 10 seconds or less?

Understand that there are conversational style differences, and sometimes the adversarial approach is not going to be the best one.

And did he turn to you and say, Deborah Tannen, could you listen to Deborah Tannen?

We just both laughed. It was so funny.

Much of the time, misunderstandings don't end in laughter. They don't even end in outbursts of anger. Especially when it comes to friends or colleagues, we are hesitant to bring up misunderstandings. We let them go, or we say we let them go, but they fester. Deborah recalls an incident like this. After she remarried, she and her husband had 2 friends over for dinner one night.

A friend had come over and another friend of my husband's was there as well. And my friend, her name was Tamara. Tamara kept offering to help. So when we were serving appetizers, she would help out by kind of offering people appetizers. And when it came to cleaning up, she was helping. To clean up. And I kept telling her, no, you're the guest, you know, you stay here. But she kept doing it anyway. And at one point I was so frustrated I actually grabbed her by the arm and plopped her down. But she was up and trying to help wash the dishes. And I was so put off by it that I actually found myself thinking, I'm not sure I want to invite her again. And I thought, wait a minute, this is a good friend. I'm very fond of her. We can talk about it. And so we did. And she got this look of astonishment on her face. And then, oh my God, she said, you know, I do that because that's how my mother does it. And that's how I've learned to do it. And she said, it just happened last night. My mother prepared dinner. I got up and I kept helping. And she said, don't do that. Don't do that. You're the guest. Stay seated. And I cleared the table, and I washed the dishes, and I cleaned up. And when I was done, my mother said, thank you so much for doing that. And it was a revelation to both of us. There are many people for whom the assumption is, I'm going to offer to help. You're going to tell me you don't want me to, but you really do want me to. And in fact, there was another friend. We were both guests somewhere. And she did that. And I said, could you do me a favor? Ask the host the next day how she felt about that. And she said the host thanked her profusely. She said, I was so tired. There was no way I could have washed all those dishes myself. I was so grateful. And I heard her saying, no, no, no, don't do it.

Yeah.

And the tricky thing there, Debra, is if you had asked that host, Should I have helped? She may well have told you, no, you don't have to help, because she would have felt obliged to say that when, in fact, she did. I mean, so this is what makes it so tricky that sometimes even doing the transparent thing of just asking the person, tell me what your conversational style is, even that does not elicit people's real conversational styles.

You are so right. I was a guest at that dinner, and I took the host at her word. When she said she didn't want help, I didn't help. Because that's how I prefer it. When I say I don't want help, I mean it. And the term, again, this is from Gregory Bateson, metacommunicating. You talk about the communication. Metacommunicating often will work, but often it doesn't because people won't tell you. Think of a classic example of that. Someone suggests having lunch and you don't really want to. You don't say, are you kidding? I would never have lunch with you. You say, oh, you know, today's— I have a lot of work today. I don't think I'll do it. So they ask you again. And then you say, oh, you know, I kind of don't feel that well today. And so finally they say, are these excuses real or should I stop asking because you really don't want to have lunch with me? You're still not going to say, no, I never want to have lunch with you.

Yeah.

You're probably going to get even more indirect. Oh, no, no, I really mean it. You're right. It is extremely difficult unless You have the kind of relationship where you have agreed, we both know there is this thing called conversational style. We both know these are things that can be tricky. So let's agree that we're going to be as upfront about it as we can when asked.

The same misunderstandings in professional settings can result in managers feeling disrespected or ignored and employees feeling bullied or confused.

One of the managers I was studying told me, he said, you know, when I make a decision, I just announce it, and I assume that if people aren't happy with it, they'll tell me. Well, that's going to work for some people and not for others. So being aware of conversational style differences is something that applies in every conversation.

Yeah, and you can see in the workplace a manager who tells a subordinate, I'm wondering if you can do me a favor. Can you get me an update on that report? In one situation, the employee can sort of say, this person is not flaunting their power, even though they could just simply tell me to go and get the update on the report. They're actually opening a conversation that sort of makes me feel included. But somebody else could say, why is the boss talking like he's a pushover? Why can't he just simply tell me what he wants? And they're both perfectly legitimate ways of entering the conversation. But the ground rules need to be shared for the conversation to actually unfold successfully.

I think power can be expressed and created either way. I was once told by a career naval officer, when he heard me talk about indirectness, he said, that's how the military works. I said, what? He said when he was a midshipman just in training and one of the officers teaching a class Came to the class and he said, you know, it's cold in here. And everybody nodded. And he said, young men— it was men at the time— when I say something, I expect you to do something about it. So let's try that again. It's cold in here. And the officer who was telling me this story said, and we all jumped up and went to close the windows. And that was a lesson we had learned that served us extremely well in the military. It was because of the power That he had the privilege of being indirect.

What makes all of this even more difficult is that the interplay of conversational styles changes from person to person. Deborah, as a fast-talking New Yorker, learned she had to force herself not to jump in every time there was a pause in conversations she had with one colleague.

I had to learn to count to 7 before I thought he had nothing to say. His name was Ron Scullen. He was from the Midwest. He was married to Susie Scullen, who was Chinese from Hawaii. And when he talked to Susie, he was the one who kept interrupting. And she would say, you ask me a question and you don't give me time to answer. You're asking another one. He and Susie did research in Alaska among Athabascan Indians. Susie was constantly interrupting the Athabascans because their sense of pauses were longer than hers. So I like that example because it really drives home we're not talking about absolutes.

Yeah.

