188. Mind Reading 101: To Know What Your Audience Thinks, Just Ask

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: Getting out of our own head, literally, makes a big difference for effective communication. It's all about perspective getting and humility. My name is Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. 

[00:00:20] Today I look forward to speaking with Matt Lieberman. Matt is a professor in the Department of Psychology at UCLA, where he focuses on social cognitive neuroscience. He is a pioneer in the study of how the human brain processes social information, particularly in understanding how people think about others and themselves. Matt is also the author of Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect.

[00:00:45] Matt, thanks for joining me. 

[00:00:47] Matt Lieberman: Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on. 

[00:00:49] Matt Abrahams: Excellent. Shall we get started? 

[00:00:51] Matt Lieberman: Sure. 

[00:00:51] Matt Abrahams: In your work, you assert that our brains are fundamentally social. You've studied how our brains engage in mind reading or understanding others thoughts and feelings. How can we leverage this ability to enhance our communication, particularly in difficult situations?

[00:01:07] Matt Lieberman: Yeah, so mind reading is this remarkable ability that humans have. We can think about and ponder what is going on in the mind of someone else based on what they say, where their attention goes, the actions they engage in. It allows us to enjoy things like playing poker, but it also allows us to care for other people and do all sorts of things that make us the successful social creatures that we are. The thing that this brings up for me is that someone might listen to this and say, oh, so I should appreciate the other person's perspective, engage in what we call perspective taking. And that's going to help me understand what they were really trying to communicate. 

[00:01:44] And it turns out, perspective taking is pretty good at getting us to care about another person. But it's terrible at getting us to understand another person. Because when we engage in perspective taking, a lot of what we do is just project from ourselves, or we project from what we think the reasonable person would say or do and secretly the reasonable person is just us. Nick Epley, who's at the University of Chicago, he does this amazing work, you know, we use lots of jargon in our world, and he said, instead of perspective taking, we should all engage in perspective getting. Like, oh, I've never heard that term. What's perspective getting? 

[00:02:20] Perspective getting is asking, if I'm a speaker, I can ask you what you're getting from what I'm saying. And if I'm a listener, I definitely should be asking how to sort of interpret something that for me makes me think, oh, does this person mean to say this thing that seems like a pretty bad thing to be saying? And almost always, if you actually engage in the conversation that way, they'll say, that's not what I meant, what I'm trying to convey is this. And then they have a second shot at the apple. I think that is where more productive conversation comes from. 

[00:02:52] Matt Abrahams: So, while it's innate to being human, the ability to actually take somebody else's perspective, we actually have to really work to make sure that we're doing that. And we have to ask questions and interact. 

[00:03:04] Matt Lieberman: Mind reading doesn't guarantee accuracy, it guarantees that I feel like I'm getting inside your head. Sometimes, I'm really good at that. There are scenarios where we really can figure that out. But there are a lot of scenarios, especially when we get into more abstract things like politics, ideology, religion, things like that, where we really don't know what's going on in another person's mind. We often think things are far more black and white for them than they are. People have uncertainty. They have nuance, we should, you know, appreciate that. 

[00:03:32] Matt Abrahams: It's all about what I like to jokingly refer to the F word of communication, which is not the naughty one, but it's about fidelity. We're seeking accuracy and clarity, and the only way to do that is to ask and engage rather than just assume. 

[00:03:45] Matt Lieberman: There's often more of a reward for scoring points, than there is for having kind of a good conversation. 

[00:03:52] Matt Abrahams: What are some practical ways that business leaders and communicators can apply the insights from social neuroscience to improve things like team dynamics, decision making, and foster better communication in general in organizations?

[00:04:06] Matt Lieberman: Social psychology and social neuroscience, a big part of what they do is empirically test the way the mind actually works in social situations when we're making sense of others, and when others are trying to make sense of us, what are the right conclusions to draw? One example is when we think about using logic to make sense of things. We have this sense, and psychologists believe this as well for a long time, that we have this general purpose system for doing logical abstract thinking. You use the same processes for playing chess, for doing math, for figuring out how, like, a plot in a story should be played out. And it turns out that we have, at a minimum, two separate systems for doing logic. And the one kind does cover things like chess and math, but it doesn't cover thinking about other people, narrative, and stories. 

