Why Conversations Go Wrong

Hidden Brain

This episode of Hidden Brain explores why conversations often go wrong, drawing on insights from linguist Deborah Tannen about how differing conversational styles—shaped by culture,

Key takeaways

• Conversational styles vary widely based on cultural and personal background, leading to misunderstandings even among close family members.
• What one person perceives as an interruption may be a sign of enthusiasm or engagement in another's culture.

Main topics

• Cross-cultural communication within families and close relationships
• The role of conversational style in conflict and misunderstanding

Notable quotes

"You say tomato, I say tomato. If you travel abroad, you instinctively know that the customs in other countries are different."

Conclusion

Misunderstandings in conversation often stem not from malice but from unexamined differences in

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:00) This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Speaker 7 (0:03) One of the most famous comedy sketches Speaker 6 (0:05) of the 20th century is built on a simple misunderstanding. Speaker 2 (0:16) It's Speaker 6 (0:17) the routine from Abbott and Costello, who's on first. Speaker 2 (0:25) The duo first Speaker 6 (0:31) performed the sketch in the 1930s and continued to refine it over Speaker 7 (0:35) the next two decades. They rarely did it the same way twice. Speaker 2 (0:50) Part Speaker 6 (0:51) of what makes the skit funny is that we are in on the joke. But what happens when the joke's on us? Speaker 6 (1:02) When real-life conversations go off the rails because of miscommunication or a misunderstanding, it's no laughing matter. Speaker 5 (1:09) 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? Speaker 7 (1:27) This week on Hidden Brain... how the unthinking patterns in the way we express ourselves can cause unneeded pain and conflict, and how we can learn to talk and listen better. Speaker 7 (2:01) You say tomato, I say tomato. If you travel abroad, you instinctively know that the customs in other countries are different. People have different ways of saying hello and goodbye, different rules for conversations with friends. In recent decades, the linguist Deborah Tannen has discovered that many of us don't need to travel to exotic lands to experience the bewilderment and confusion of cross-cultural communication. We can experience those very same feelings when we talk to our own siblings, parents, partners, friends, and colleagues. She studies why this happens and how we can all have better conversations with the people in our lives. Deborah Tannen, welcome to Hidden Brain. Speaker 5 (2:45) Such a pleasure to be here. Thank you. Speaker 7 (2:48) You were born in Brooklyn, New York. Your parents were immigrants, one from Poland, one from Russia. They were both very alert to the ways people use language, but also alert to subtleties in human relationships. Can you tell me a little bit about the conversations you had at home and also the conversations you sometimes had about those conversations? Speaker 5 (3:09) 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 ve'chalila, something like heaven forbid. And he said, but she said chalila ve'chas. And he said, I remember because nobody else said it that way. So he had that attunement. two 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 a two-mental language and two relationships kind of came together for me. Speaker 7 (4:07) 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? Speaker 5 (4:24) Yes. I would ask him a question. Don's having a party. Do you want to go? And he would say something like, OK. Now, to me, OK 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? Nowhere in the back I'm 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. Speaker 7 (5:03) Deborah was intrigued by the many ways people understood and misunderstood each other. Eventually, she returned to the United States and began a Ph.D. in linguistics. One Thanksgiving, she decided to do some research by recording a conversation with friends. Speaker 5 (5:19) I wonder how our grandparents and parents felt about Thanksgiving. Two Speaker 7 (5:25) were from California. One was from the U.K. Deborah and two others were New Yorkers. Speaker 5 (5:31) It was simply my best friend, his brother, his former wife, and two of his friends who were in town. Speaker 2 (5:39) Remember where W.I. and S. used to be? No. And they built the big, huge skyscraper there? Speaker 5 (5:43) No. Where was that? Speaker 2 (5:45) Right where Central Park West met Broadway. Is that Columbus Circle? Is that Columbus Circle? Here's Columbus Circle. Now it's Speaker 5 (5:53) the Speaker 2 (5:53) Huntington-Hartford Museum. Speaker 5 (5:55) That's the Huntington Speaker 2 (5:55) -Hartford, right? Speaker 5 (5:55) 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. Speaker 2 (6:10) He's Speaker 1 (6:10) a Speaker 2 (6:10) sociologist who's so brilliant. You have to read him. And it goes on. Speaker 2 (6:19) And I Speaker 5 (6:20) 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 any time 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 woman, while they were just waiting for a normal pause so that they could come in, one of the