Why Conversations Go Wrong

0:00This 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 actor's 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 guy's name. That's what I want to find out, the guy's name. Now tell me, who's on first, what's on second, I don't know who's on third. The duo first performed the sketch in the 1930s and continued to refine it over the next two decades.

0:36They rarely did it the same way twice. You know the guy's name's on the baseball team? 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 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

1:32can cause unneeded pain and conflict, and how we can learn to talk and listen better. Thank you. for Hidden Brain comes from Pacific Life Insurance. You make promises throughout your life. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has been helping you keep them by protecting those who matter most. Pacific Life, the power of a promise. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you create a more confident financial future. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska. And in New York, Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Pfizer. If your brain still remembers how to use a card catalog or find a number in a phone book, then remember this. RSV can be a serious respiratory virus,

2:42especially if you're over 50 with certain health conditions or over 75. There's no prescription treatment, but one dose of a vaccine can help protect you. Find out more at PfizerForAll.com. Pfizer, outdo yesterday. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Dell. This Black Friday, give a gift that goes beyond the box, the Dell XPS 13 laptop. It's the thinnest, lightest XPS laptop yet, with a long battery life, beautiful design, and powerful performance with Intel Core processors. Find perks like Dell rewards, fast free shipping, and flexible financing. Head to dell.com slash deals. That's dell.com slash deals. You say tomato, I say tomato. If you travel abroad, you instinctively know that the customs in other

3:45countries 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.

4:38They 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. And I remember one time he was telling me about an aunt that he had particularly liked. And he said, now there was this expression, chas v'chalila, something like heaven forbid. And he said, but she said chalila v'chas. And he said, I remember because nobody else said it that way.

5:21So 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

6:06would 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.

6:56I wonder how our grandparents and parents felt about Thanksgiving. Two were from California. One was from the U.K. Deborah and two others were New Yorkers. It was simply my best friend, his brother, his former wife, and two of his friends who were in town. Remember where W.I. and S. used to be? No. And they built the big, huge skyscraper there? No. Where was that? Right where Central Park West met Broadway. Is that Columbus Circle? Is that Columbus Circle? Here's Columbus Circle. Now it's the Huntington-Hartford Museum. That's the 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.

7:47He's a sociologist. He's so brilliant. You have to read him. And I had to conclude that I was getting a chance to observe the conversational styles of the three 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 Yorker's sense of how long a pause was normal was shorter. And so while the Californians and even more the British women, 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.

8:49We 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 two and a half months to transcribe this three-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 the. 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

9:35people 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.

10:16Some 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. I shook hands with Rubenstein once. Yeah, we did together. That's right. We did together. Wasn't it incredible? I was like, who's this? Rubenstein's right. We were together. It was incredible. I was like a Christmas gift. Rubenstein's hand. We shook hands with Rubenstein. And he had his red stubby hands. They were like jellies. They were like putty. Really? Completely soft and red. If we do that with someone who thinks one voice goes at a time,

11:01if you begin speaking while I'm speaking, that means you're interrupting and I'll stop. Well, who created that interruption? It took two 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 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 you hear about the lady okay did you hear you have to say boy girl boy boy girl boy did you hear about the lady who, boy. Did you hear about the lady who was asked? What? Did you hear about the lady who was asked?

11:48And there was one example where one of the New Yorkers, it wasn't me, tried seven 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. And 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

12:34from 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 L.A.? You live in L.A.? Yeah. You're visiting here? What do you do there? I work at Disney. You're a writer? Artist? No. Writer? Yeah. I write advertising copy. Disney present. Your writer? Artist? Yeah, I write advertising copy. 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.

13:24He 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 gun fire. And instead of backing off. Did you go there for that purpose? And downshifting, I was putting on more and more of these questions. 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,

14:07and neither party thinks of it as being obnoxious or rude. But if you don't share the same conversational styles, 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,

14:52it 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.

15:54You walk away saying the kind of person you are. You know, you didn't want to give me a chance to talk or you only want to hear yourself talk or the other side. Why do I have the conversation with you like pulling teeth? You're right 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

16:36though 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, 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

17:32and keep people from the happiness that is actually within their reach. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. The brain isn't fixed. It's flexible. That means we're always capable of transformation. A master's degree from SNHU can help you build the skills to become whoever you want. A leader, career changer, dream chaser. With no set class times and low online tuition, SNHU makes grad school possible because it's never too late to learn something new. Get started at snhu.edu slash brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. The best pieces in your closet are the ones you can count on, whether you're heading to work, going out, or keeping things casual. And this time of year, quince makes finding something

18:31great for everyone else just as easy. Quince focuses on high-quality staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, 14-carat gold, and Italian leather. All timeless, versatile Thank you. 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. Deborah Tannen is a linguist at Georgetown University. She is 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,

19:40we 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 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 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.