You talk fast, you talk slow. It's always relative.

When we come back, how to learn to code-switch across the chasms of cross-cultural communication. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Account's automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on. The versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt— these are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable All season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. We've seen how different conversational styles can produce unintended conflict and misunderstanding. Linguist Deborah Tannen's more recent work has focused on the landmines buried in conversations between siblings, between parents and children, and between political adversaries. In all these realms, she finds that much animosity and conflict could be reduced if we only stopped to do what her parents did during her childhood or what she did during her PhD dissertation. Step back from conversations and analyze them like a scientist. This is often very hard to do in real life because when people say things that upset us, we rarely stop to think. Deborah, after you started getting famous and went on TV all the time, your mom noticed something about your TV appearances. What was it?

My mother was very upset that I was wearing the same red jacket on all the TV shows. She just complained. Of course, my mother was the only one who watched every show that I was on. At that time, it was every city you went to, you did a show. And so I had the jacket I was wearing on my book tour. But then she would watch them all back to back, and it really upset her. My mother always felt that I paid insufficient attention to my clothes.

I have to mention one thing. Since your mom is not here to observe the conversation, I have to flag the fact that you are wearing a red jacket for this conversation today.

No, it's just a red turtleneck. But I do like to wear red. It's true.

And what was your reaction when your mom basically told you after you had finished this triumphant book tour, why are you wearing the same jacket all the time? What was your reaction, Deborah?

I was, of course, hurt that she was talking about what I was wearing. And not what I said. And I remember discussing this with the host on one of the national morning shows. She told me that her mother did that, that her mother would tell her after each morning what was wrong with what she was wearing or maybe what was wrong with her hair.

The kind of interaction Deborah had with her mother has long been a staple of television comedy. In Veep, Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays a politician and a mom. In one episode, her daughter reaches out with a heartfelt plea.

I have had a hard, lonely, miserable life, and the only thing that is going to make it worthwhile is if I become the daughter of the next president of the United States.

Okay, sweetie, thanks, and that jacket doesn't work. By the way, you look like a waiter.

Oh, goddamn it.

Deborah writes about what she calls the big 3 flashpoints in conflicts between mothers and daughters.

Hair, clothes, and weight. And the mother-daughter relationship, in some ways, is a perfect storm. From the point of view of the daughter, here's the person you most want to think you're perfect. You think she knows you so well, and if she thinks you're wanting, then you really must be fatally flawed. From the point of view of the mother, here's the person you most want to help to make sure everything goes as well as it could for her.

Mm-hmm.

And women are judged by appearance, hair and clothes and weight. So from the point of view of the mother, this is caring. I just want to make sure everything goes well for you. Nobody else will tell you because they don't love you as much as I do. They don't care as much as I do. But anytime you make a suggestion for improvement, you are implying criticism. And that's what the daughters hear. So in fact, my mother's critical is one of the biggest complaints I heard from adult daughters. And one of the biggest complaints I heard from mothers of adult One of the letters was, I can't open my mouth. She takes everything as criticism. And it's both. It's not who's right, who's wrong. It's that suggestions for improvement really are implied criticism and are also a sign of caring.

I understand that one time your mom asked you about your hair.

Yes.

Tell me about that.

I was visiting my mother and she said, do you like your hair that long? And I burst out laughing. And she asked why. And I said, well, you know, I'm writing this book about mothers and daughters. And so many daughters tell me their mothers are critical of their hair. And she said, I wasn't criticizing. So I let it drop. And then later in the visit, I said, so, Mom, what do you think of my hair? And she said, I think it's a little too long. Now, I always remember this one woman who said to me— she was in her 60s, and so her mother, you know, would have been in her 80s. And she said, my mother's losing her eyesight, but she can still spot a pimple across the room. Now, that was said in the spirit of, my mother's going to find my flaw. The one thing, the one flaw. Now, who, when they look at you, is going to see the pimple?

Right.

And mothers and daughters often look at each other as reflections of themselves and therefore with the same level of scrutiny to which they subject themselves.

And we touched on this earlier in our conversation. All of these categories are going to be influenced by class, by culture, by nationality in all kinds of interesting ways. There might be cultures where Moms are expressing their concerns in terms of how their daughters are not eating enough, not that they're eating too much. I mean, so a lot of this is culturally specific. It's not necessarily that all mothers and all daughters in all cultures behave exactly the same way.

Yeah. Well, the specifics may be different. And by the way, I have been told by some women, my mother never did that. My mother never criticized. So all these things are not everybody, not 100%, but the pattern It seemed to be pretty cross-cultural. So, for example, a woman from Oman told me that mothers there might say to their daughters, I can see hair, meaning your hijab isn't completely covering your hair.

Mm-hmm.

Or a woman told me— this is from Africa— she had a wedding she was going to go to. She showed her mother the dress she was planning to wear for the wedding. The mother made a comment that she didn't think it was appropriate. And so the daughter stayed up the whole night sewing a new dress for the wedding.

Wow.

Yeah. So the specifics may be different, but the mother being the guardian of the daughter's appearance, because women are judged by appearance.

As I read your work, Deborah, I was struck by how Naively, many of us enter conversations. We think conversations are like a walk in the park when really it's often potentially a walk across a minefield. The fact that we're naive about the challenges is actually one of the dangers. This is why we never expect it when things blow up in our faces.