New Yorkers would get the sense, uh-oh, you know, they have nothing to say. We might as well fill this pause. What's to analyze? Speaker 2 (7:10) There hasn't been one misunderstanding. We've all understood each other perfectly. What do you mean by that? Speaker 7 (7:19) 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? Speaker 5 (7:37) 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 people who had been part of the conversation. They listened to it and checked it for me. Speaker 7 (8:02) 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? Speaker 5 (8:27) Well, one of the insights is that you have to look more deeply to see what the intentions were and how the way one person speaks is actually influenced by how another person speaks. Some people might have concluded the New Yorkers are interrupting because they're starting to talk when someone else is speaking. Well, sometimes we talk along as a way of showing enthusiasm. We're so interested. We don't wait for you to stop. We talk along. That Speaker 2 (8:57) was my fault. I shook hands Speaker 5 (8:58) with Rubenstein once. Speaker 2 (9:00) Yeah, we did together. That's right. We did together. Wasn't it incredible? I would have liked a person with this. Rubenstein's hand. We shook hands with Speaker 5 (9:09) Rubenstein. And Speaker 2 (9:11) he had his red stubby hands. Speaker 5 (9:13) They were like Speaker 2 (9:14) shivvies. Speaker 5 (9:15) They were like putty. Really? Completely soft and red. If we do that with someone who thinks one voice goes at a time, if you begin speaking while I'm speaking, that means you're interrupting and I'll stop. Well, who created that interruption? It took 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 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 Speaker 2 (9:59) should we do that? Should we start with the lady who was asked? Okay. Did you hear? We have to say boy, girl, boy. Boy, girl, boy. Did you hear about the lady who was asked? What? Did you hear about the lady who was asked? And Speaker 5 (10:11) 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. Speaker 7 (10:27) 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. Speaker 5 (10:36) 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. Yeah, my best friend. But one of the guests was a friend of his who was visiting from Los Angeles. His name was Chuck. So I was trying to be friendly to Chuck and make him feel welcome here. So the truth is I knew the answers to these questions because Carl had told me. But I was trying to be nice to Chuck and give him the floor. And the conversation went something like this. I said, you from L.A.? You live in L.A.? Yeah. You're visiting? You're visiting here? What do you do there? What do you do there? Speaker 2 (11:21) I work at Disney. You're a writer? Speaker 5 (11:25) Artist? Yeah. Speaker 2 (11:28) I write advertising copy. Speaker 5 (11:31) It was one after another and this high-pitched, clipped syntax. And when I listened to the tape, I realized it was having the opposite effect of what I expected. He wasn't taking the floor and he wasn't talking. And I talked to him about it afterwards. I'm still in touch with all these people who were there. He was just caught off guard by the rapidity of my questions. So, but that's a permanent full-time thing you have? So you eat? Speaker 2 (11:59) Yeah. Speaker 5 (11:59) It seemed like he was being assaulted by machine gun fire. And instead of backing off... Did you go Speaker 2 (12:07) there for that purpose? Speaker 5 (12:09) And downshifting. I was putting on more and more of these questions. Can't you Speaker 2 (12:13) get that job? My dad's worked for us since 1937. Right. Speaker 7 (12:17) So the interesting thing there is that if you share a conversational style with someone, you essentially can play this game where, in other words, you can interrupt the flow of a conversation with sort of very quick machine gun exchanges, and neither party thinks of it as being obnoxious or rude. But if you don't share the same conversational style, so the very same interruption can come across as being completely different and clearly... Over the Thanksgiving dinner, some of that was happening. Speaker 5 (12:43) 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 universal about human relations and about conversational style. If you talk to someone who shares a conversational style with you, You just talk in a way that to you makes sense. It makes sense to them. And it isn't only that they don't think you're rude. It's that they appreciate the way you are appreciating them. It is like a sign of we get each other. This is a great conversation. A perfectly tuned conversation is a vision of sanity, a reassurance that you're a right sort of person and all's right with the world. Speaker 7 (13:46) 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. Speaker 5 (14:02) These things are so automatic that when things start to go wrong, we don't look at that level. You don't walk away saying, you know, that was kind of awkward because I think you expect a millisecond shorter pause than I do. You walk away saying the kind of person you are. You 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? Speaker 7 (14:30) 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 though Both of us have the best of intentions. Speaker 5 (15:01) 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 noticed it said, oh, look at that duck, isn't that charming? And her friend said, you're not listening to me. And she said, of course I'm listening to you. Why would you think I'm not listening to you? Well, why are you talking about the ducks? Speaker 7 (15:49) When we come back, how these misunderstandings produce deep wounds in relationships and keep people from the happiness that is actually within their reach. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Speaker 6 (16:10) 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, we have different styles of conversation or different psychological orientations. Speaker 6 (16:43) 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? Speaker 5 (17:01) 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. And 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. Speaker 2 (17:39) Tim, Tim, Tim, the first step for greatness is humbling yourself. Oh, yeah. Maybe you shouldn't try to have all the answers and instead ask more questions. You see, Tim, a truly wise man always has more questions than answers. Speaker 7 (17:54) Deborah, I want to play you another clip from Home Improvement. Jill, who's the wife, has prepared a surprise romantic dinner. She gets on the phone and asks Tim to come home. He says he'll be back in 15 minutes. But he ends up staying the whole evening at a bar with his friends. Here's what happens when he comes home. Speaker 2 (18:13) I'm really sorry, but the guys and I got in some real serious 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're gonna be home in 15 minutes and then you worked Because I'm flirting with you like crazy on the phone You didn't even notice and most of all because I went to all this trouble for nothing I spent the whole evening by myself and now you're stuck with a plate of cold food Oh, don't worry about me. I ain't at the bar. Speaker 7 (19:05) So unpack what just happened here, Debra. Speaker 5 (19:08) I think the trouble could be traced to the conversation where she feels that she communicated in her way of speaking to him that she was flirting, that she was trying to set up a romantic atmosphere, and then didn't tell him directly, come home, I have a surprise for you, or it's really important you come home tonight. He said he'll be home in 15 minutes, fine. She took him at his word. He, and this is such a common cultural difference between women and men, if you think of women's and men's ways of speaking as cultural differences, he expected that his wife would just tell him directly. And so his antennae were not rolled out for picking up those hints. And he feels falsely accused. You didn't tell me there was a special reason for me to come home, so how could I know? What, do you expect me to be a mind reader? Speaker 7 (20:04) 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? Speaker 5 (20:19) People who tend to be direct don't understand why anyone would be indirect, but sometimes they can understand it if you think of the birthday present routine. Speaker 5 (20:30) You want the person you love and who loves you to give you a birthday present that you would want because it's a sign that they care, that they are willing to take the trouble to figure out what to get you, that they know you well enough to pick the right thing. Now, you could say, well, why don't you just tell them what you want? That would guarantee that you get what you want. You might get what you want, but you don't get all those other things that you want. Evidence that they care, evidence that they know you well enough to know what you would want. And so that is how indirectness works in other contexts as well. And I think it's so important to point out, first of all, it's not always women and men. And 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. Speaker 7 (21:26) The Speaker 5 (21:26) 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. Speaker 7 (21:51) When misunderstandings arise in closed relationships as a result of these underlying differences in communication styles, it can sometimes send a big message to both parties. This relationship isn't working. Deborah mentions a real-life example she heard of a couple driving in a car. Speaker 5 (22:12) And she had said to him, are you thirsty, dear? Would you like to stop for a drink? And he wasn't. So he said no. And then later it turned out that she was annoyed because she had wanted to stop. And his feeling, kind of like the home improvement example, was why didn't she tell me? Why does she play games with me? Why do I have to be a mind reader? And I said, you know, I suspect that when your wife said, are you thirsty? Would you like to stop for a drink? she probably was not expecting a yes-no answer. Speaker 6 (22:42) She Speaker 5 (22:42) 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. Speaker 7 (23:20) You cite the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who talks about something called the message and the metamessage. Can you explain those terms to me? Speaker 5 (23:28) Yes. The message is the meaning of the words. The metamessage is what it says about the relationship that you say these