20:30And the neighbor would shed light on these arguments. And it was actually told to me by the people who produced and created the show. The neighbor's advice came out of my books. Tim, Tim, Tim, the first step for greatness is humbling yourself. 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

21:16he comes home. I'm really sorry, but the guys and I got in some real serious discussions discussions about relationship things you know men women stuff sharing feelings pretty heavy stuff I spent two 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 once 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.

22:02I spent the whole evening by myself, and now you're stuck with a plate of cold food. Oh, don't worry about me. I ain't at the bar. So unpack what just happened here, Debra. 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, 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,

22:43if 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,

23:28but 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.

24:12And I think it's so important to point out, first of all, it's not always women and men. And 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. 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 closed relationships

24:58as 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 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?

25:42She probably was not expecting a yes, no answer. She probably expected something like, I don't know. How do you feel about it? 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. And 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?

26:32Yes. 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 meta-message 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 meta message of her asking, Where's your coat? For her, it was a meta message of friendliness. And if you say something about a person's welfare, you know, that shows another

27:33level of caring about them. He responded to the meta message 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 two people. Anytime we talk to each other, we have to balance both who's up, who's down, and are we close 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,

28:26I'm going to have dinner with him tonight. And she said, gee, you know, 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.

29:19And 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. Two 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 Harnix Goodwin is an anthropologist at UCLA who has observed this, that boys will often

30:06tell 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. And all of this, of course, has great implications for when you're adults 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

30:50worldviews. 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 if they're heterosexual and they expect he's going to be a new and improved version of a best friend, 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

31:36and what that made her feel. And then how was your day? They won't rat race. Really? Didn't anything happen? No. 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, top 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

32:23public 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 comes into its own. For many women, you know, 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 own life, Deborah? Do you notice moments where you basically stop and say, uh-oh, I understand I missed the meta message of what was being communicated here? Well, I'll tell you one thing that comes to mind.

33:13This is before I was married. So it was a fellow I was dating at the time, and we were all having an argument. The phone rang. Somebody called and said, turn on the television. You're on the television right now. So we interrupt our argument, put on the television. And there I was being interviewed about conversational style. And what did you find out about conversation after listening to Walt? 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?

33:57We 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 two 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.

34:53And 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 her 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

35:43and I kept helping. And she said, 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, it 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, 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.

36:30She 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, Deborah, is if you had asked that host, you know, should I have helped? She may have well have told you, no, you don't 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, you know, 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 know, you are so right.

37:03I 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 today. So they ask you again. And then you say, oh, you know, I kind of don't feel that well today.

37:48And 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. 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.

38:41One of the managers I was studying told me, he said, you know, when I make a decision, I just denounce 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, you know, 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, you know, why is the boss talking like he's a pushover?

39:26Why 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, was men at the time, when I say something, I expect you to do something about it. So let's try that again.

40:11It's cold in here. And the officer 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 seven before I thought he had nothing to say. His name was Ron Scullin. He was from the Midwest. He was married to Susie Scullin, who was Chinese from Hawaii.

41:03And 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. 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 Vedanta. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Principal, the perpetual pen-tapper, the arbitrary fridge reorganizer, the holiday party planner that starts in May.

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43:01Terms and conditions apply. 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.

43:50Deborah, 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.

44:45No, it's just a red shuttle, Nick. 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.

45:26In 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, God damn it. Deborah writes about what she calls the big three 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.

46:29From 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. 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 daughters was,

47:14I can't open my mouth. She takes everything as criticism 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.

48:09Now, I was doing this one woman who said to me, she was in her 60s, and so her mother 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? Yourself. 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

49:02cultures 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 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.

49:44Or 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. 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. You know, we think conversations are, you know, like a walk in the park, when really it's often, you know, potentially a walk across a minefield. And the fact that we're naive about the challenges is actually one of the dangers.

50:38This is why we never expect it when things blow up in our faces. Yes, and 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? 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?

51:34I'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. In other words, to 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?