Yes. This is partly why it's so satisfying when it goes well. There are so many things that could Misfire. The pace at which you speak, not just how long you wait between turns, but how quickly within turns, how you get to the point. Do you get right to the point or do you start kind of vague so that if you're talking to someone who doesn't work that way, they cut you off before you get to the point because they think you've had a chance?

Mm-hmm.

The rhythms, the music of speech, the intonation patterns, humor. That is a minefield. What can you tell jokes about? How do you let people know that you're joking and that you're teasing?

I'm wondering, Deborah, if one of the solutions that might be called for is in some ways for all of us to exercise both a little more empathy but also a little more compassion for one another. start with the assumption that misunderstandings are happening because of unintended signals. In other words, to extend to the other people in our lives, whether those are work colleagues or people in our personal lives, that if a misunderstanding has occurred, odds are it's probably happened because of a miscommunication, not because someone intended to hurt us.

That's a great way to look at it. I often say mine is a rhetoric of good intentions. And people sometimes object to my work. They say, well, what if people don't mean well? What if they really are out to get you? What if they really are hostile? And my response is, that's not news. People are always ready to see other people as having bad intentions and being up to no good. Or having bad personality characteristics. So the news that my work can provide is to step back and think, what if they don't have bad intentions but have different conversational style, different ways of trying to accomplish the positive things they're trying to accomplish? And what thinking about conversational style does is give you a way to Imagine different intentions.

Yeah. We had the actor and writer Alan Alda on Hidden Brain a couple of years ago, and he said something that was very insightful. It's possible, of course, that if we imagine that other people are not trying to harm us, we could be wrong. In fact, they might actually be out to get us, and we could be naive about it. But he said, the more empathy I have for other people, the less annoying I find that they are. So separate from the fact that Whatever people's real intentions might be, it might actually just be better for us to show more empathy because we'll end up being less triggered by other people.

I love that perspective. Absolutely. If you frame everything as a fight, it's corrosive to the human spirit. Everyone feels less safe and more vulnerable. If you get in the habit of seeing good intentions, yeah, maybe you'll miss a few bad intentions and think better of A few people that don't deserve it, but the world will feel like a safer place whether you're right or not. But I think you'll be right more often than you realize.

Alan Alda told me that he tried to be empathetic to others even if he didn't feel like it. There's another way to put this. From time to time, he lied to himself. He wanted to feel one thing, but he told himself to feel something else. A listener named Daisy says she did the same thing for many years, except she took it to another level. It all started with a difficult relationship that Daisy had with her mother.

I was, um, given up to a foster home at a very young age. I was 12 years old. And although I had constant communication or a pseudo relationship with my mom, um, the relationship was never really healed. And throughout my life, as I became an adult, um, she inflicted a lot of pain and, um, made life very difficult for me. And so at a certain point, I found it just much easier to just tell people that she had passed away several years ago.

When many people asked about her, I would just say she passed away.

For Daisy, this was a self-protecting lie. It made it easier for her to compartmentalize her feelings about her mom. And it worked. She even told her partner that her mom had died. The lie worked perfectly. Until her mom actually died.

That is where I had to tell my significant other that my mom is alive, or was alive, and she was alive for the decade of our relationship, and that I didn't tell him that she was alive and I'd been living like she died, and we have to go now and salvage this situation. It was very stressful for him, and it did make a ridge in our relationship, um, for a little while, but I think eventually he's come around, though, but it is still a touchy situation. But we've been very distracted with the circumstances, the aftermath of her actual real passing.

When we come back, more stories about lying to keep the peace. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Onboard, enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Let's imagine a hypothetical scenario. Your friend has been working for 3 years on a novel. It's her lifelong dream, and she's sacrificed a lot for it— nights, weekends, relationships. She's even turned down a promotion at work to make time to write. She finally finishes a first draft and asks you to read it. You read it, and it's not good. The plot has serious structural problems The characters feel flat. Your friend looks at you with hopeful eyes and asks, what do you think? You love your friend. You hate the novel. What do you do? These kinds of scenarios play out in our lives every day. And it's not always clear whether the brutal truth is better than the gentle lie. At the University of Chicago, Emma Levine studies the psychology of deception. She joined us for 2 recent episodes of Hidden Brain titled When It's Okay to Lie, and on Hidden Brain Plus, Telling the Truth About Lies. Today, Emma returns to the show to respond to listener questions and comments about her work. Emma Levine, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

Thank you so much for having me.

So, Emma, we generally think of lying as deception, but you've studied a great many scenarios where, in fact, most people endorse deception. Paint me a picture of some of these scenarios.

There's a lot of times when people endorse deception, even if it does entail lying. I mean, even going back to that opening example you just talked about, people might think you should lie at least a little bit in that situation. I don't necessarily think you should, but some people might say you should because it's prosocial, because it's helpful to other people.

Mm-hmm.

And what I focus on in particular is not just whether it's a little bit helpful or whether it spares someone's feelings, but whether it spares someone's feelings when the truth could not cause any improvement or have any long-term benefit. And that is the specific situation in which people tend to endorse deception the most.

You mentioned a second ago that this was prosocial lying. Unpack that term for me, Emma.

Often we think about deception as antisocial, meaning that it harms other people. It's anti-social in that it is not good for the social wellbeing of others, our social fabric. Just means that it's good for others, it's well-intended. And so when lies are intended to help other people, we can think about them as prosocial, whether that's, you know, avoiding telling someone their book is problematic or poorly written, or giving a patient hope in a medical situation. These are different types of examples of prosocial lies.

Hmm, so one form of prosocial lying is when we are a role model to others and we are worried that telling the truth could send them down A bad path. Listener Mark has been a high school teacher for 31 years, and he says he regularly tells a lie to his students. Every year, I pretty much get asked the same question.

Did I ever do drugs when I was younger?

And every time I lie about it.

I smoked my fair share of pot when I was in my 20s, dropped acid a few times.

Not something I'm ashamed of.

You know, it is what it is.

But I do not want to tell adolescents that I did that. I feel bad about lying to them, but I think it's the right thing to do. I don't think they need adults telling them that, hey, I did it and, you know, had no negative consequences on me at this time in their life.

So I'm guessing Mark might approach a conversation about drugs differently when he's talking to a friend compared to when he's talking to his students, Emma. So when we're lying, Who the audience is makes a big difference, right?

Absolutely. This is a really interesting question from Mark, right? When it's your friend asking about your past history, it's an act of intimacy to tell the truth. It's being real, being authentic. The truth has a benefit in that it can help reveal similarities or shared understanding. But I see what he's saying when talking to students. students is that the truth seems harmful if the takeaway is that there was no cost to doing drugs and actually it was quite a bit of fun back then.

So we heard from several medical professionals who say that they regularly lie to vulnerable patients. Patricia is a family medicine physician. She had a patient living with dementia. He smoked a lot, which caused him to have emphysema and eczema. Patricia writes, when the time came that he had to move into memory care, we faced a dilemma because there could be no smoking there and he couldn't go outdoors and smoke. The family, the staff, and I let him know that he had, quote, decided to give up smoking. He didn't really remember that, but he went along with it, probably because he really didn't want to admit to us how bad his memory was. This worked like a charm, and he gave up smoking rather easily, and stopped asking within a month or two whether he could go out. We were able to get him off all of his medications for the emphysema and even the creams and lotions for his eczema, which cleared right up. So Emma, doctors are supposed to tell the truth, and they are also supposed to do no harm. What happens when these 2 imperatives are in conflict with one another?

This is a really longstanding and complex medical ethics question and one that I'm really interested in and have been engaged with in my research. And there aren't easy answers. You know, having worked with and talked to a lot of clinicians, I think this tension is on their minds constantly, and many do decide that sometimes it is better to hide the truth because telling the truth would cause unnecessary harm. Going back to this idea of, right, would the truth lead someone to a good decision, better understanding, even if it hurt their feelings.

Hmm.

And, you know, the example you shared and something that a lot of clinicians talk about is, right, when there's cognitive impairment like dementia, the ability for the truth to bring about full understanding or growth or change is more limited. And that sometimes, for better or for worse, gives people the perceived leeway to lean more towards do no harm, to lean more sometimes towards deception as well.

But in this case, couldn't a libertarian say, you are depriving this man of his desire to smoke, and yes, it might not be good for him to smoke, but you are being paternalistic by making the decision for him?

Absolutely. And I do think this particular instance is one of paternalism. In my own research, I do find that paternalistic lies tend to backfire, even if they're told with prosocial intentions, right? Because if you take away my ability to make a decision, if you assume, right, that the harm of smoking is worse for me than my own right to choose, I might resent that. It's a little bit more complicated in the situation of dementia because autonomy is already inhibited. So this isn't an endorsement of that lie, but I think it's common for people to think differently about it in this situation.

So Patricia's story makes me think about the placebo effect in medicine, Emma. So a medical practitioner gives patients sugar pills, but says they are real medications. Now, if patients actually feel better, if they actually get better, as some studies have shown, the lie is actually a central part of the medical care. What's the right thing to do in this situation?

Well, this is an interesting question too that goes back to kind of what we were talking about with autonomy. I think a priori, a lot of people would say that I wouldn't mind being given a placebo if psychologically it would help. And so something that's interesting to think about in these situations is, can we solicit these preferences and understand them in our close ones before the pivotal decision comes so that we are actually acting consistent with their wishes, their autonomy, even in that moment if it feels like we're not, right? So if you had a patient and you knew In the next clinical trial, we might not be able to give all patients the actual medicine, and some will be given a placebo. We won't be able to tell you which one you're in, but would you consent to that? Then I think that gives us reason to think it's okay to give a placebo.

Hmm. So a common theme in many of the stories that we've been talking about is that the person who is lying is not actually profiting from the lie. The person is lying in order to help the other person. You looked at this idea, the motive behind our lies change how people think about the lies, right?

Absolutely. Going back to the question of what is prosocial versus antisocial, prosocial lies tend to be seen as more ethical and can even increase trust and reliance in other people and preferences for relationships, whereas antisocial lies almost always harm trust and are seen as unethical, right? So if I'm gonna harm you or I seem selfish, selfish lies are often antisocial. If I help myself and harm you, the quintessential cheating, stealing, lying to cover my own transgressions, those are all, you know, very bad for moral judgment and interpersonal judgment like trust. But the lies we tell to help others are seen very differently. It's complicated. Some of those are also resented like paternalistic lies, but some of them, are seen as quite ethical.