[00:05:03] That's a separate system, and they're a bit like a seesaw. If you are engaging one of those thinking systems, you're likely to be turning off the other. If you're running a boardroom and you bring everyone in and there's twenty people sitting around the table, and you are promoting norms of having your best analytical thinking hat on, you are simultaneously, without saying so, basically saying, become a little socially dumber. Because you're telling them to turn off the system that would allow them to pick up on social cues that are really important for a lot of the coalition building we do. So there's a variety of ways in which learning about social psychology and social neuroscience is going to teach you some of the best practices and best understandings about the nature of things.

[00:05:51] Matt Abrahams: So the way in which our brain functions, in some cases, can be the opposite of what the intuitive theories that we present to ourselves and observe in others. Many of our listeners are really interested in the ideas of negotiation and persuasion. Are there specific neuroscience, social neuroscience findings that could help people be better at their persuation and influence in negotiation? Are the things that they could do, should do, should stop doing, that you are aware? 

[00:06:23] Matt Lieberman: Yeah, so I'll give you a little neuroscience and a little psychology. One of the things that we saw, and I think it was a little surprising, is that when we looked at where persuasion effects consistently happened in the brain, they weren't really where a lot of folks would have expected. The way our studies worked, and I think one of the things that made them successful, is that we didn't just show people messages and then say, how persuaded are you by that message? Instead, we would bring people in with messages about changing some behavior. We would measure the behavior of the week before the scan and the week after the scan in ways that didn't make it obvious that we were doing that. So people weren't trying to manipulate their behavior to look a certain way and so on.

[00:07:08] And what we found, and we've now seen this across fifteen different FMRI studies, the very consistent effect, that when people see messages that are associated with them really going on to change their behavior in kind of message consistent ways, you'll see increased activity between the eyebrows and the middle of the forehead, a region called medial prefrontal cortex. It's where the two hemispheres of the brain meet, kind of at the most front point in the brains, that is consistently associated with reflecting on your own identity. Thinking about yourself and the characteristics that make you, you. And that's been shown since 2002. It's a funny thing because you think of yourself and your identity as the thing that would help protect you from persuasion.

[00:07:58] But what it suggests to me, is that part of what is happening when someone is delivering a persuasive message, is that at some level you're trying on a new identity. You can either choose to adopt that identity because you're like, I'd like to be that person. I'd like to be the person who smokes less, who gets more steps in every day. Like that's an identity I would like to embrace or it's an identity where like, yeah, I can't see that being me and then that's part of rejecting things. And so I think part of what our self exists for is to allow for the influence of the social world around us. In the West, we tend to think our identity keeps the world from getting in and making us do things we don't want to do.

[00:08:42] But I think it's a conduit for getting the world's norms into your head when you're young. And then occasionally updating those when you're like, that's an identity I could try on. When I think about persuasion more generally, and this informs some of our neuroimaging work, don't tell people what to believe. Doesn't really work. We have this phenomenon in psychology called reactants. Humans are built not to have their sense of freedom challenged. When you tell someone to believe, you're challenging their autonomy and saying, you believe the wrong thing, here's what you need to believe. And so I think you're far better off engaging in some kind of storytelling, and that story can be about yourself, a third party.

[00:09:26] And never specifically bring up the ultimate claim that you want the other person to adopt. In the literature, this is called narrative persuasion as opposed to rhetorical persuasion. And I think about this from the perspective of trying to be like a really good film director. A film director doesn't say, this is the scene in which you learn that Tommy is bad. I don't want to watch that movie. I want to watch the scene and it's, you know, it's one of these show don't tell type of situations. And a great director knows exactly what reaction you're going to have. They've set up the shot, they've set up the script to do exactly what they want, to lead you to that conclusion that you will draw yourself and take ownership of. When you're trying to persuade, what you really want is for the other person to feel like they've self persuaded rather than you persuading them. It'll stick a lot more if they think they came to that conclusion themselves. 

[00:10:23] Matt Abrahams: When we go to persuade, we can make that easier for people to do. And we can actually ask, you know, imagine what it would be like if, what if you could. So the language becomes a way of expediting that, which is really interesting. Asking them questions, I think, are ways that work with the way persuasion works rather than working against. I really appreciate that. I have to say that one of the areas of your research that I really found interesting is that social pain parallels physical pain in the brain. I first learned of this when I was writing my first book on managing speaking anxiety. Can you talk a little bit about that and what does this suggest for us? 