52:18What 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,

53:13that 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

53:59it. 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 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,

55:12the relationship was never really healed. And throughout my life, as I became an adult, she inflicted a lot of pain and 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

55:56and 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 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 Vedanta. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Stripe. Stripe is built for whatever comes next. Because as your business scales, Thank you. The more payments Stripe sees, the smarter its AI gets at detecting these patterns as they emerge.

57:11Stripe's network is so vast, it has seen $1.9 trillion in payment volume across millions of global businesses. In fact, when a card is used, there's a 92% chance the Stripe network has seen it before. All of this means fraudulent patterns across payments, accounts, and customer abuse can be detected, flagged, or blocked more easily, based on the rules you set up, of course. Blocking bad actors, welcoming good customers. Keeping more of your revenue, your revenue. Learn more about fighting fraud with Stripe at stripe.com slash radar. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Mazda. Being safer on the road starts with the person behind the wheel. That's Mazda's philosophy when designing every vehicle.

57:56Their proactive safety features help keep you more aware, connected, and engaged during every drive, which means your car does more than help protect you. It helps make you a safer driver, which helps protect everyone. That's why Mazda has been named Consumer Reports' Safest New Car brand. To learn more, visit mazdausa.com. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Let's imagine a hypothetical scenario. Your friend has been working for three years on a novel. It's her lifelong dream, and she 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.

58:54You 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 two 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.

59:48Thank 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 pro-social, because it's helpful to other people. 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

1:00:37truth could not cause any improvement or have any long-term benefits. And that is the specific situation in which people tend to endorse deception the most. You mentioned a second ago that this was pro-social lying. Unpack that term for me, Emma. Often we think about deception as anti-social, meaning that it harms other people. It's anti-social in that it is not good for the social well-being of others, our social fabric. Pro-social 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 pro-social, whether that's 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 pro-social lies. So one form of pro-social lying is when we are

1:01:36a role model to others, and we are worried that telling the truth could send them down a bad path. Our listener Mark has been a high school teacher for 31 years, and he says he regularly tells a lie to his students. 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 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?

1:02:36Absolutely. 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 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.

1:03:25Patricia 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,

1:04:06and they are also supposed to do no harm. What happens when these two 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. 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? And, you know, the example you shared in something that a lot of clinicians talk about is, right, when there's cognitive impairment,

1:05:02like 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 pro-social intentions, right? Because if you take away my ability to

1:05:58make 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?

1:06:48Well, 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,

1:07:36we 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. 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 pro-social versus anti-social, pro-social lies tend to be seen as more ethical and can even increase trust and reliance in other people and preferences for relationships, whereas anti-social lies almost always harm trust and are seen as unethical,

1:08:25right? So if I'm going to 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. 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. A 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

1:09:14her 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

1:09:58somehow 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. So yeah, the right thing to do was to lie. Emma, have you found in your studies that, like Craig, people can tell pro-social 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 the norm of truth-telling. We learn very young, you should always tell the truth. We say out loud

1:10:51honesty 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. 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

1:11:39they 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 pro-social 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.

1:12:25Joanna'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. 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 Vedanta. Thank you. with their stories on Season 6 of Planet Visionaries, featuring explorers, scientists,

1:13:55and conservation leaders addressing research, biodiversity, and conservation issues in amazing locations. Hosted by environmental advocate and climber Alex Honnold, Planet Visionaries shares stories of discovery, determination, and initiatives relating to environmental change. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Wedding photos unforgettable because his fly was open. So get him underpants he'll love and get a head start on holiday shopping with low prices on gifts everyone wants. 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.

1:14:56They 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 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 one in every five interactions, 20% of the time.

1:15:56But 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, some people might say, 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 are 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 three days and spend three 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 the control

1:16:46condition 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 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. 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

1:17:38seeing a friend's ugly baby, you discuss the two 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.

1:18:26Absolutely. 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. So from the communicator side, similar to what John 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 want to lie because 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

1:19:23the speaker, 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 both prevented them from hearing the truth and you prevented them from meeting some other social goal like feeling good and feeling loved.

1:20:15And 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, a level of coercion. Interesting. I think there's two elements to that question, both of which I've done some research on, but in somewhat separate veins. So there's the fact that

1:21:03these 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 fact, 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,

1:21:50higher in grit. So we tend to think this is a good quality that you can control your emotional expressions. The other element of what you're saying, though, is about the sales element. And 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 things. I can also imagine a scenario where a salesperson

1:22:45is actually genuinely uncomfortable with lying, but they're being told by their manager, you know, this is what it takes to keep this job, you know, and perhaps the salesperson is not long 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. So 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

1:23:31that 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 experienced 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.

1:24:17Every 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 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

1:25:11they 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, you know, running a magnificent race is like one of those moments. I mean, I'm not a long distance runner myself,

1:26:03but I've cheered at marathons. And I've often noticed, Emma, that, you know, 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.

1:26:46But 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 This serves a purpose. When we come back, the unintended consequences of lying. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This podcast is supported by NERDTEC ODT. Remedjapant. We know you didn't ask for an interruption, but migraine doesn't wait for the right moment to interrupt either. It just barges in, takes your time, and throws everything off. So when migraine takes your time, take NERTEC. It's for the acute treatment of migraine with or without aura in adults.

1:27:59NERTEC can provide pain relief in two hours, which can last up to two days. Ask your healthcare provider if NERTEC is right for you because your time is for you, not migraine. Don't take if allergic to NERTEC ODT. Aller your time is for you, not migraine. Don't take if allergic to NERTEC ODT. Allergic reactions can occur even days after use. Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or throat. High blood pressure and Raynaud syndrome can occur. Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, coolness, pain, or color changes in fingers and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4NERDTAC or visit nerdtac.com. All right, back to your podcast,

1:28:35playlist, or whatever's keeping you going today. What do I gift my mom and nieces? Walmart has top brands you know Like Ninja, Disney, Lego Oh, Dad loves music. Sonos can bring his songs to life with sound that hits just right. And my coffee-obsessed bestie? De'Longhi Brews Coffee right for morning's extra price. All those great brands at Walmart? Who knew? We knew, now you do too. Shop Gifts No Love at Walmart. 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 of lying. Emma, I remember reading a poem by Philip Larkin many years ago. It's called

1:29:30Talking 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 two 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

1:30:23see 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 pro-social lies. But we might be more likely to be honest overall, fewer lies overall, but the lies we tell are more pro-social. 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. And so there are a lot of different processes that can kind of turn this propensity of telling these pro-social lies on and off.

1:31:23I want to get into some of the complexities of pro-social 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 four 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,

1:32:21and 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 passing. 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 would 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

1:33:27and 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 five 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 five months after her brother, but in those five months, she was kept in the dark. Now this is a very complicated scenario, and I think many listeners might be divided

1:34:31about 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 pro-social in many senses, both to the son and to protect the mother. But in, you know, 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. But

1:35:41eventually, 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 cost 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

1:36:36mentioned 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 have been the time to tell Mia's mom that, in fact, this had happened. Although I can imagine that would have been very, very difficult because her mom wouldn't have had the time to, 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

1:37:17information 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, you know, 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 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

1:38:11is 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, you know, knowledge is more shared and responsibilities are more shared and decisions are more shared. And perhaps in situations like that, you know, it's more complicated than to say it's just the individual person's decision about what to do. Absolutely. And 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

1:38:54different 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 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,ana Kim and I, with some colleagues, have some research looking at critical feedback and honesty than in the U.S. because we kind of have a shared understanding of what the norms are and where we should be performing, what is lacking,

1:39:56and we share that with each other. Whereas in the U.S., it's like, you do you, you know? Who am I to comment on your workplace behavior? And so there's all kinds of contextual and cultural ingredients that go into how we approach this. 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 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 five years. While I went through the trial and

1:40:57PTSD, 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 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 pro-social 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 pro-social ones. So I think there's two ideas here. One

1:41:50is related to something we talked about earlier, is about the temporariness of the lie, right? If 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 pro-social, 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 two people, right, it all compounds. It also requires us to keep lying to keep the same story alive. And that's really costly. Even beyond, right, this single relationship, there is also research suggesting, right, the more you lie,

1:42:46the less guilty you feel about future lies. And that can be a cost as well. I'm also reflecting that sometimes the person who is being lied to, even if the lies are pro-social, 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

1:43:37was 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, 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

1:44:31coping 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 pro-social 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.

1:45:30They don't want to 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 Querell, Ryan Katz, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer.

1:46:34I'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 slash athiddenbrain so you don't miss any of our videos. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon. If your workday happens in two languages, this one's for you. WhisperFlow is a voice-to-text app. You talk, it types, in any app, in more than 100 languages. The email in English, the text to your mom in Spanish, the client note in Portuguese, and it switches languages as you do, with the ums and typos gone four times faster than typing. WhisperFlow is free. Get it at whisperflow.ai. That's W-I-S-P-R-Flow.ai. Hi, it's me, your gutters.

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