Hmm. What I find interesting is that the norm of truth-telling is so powerful that when we lie to be kind to another person, we can often still feel like we have done something shameful. Our listener Craig's mother was in declining health, and so after she had surgery and had to go to a rehab facility, he and his wife moved her out of her apartment. Once she was done with rehab, she went to a long-term care facility. Only they didn't tell her that this was now her permanent home. This was not fun to do. It didn't feel great at all. But my wife and I packed up all of her stuff, ended her lease without my mom knowing. Now, she was meticulous about her things, loved her artwork and her flatware and her furniture and so on. And we disassembled it, put everything in boxes and into storage. And the avoidance and omission was we didn't say, hey, news bulletin, Mom, just in full transparency, So, you know, we packed up all your stuff. You can't go back to your apartment. We let that not be known. I know it was the right thing. It's what she needed. It was the right thing for her. And somehow we're lucky enough that she actually was thriving a bit, came back alive at the last part of her life. The last few months, she started wearing colorful clothing, playing bingo, which she never did, playing cards, birdwatching, and so on. And we're super grateful for that. Yeah, the right thing, the right thing to do was to lie. Emma, have you found in your studies that, like Craig, people can tell prosocial lies but then feel somewhat guilty about it?

Absolutely. And Craig's example is a complicated one because it turned out well, but it's not obvious it would have, which is probably what contributes to some of the guilt. But I think what else contributes to the guilt is is the norm of truth-telling. And we learn very young you should always tell the truth. We say out loud honesty is always the best policy, and we do carry around these implicit exceptions. That is what my research unearths, but we rarely can say it out loud. We rarely explain it clearly to kids. And so all we have in the front of our minds is that the truth is the gold standard. And when We break it, we feel guilty.

Hmm.

So we've talked about people lying to protect others. I want to talk a moment about people lying to protect themselves. Joanna from New Zealand writes, I used to believe that lies were always to be avoided until I was doing chemotherapy. Then I learned that sometimes I just did not have the energy to argue my case, and I did not want to deal with other people's reactions. And it was easier to just say what they wanted to hear and then do what I wanted. Mainly, I used lies to fend off a relative who likes to roll in the negativity of life. I did not need the poor victim floods of emotion drowning me, so far easier to placate her with lies. I don't kid myself that it was anything to do with her vulnerability. It was completely about mine. So Emma, I'm wondering what you make of Joanna's actions here. She was not being prosocial in the sense that she was not lying to protect another person, but she was lying to protect her own well-being. What do you make of her choice?

I think this type of lie is common, and many people would also think it's more ethical and acceptable than lies that are self-serving, again, in the antisocial way. Joanna's lie isn't harming another person. It is protecting herself. And in particular, it's really about privacy, which is a different type of lie.

Mm-hmm.

It pertains to whether and who whether anyone and who is entitled to my information. I get to make that decision. My loved ones aren't entitled to my pain unless I make them, you know, entitled to that intimacy. So those types of lies, they can reduce intimacy, they can reduce trust and closeness. But a vulnerable person has the right to make that decision and that trade-off for themselves.

When we come back, the gray areas where it's hard to tell truth from lies. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Stripe. Stripe is built for whatever comes next because scaling your business model isn't a set-it-and-forget-it thing. You want to test, iterate, and launch new pricing plans constantly. With Stripe Billing, you can easily experiment with new subscriptions and launch new usage-based and hybrid pricing models so your revenue model can change as fast as your product and market fit evolve. Reach new customers, expand globally, and keep revenue operations ready for whatever comes next. Stripe Billing powers any business model. It's built to support you no matter how much you scale, with a network powering more than 1.6% of global GDP and the partner of choice for 86% of Forbes AI50 companies that have monetized to date. Learn how you can power any business model at stripe.com/billing.

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Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Tell the truth. It might be one of the first lessons we learn as children. But as we get older, we notice that our parents and caregivers don't always practice what they preach. They tell us to say thank you for a Christmas present we detest. They say to be nice to people when we don't feel like it. And we notice that when they are with their friends, they don't always say the same things that they say in private. At the University of Chicago, Emma Levine studies the human propensity to lie. Emma, does research give us any sense on how much people lie?

Sure. There are some great studies done by Timothy Levine, not related to me, and others that look at this question. And, you know, they find that actually some people lie very, very often, but most people don't lie that much at all. So historically, we've kind of had the number in our head that people lie, let's say, in 1 in every 5 interactions, so 20% of the time. But that actually comes from a distribution where there are a few prolific liars and then a lot of people who don't actually lie very much at all.

I understand that when you tell people these statistics, you know, some people might say, you know, I never tell a lie, I'm always honest. And you and other researchers have challenged people to try and go 24 hours without actually telling a lie and to pay very close attention to whether they're lying. Tell me about this work and what it finds.

Sure. Well, in some of my own studies, what we had people do is take 3 days and spend 3 days being completely truthful in every conversation they had, in every interaction with every person in their life. And it was hard. It was harder certainly than, you know, the control condition where we just had people be conscious of their communication. We also had a kindness condition in which people were focused on kindness, which often does enable lies. But more than finding, you know, a reduced lying per se, what we find, this is work from me and Taya Cohen at Carnegie Mellon, We find that people find this experience of full honesty surprisingly enjoyable and more socially connecting than they expect.

Hmm.

I want to talk a moment about lies of omission rather than lies of commission. Here's listener John. In my experience, another unspoken social understanding exists around what we define as lies or dishonesty. Specifically around the idea of lies of omission. Using your example of seeing a friend's ugly baby, you discussed the 2 options of telling the lie that you think the baby is beautiful or telling the truth about how you feel. But there is at least one other option, which is to say nothing at all. Some might consider that dishonest or avoidance, but some might consider it tactful or just the normal understanding that we don't need to say everything we think. I'm curious if your researcher has any thoughts or evidence about how people define honesty, especially in the context of not saying something untruthful, but of choosing not to say something truthful. What do you think, Emma? I'm guessing if we count lies of omission the same as lies of commission, your stats on how often people lie would probably shoot through the roof.

Absolutely. Certainly people avoid sharing information and just avoid conversations, avoid people all the time, and they don't necessarily construe that as lying, although they're doing it with the purpose of avoiding the truth. But this question is so interesting because I get it a lot, and I think people are really kind of off the mark in terms of how they think about omission, and some of my studies show this.

Mm-hmm.

So from the communicator side, similar to what Jon was saying, it feels like a moral compromise, right? I don't want to say this hurtful truth that your baby's ugly. I don't wanna lie 'cause lying is morally costly and reputationally costly. So it feels like the right compromise is to say nothing at all. And a lot of communicators, when you're in the perspective of the the communicator, people think that, that it's kind of a moral compromise. It's judged more moral than lying and less moral than telling the truth, right? So communicators see omission as this compromise, but listeners don't see it the same way. The listener kind of sees through what you're doing, recognizing that omission's kind of a way out. And what they want some of the time is reassurance or comfort or positivity or happiness. So when they ask, isn't my baby beautiful? And you turn away or change the subject, they know what you're thinking. And now, right, you've, you've both prevented them from hearing the truth and you've prevented them from meeting some other social goal, like feeling good and feeling loved. And so it's actually not a compromise. Sometimes it's the worst of both because it robs someone of both benevolence or kindness and honesty.

Let's talk for a moment about situations where people are explicitly asked to lie. Many waiters or retail salespeople are trained to act cheerful as if they cannot wait to serve you and help you. And in some cases, I'm sure it's actually true, but in many cases, someone has told them that their employment depends on their behaving a certain way. I'm wondering how you think about such lies because they involve, if you will, Interesting.

I think there's 2 elements to that question, both of which I've done some research on, but in somewhat separate veins. So there's the fact that these service personnel are often fibbing about their feelings. They're misrepresenting how they feel. So when we think about lying about our feelings, we tend to think that that's more acceptable than lying about material facts.

Interesting.

Right.

It's more acceptable to smile really big when you hand somebody an entree that's mediocre rather than say, this entree is the most amazing entree in the world, right? Just the fact that it's nonverbal makes it seem more acceptable. So I think that gives this type of behavior some leeway. And in fact, we often perceive those who can lie about their feelings in terms of misrepresenting their emotion, we see them as higher in kind of cognitive and emotional control. higher in grit, so we tend to think this is a good quality, that you can control your emotional expressions.

Hmm.

The other element of what you're saying, though, is about the sales element. In some of my other work, I look at deception as associated with salesmanship and how it relates to different occupational stereotypes. So in sales and marketing, Sometimes people actually think deception is a competency. It allows you to do your job well, and that can be really problematic for kind of long-term sustenance of some of these occupations. But we do expect that when we're being sold, and often people therefore discount some of the information or some of the approaches that are being used when they are being sold I can also imagine a scenario where a salesperson is actually genuinely uncomfortable with lying, but they're being told by their manager, this is what it takes to keep this job.

And perhaps the salesperson has not longed for this job, but I can imagine that being a particularly difficult situation, Emma.

Yeah, I think that is a difficult situation, but in the long run, you actually can sell a lot and do really well without lying. Aside from studying deception and honesty, I teach negotiations, and that's also a key idea I try to communicate to students is that, yeah, deception can pay off in the short run a little bit, some of the time if it's not discovered, but to actually help people achieve their interests and find joint gains and close sales that are going to get people to come back to you in the future, The truth is really beneficial.

Now, our listeners are amazing, Emma, and they come up with wonderful insights. It's one of the reasons I love these segments where we feature their voices. Listener Tim has noticed that there are times when people are lying to him and he knows they are lying and they know he knows they are lying. There is a strong culture of positivity and encouragement in the trail and ultra-running community. I experience this on the occasion I've participated in races. I've been 50 miles into a run with thousands of feet of elevation gain. Everything hurts, I can't keep food down, and I know I look terrible. Every person I see, without fail, is cheering me on, often calling out, you look strong! Or, you look great! These are lies.

I look neither. I look like I'm ready to curl up on the side of the trail and give up.

Now, Emma, what I find fascinating here is that everyone knows that these are lies, and everyone knows that everyone knows that these are lies. What do you think these collective delusions say about us?

Well, it's not obvious to me that the people saying them think they're lies. I mean, the fact that this person is doing this 50-mile race At all, it suggests he is strong, right? I, you know, if they're comparing him to themselves, like, I wouldn't be standing at all. So it looks pretty strong to me. But that aside, I think if we accept that these are collective delusions, I think they really reveal something about the social motives we have beyond honesty, right? And that there is nuance here. Sometimes we all want to live— in a world of hope and encouragement and fantasy and suspend reality for a moment, whether it's for the purpose of getting through that race or enjoying a movie or a story or feeling like the most beautiful bride on your wedding day, right? That's another classic example that goes back to discussions in the Talmud of you shouldn't ever tell a bride she's not beautiful because it ruins— That very special moment that you can't take back. And we might think running a magnificent race is like one of those moments.

I mean, I'm not a long-distance runner myself, but I've cheered at marathons. And I've often noticed, Emma, that you might cheer for the people who are doing really well and the top runners who are blazing past. But very often, it's the stragglers, the people who are struggling at mile 16 or mile 20, and they're not sure if they can make it, and you're not sure if they can make it. That's where the crowd comes alive and really tries to egg the person on. And very much, it's a case of trying to encourage the person to get across the finish line.