[00:11:02] Matt Lieberman: This is more my wife's work than mine. We did it together back in the early 2000s. We showed that if you look in the brain, as a person experiences some kind of rejection, which we were nice enough to deliver to people while they're laying in an MRI scanner. If you have them experience in real time some kind of genuine rejection, the responses in the brain, where they show responses and the way those responses work with each other, looks very similar to what happens when you feel physical pain. So social and physical pain seem to have this kind of overlap. And then there was this follow-up study showing that if you take Tylenol over a period of days, you'll actually report less social pain in your daily life and show a blunted response to social rejection. And I will add the caveat that this was done under very controlled circumstances. Nobody should be taking Tylenol at home to dull their social pain. Over five hundred people a year die from Tylenol overdoses. So, anytime I talk about this, I always tell people, do not do this at home. That's not the way to think about this. 

[00:12:10] Some people say social pain is just so different from physical pain, and it is. No one is going to feel rejected and say, geez, I don't know if I have a broken heart or a broken arm. But I can have a broken arm, a headache and arthritis, and all of those are equally distinguishable forms of pain. So pain is a broad category. And I think social pain warrants membership in that pain club. There's another important point in terms of how people think about this in the real world. I think that we have reached a point in our society where there's a lot of folks who will take this kind of evidence to suggest this is why I am allowed to censor or not expose myself to anything that might be socially painful for me. And I think that that's a big mistake for people who do this. And I think that it's important to remember that pain is two things at once. It's an alarm signal that tells you something's wrong. You better change something you're doing. 

[00:13:09] And so that's consistent with, if what you are going to say is going to make me feel bad, I'm going to shut the door to that, just like I'm going to pull my hand off of the stove if I'm burning it. But the other important thing to know about pain is that it teaches us lessons. We learn from pain, we learn about the world from pain, and I think that if you're not exposed to things that could be socially painful, you're really sort of shutting off your ability to learn a lot of things about the way the world works and maybe some of the assumptions you have about the world not matching everything that's going on in the world.

[00:13:41] Matt Abrahams: When I was thinking about what you were saying, it was really hitting me that there are times where I will say something that could be hurtful to somebody, could cause some pain. But in my mind, it's not that significant. And yet, based on what you're saying, this could have quite a significant reaction in the way the body and brain respond to it. You have a venture going on that I find really interesting. Can you tell us about that new venture? About how you're using technology to help solve an important social connection issue that many of us face? 

[00:14:12] Matt Lieberman: There are a lot of people who are struggling with social connection in almost every walk of life these days. There's what's considered a loneliness crisis. You know, our surgeon general, whose job it is to focus on the physical health of the nation, said that one of his fundamental priorities last year was helping people become less lonely, more socially connected. And, you know, he interviewed us for that work when he wrote about it. So I was persuaded to start a company that uses ideas about how we see and experience the world. When you think about finding people to be connected to, we often think about it in terms of shared interests and hobbies. We think about it in terms of personality, and it turns out that if you try to predict who's likely to get along and be compatible from those things, you'll get nowhere.

[00:15:06] You can use the most advanced AI you want, there's several published failed attempts at predicting those things. But there was work going on in neuroimaging showing that if we watch a movie while we're in the MRI scanner, and you look at certain parts of the brain, and we look at the responses that we both have while we watch stupid cat videos, some people playing basketball, maybe a political speech, a number of just random slice of life things that you might see flipping the channels on the TV, the more similar our responses are in that region over time. Whether your increases go up with my increases and your activity in that brain region go down with mine, the more likely it is that we're likely to get along and be friends in real life. What that's reflecting is our tendency to see and experience the world in more similar ways. 

[00:16:00] We don't all see the same thing even when we're looking at the same thing. We have those assumptions in our heads that cause us to see things certain ways. And it's just easier to get along with someone else if they have some of those same assumptions. They're gonna laugh at the same things and find the same things distasteful or highly moral or whatever those things are. We tried to figure out if we could measure this and it turns out we could. And then it also turned out that we could take strangers and predict which of them would get along, which of them would connect in real life when they met. 

[00:16:33] Matt Abrahams: I think it's amazing that you're targeting a really significant problem of loneliness and feeling disconnected and the ability to apply insights from neuroscience to solve those problems are fascinating. Before we end, I'd like to ask everybody three questions. The first one I make up for you and then the others are the same I've been asking for years. Ready for that?

[00:16:52] Matt Lieberman: I'll do my best. 

[00:16:52] Matt Abrahams: You have spent a lot of time looking inside people's heads and seeing how that applies to our social world. What's one big takeaway you have from that that's really impacted the way you live your life?