Right. And there are, of course, more honest ways to do it. You can say, you've got this. You can do it. We believe in you. I don't think any of those are lies. And perhaps that is the most ethical way to go about this. But I think there are a lot of people that would also say it's kind of a beautiful moment to say, you look amazing and you look strong. Because one, in some sense, that is true. And two, this is, you know, this is a moment that serves a purpose.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Emma Levine is a psychologist at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Today, she's answering listener questions about her research on the moral complexity Emma, I remember reading a poem by Philip Larkin many years ago. It's called Talking in Bed. It's a short poem, and I'd like to read it to you. It goes: Talking in bed ought to be easiest. Lying together there goes back so far, an emblem of 2 people being honest. Yet more and more time passes silently. Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest builds and disperses clouds in the sky, And dark towns heap up on the horizon. None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why, at this unique distance from isolation, it becomes still more difficult to find words at once true and kind, or not untrue and not unkind. Now, I love that poem so much, Emma, and it makes me think about prosocial lies in the context of intimate relationships. If these lies are produced by our empathy and love for other people, shouldn't we expect to see the greatest amount of prosocial lying in the context of our closest relationships?

It's a bit complicated because it depends what you mean by close, and it also depends how we think about the amount of lying. So typically, a greater proportion of our lies will be prosocial, When we know the person, we're more likely to feel empathy and compassion, which is a motivator of prosocial lies. But we might be more likely to be honest overall, fewer lies overall, but the lies we tell are more prosocial. But when we're really, really close to someone, we also might feel most emboldened to tell the truth, to be our full selves, and to know they can handle it.

Hmm.

And so there are a lot of different processes that can kind of turn this propensity of telling these prosocial lies on and off.

Hmm. I want to get into some of the complexities of prosocial lying, Emma. Sometimes lies born of kindness can have unintended consequences. Listener Mia tells a story about her brother and her mother.

Last February, my brother was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and was given only a few months to live. He requested that everyone refrain from telling our mother about his diagnosis. He was worried that the news would cause my mother unbearable pain and wanted to protect her. We had no choice but honor his wish. My brother passed away in April. And my mother remained unaware of her son's passing. Naturally, my mother would ask about my brother because he used to come and see her several times a week, and all of a sudden he stopped coming. My sister, who continued to care for her, bore the burden of telling a series of lies about my brother's First, she said that he was not feeling good and didn't want to pass whatever the germ he had. Then said that he had checked into a hospital for extensive tests. And then later she said that he had traveled to South Korea for a long-term treatment. My mother suspected That my sister was not telling the truth because my mom will comment like, well, he may not be able to come and see me in person, but he could certainly make phone call and talk to me. My mom waited for my brother's phone calls and visits every day and often felt forgotten and abandoned. And wondering what she had done. She would ask about when my brother was coming back from Korea, but gradually she stopped asking about my brother. Internally, she knew something had happened to him, but she also knew that no one would tell her the truth. For 5 months, I grappled with the question of whether we were doing the right thing by not telling my mother the truth. No one had the courage to tell my mother the truth, nor knew for sure that my mom would have been better off knowing the truth.

So Emma, my heart breaks for Mia and for her mom. Mia says that her mom passed away 5 months after her brother. But in those 5 months, she was kept in the dark. Now, this is a very complicated scenario, and I think many listeners might be divided about whether the family did the right thing. What do you think?

Yeah, I am also shaken by Mia's story. It is a sad one. I think it's really unfortunate that this mother, at the end of her life, faced such Uncertainty and was not given the chance to say goodbye to her son. And I understand the motivation behind not sharing the son's illness with the mother, especially if that was his wishes, right? It is prosocial in many senses, both to the son and to protect the mother. But And in my own research and just reflections, those types of deception tend to be appreciated only when they're temporary, right? If now's not the right time because there's too much uncertainty or she's fragile, we don't have to tell her everything right away. Eventually, right, most people think you should reveal because there is instrumental value in that truth. It's grieving and love and saying goodbye. And related to the conversation we were having on the costs of omission, the reason omission is painful is because it creates uncertainty. It doesn't give you hope and it doesn't give you truth. And this is a little bit similar. This aging woman was uncertain. She knew in some sense that something bad was happening, but she wasn't given the information, and that seems quite painful.

I mean, there are different stakeholders in this story, of course. Mia's brother, when he was diagnosed, you could argue that it was within his prerogative to share what he wanted with Whomever he wanted. As you mentioned earlier, his sorrow and his grief and what he was going through, those were personal things. And it wasn't for anyone else to decide necessarily how much to learn or how much others should learn about what was going on with him. But presumably when Mia's brother passed away, perhaps that would've been the time to tell Mia's mom that in fact this had happened. Although I can imagine that would've been very, very difficult because her mom wouldn't have had the time to—

Yeah.

in some ways grapple with this diagnosis and come and have a chance to say goodbye to her son, as you mentioned. It really seems very complicated, Emma.

Absolutely. It's very, very complicated given that the son requests that this information be kept private. And you're right, it is his prerogative. I think the complicated part though is how long that uncertainty ...goes on, right, after his passing. And I assume, right, the intentions were, if we can keep the mother positive and thinking this is nothing, then that might have been certainly the right thing. And perhaps she passes away without ever having a doubt and ever kind of grappling with what's going on. But as it unfolds, it seems like there might have been a time—

Right.

to reveal before the end.

I'm also struck by the fact that there are cultures that are more collectivistic and cultures that are more individualistic. And I think the idea that what's happening in our lives is our choice and our business, and we get to decide if we tell anyone anything and what they learn about it, that reflects a very individualistic way of thinking about our choices and our agency. And there are many other cultures in the world, Emma, where I feel knowledge is more shared and responsibilities are more shared and decisions are more shared. And perhaps in situations like that, it's more complicated than to say it's just the individual person's decision about what to do.

Absolutely. I think there are all kinds of interesting and complicated intersections once we start thinking about honesty and deception and culture, because In a lot of collectivist cultures in particular, there's definitely different norms about what we share in terms of illness, where actually the whole family might know, but they would keep an aging parent, the patient, in the dark because they believe knowing, let's say, that you have cancer could do harm in and of itself. But that kind of specific model of how we deal with hope And benevolence and deception in medicine is different than how collectivist cultures might deal with deception in other contexts. For example, my PhD student, amazing PhD student, Yena Kim, and I, with some colleagues, have some research looking at critical feedback and honesty in both the US and China, and we actually find, consistent with what you said on responsibilities and duties and shared knowledge, that in China, people are much more willing to give critical feedback than in the US because we kind of have a shared understanding of what the norms are and where we should be performing, what is lacking, and we share that with each other. Whereas in the US, it's like, you do you. Who am I to comment on your workplace behavior?

And so there's all kinds of contextual and cultural ingredients We heard from listener Kate, who has a story about how one lie can lead to more lies.

When I was 14 years old, I was sexually assaulted by a stranger. Fortunately, I was able to report it to the police, and it even went to trial. But we decided, or my mother decided, that we could not tell my dad. grandmother, as she was an elderly immigrant woman who loved me very much, and she couldn't handle it. So the day after it occurred, we went to visit her and pretended nothing happened. And it went on like this for 5 years while I went through the trial and PTSD. We didn't tell her anything. We kept the lie going, the whole family. And It really impaired my relationship with her after that because I— we did love each other very much, but I could never be honest with her again about anything or talk to her about anything because the biggest thing I was going through in my life, I couldn't share with her. And that's sad. That was a big lie, and I regret it.

So, Emma, it seems like Kate's lie created a wedge between her and her grandmother. Talk a moment about how lying, including prosocial lying, can negatively affect our relationships.

Sure. I mean, I think Kate's story is such a great example of the costs of lying, the long-term costs of lying, even the prosocial ones. So I think there's 2 ideas here. One is related to something we talked about earlier, is about the temporariness of the lie, right? You withhold information or lie about information for a specific amount of time, given extenuated circumstances, and then you know and you do reveal it later. Most people think that's tactful, that's prosocial, that is polite, that is ethical. But when we keep withholding, it compounds over time, right? The erosion of trust, the— Awkwardness, the lack of closeness between 2 people, right? It all compounds. It also requires us to keep lying to keep the same story alive, and that's really costly.

Mm-hmm.

Even beyond, right, this single relationship, there is also research suggesting, right, the more you lie, the less guilty you feel about future lies, and that can be a cost Hmm.

I'm also reflecting that sometimes the person who is being lied to, even if the lies are prosocial, the person knows that they are being lied to. Listener Robbie is a radiation oncologist, and it often falls on her to break bad news to patients and their families. Here's Robbie's story.

Throughout the years, many families have asked me not to tell the patient the truth. I will tell them that I will try to respect their wishes, but that if the patient asks me, I will answer honestly. Invariably, at some point, I'll be alone with the patient who will tell me that they know they're dying and that they wish their family would try to stop pretending that everything was okay. They feel cheated out of the opportunity to have the discussions they want to have with family before they die. I beg people to be willing to discuss painful truths rather than trying to hide what everyone knows.

What do you make of Robbie's idea, Emma?

I think it's great advice. I mean, going back to kind of something that's been underlying a lot of these cases, right, the questions we need to ask ourselves is, can the truth have some long-term value or instrumental good, even if it will cause pain? And the grieving process and saying goodbye and planning, those, despite being painful, are all instrumental goods. And so when we don't give people the gift of fully coping and grappling with these things, It can be really damaging. And I'd say just focusing on deception in those situations is unwise, and it's not seen as ethical by most people.

I mean, in some ways, what I hear you saying, Emma, is that we sometimes tell prosocial lies in order to avoid giving people pain. But it's also the case that sometimes pain is the pathway to growth, to deeper relationships, to understanding the meaning of things.

Absolutely. I mean, beyond some of my work on honesty and deception, or inspired by some of that work, I have a body of work on difficult conversations. And that is exactly what you're saying, right? Difficult conversations are the ones that both cause pain and promote long-term benefits like intimacy, growth, understanding. And people think you should have those conversations. They avoid them. They don't wanna have them. They're very hard and scary, but we all kind of know deep down somewhere we should have them. We should tell the truth, right? It's really only when the lying is temporary or there's no long-term value that we see it differently. But difficult conversations are a part of life, and that pain does lead to growth.

Emma Levine is a psychologist at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Emma, thank you so much for joining me again today on Hidden Brain.

Thank you for having me and for all the guests sharing their stories.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quirrell, Ryan Katz, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you enjoy listening to the show, you'll probably like to watch it as well. Subscribe to our new YouTube channel at youtube.com/@hiddenbrain so you don't miss any of our videos. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon. Hey, this is Will Arnett, host of Smartless. Smartless is a podcast with myself and Sean Hayes and Jason Bateman, where each week, one of us reveals a mystery guest to the other 2.

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