[00:17:05] Matt Lieberman: I think one of the big takeaways from neuroimaging and from other things in general is that people are more complicated and nuanced then we give them credit for. Our brain does so many clever things behind the scenes to give us an immediate sensible picture of what's going on in the world, what's going on in any given moment. It is miraculous that our brain does this. And one of the things about this is that it not only delivers to us a sensible picture of the world that is absolutely not a direct representation of the world, but it gives us a really inappropriate level of confidence in what we see. And I think from a running from the dangerous animal perspective, that's a good thing, right? You don't want to have to stop and think and be philosophical and say, how do I know this thing really wants to hurt me? We want a brain that says, run away from the dangerous thing. And it's good ninety-nine percent of the time, but one percent is still a good amount of the time where it gets us into lots of trouble. And I think the biggest unnoticed problem in the world is that we don't appreciate the constructive activity of our own minds and the ways in which that then leads us to make very negative attributions about other people and why they're doing the things they do. What we really should be asking is, why do you see things that way? Is there an insight I can get from that? And also, why do I see things the way I do? What assumptions is my brain making? To do that just involves a greater level of humility. 

[00:18:41] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for that. I hope everybody listening takes a moment to reflect on the fact that we are often overconfident. And to remind ourselves, as you have just reminded us, that we need to question why other people might think the way they do and why we think the way we do. Let me ask you question number two. Who is a communicator that you admire and why? 

[00:19:03] Matt Lieberman: There's so many. I actually think some of the most effective, important communicators in the world today are comedians. They point out all the quirks of the social norms that we all adopt without stopping to think about them. And they highlight these things for us and they're like, why do I do all these things the way I do? They tell us hard things about the world, about our political divide, about religion and other things like that. I tend to think of comedians today performing a lot of the same role that up until maybe 1950, philosophers did for us. And I don't think philosophers do that so much anymore, but I do think that the comedians are the people that are out there really getting us to stop and think and laugh at the same time. 

[00:19:51] Matt Abrahams: I don't know who I thought you would say, but I didn't think you would name comedians, and I appreciate that. Final question, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? 

[00:20:02] Matt Lieberman: One is the humility piece, right? Remember that you are not as clear as you think you are, and that people are not hearing what you think they're hearing. When you are speaking to an audience, you don't get to do perspective getting. This is actually one of the reasons I use humor a lot in my lecturing, because it's how I know that people are listening to everything else. If they're laughing at the right time, it means they were listening the rest of the time too. But it's a really hard thing and it's different than having a one on one conversation where I can look at your eyes and your facial expression and get some read on what's going on. Audiences don't think they have a job other than to just enjoy, so they'll just sit flat faced, passive, no back channeling where they're giving you head nods. You've got to work really hard. So that's number one. Number two, when it comes to having conversations. And I have to give credit, this comes from David Rockey, and one of the things he said to me long ago is, you've got to think differently, separately, about before, during, and after. When you're in the moment of having a conversation, don't try to do too much thinking because you can't, you're just going to muck it up. 

[00:21:08] It's like a baseball player thinking as they're swinging. You don't want that, you're going to choke. So do your thinking before and after, right? Before you go into an interaction, think about the things you want to say. Also think about the mindset you want to have. If you want to have that mindset of perspective getting and humility, remind yourself. And then after you want to do a postmortem and be ruthless with yourself and say, this is what didn't work. And if you got into things that you wish you hadn't said, take that time to say, I'm going to write to that person and say, I wish I hadn't said that. And I think a lot of other things too, that are a lot nicer than that. And then the third thing, learning the kind of communicator you are, so that you can learn what your strengths and weaknesses are. Compensate for the weaknesses and play to your strengths. One of the ones I use in writing is, are you an over or under communicator? Most of us are not very good at communicating. It's why it scares us so much. 

[00:22:04] Matt Abrahams: Those three ingredients are critical and the recipe for successful communication is clear. The last point you made about really know yourself and what type of communicator you are. I want to thank you for helping us get better insight into the type of communicators we are and the type of people we are. The fact that you get to look under the hood and look in the brain and come forward with some ideas and the guidance to be driven by humility and perspective getting, I think are critical for all of us. Thank you for your time. 

[00:22:34] Matt Lieberman: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:22:38] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about neuroscience and communication, please listen to episode 24 with Baba Shiv and episode 39 with David Eagleman. This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram and check out FasterSmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter.