Supercommunicators, page 11
The writers finished their script, auditioned actors, shot the pilot, and delivered it to the studio bosses, who recruited test audiences to provide feedback. This was largely a formality, however. Everyone was certain viewers would love the show.
Audiences hated it. They disliked the characters, particularly Gilda and Katie, who struck them as toxic and threatening. But most of all, the audiences were confused. How were they supposed to feel about these characters? Were the physicists innocent children or sexualized adults? Were they lovable prodigies or gullible fools? None of the characters, viewers said, seemed to click with each other. The show was emotionally bewildering.
“You cannot make a sitcom where the audience doesn’t know how to feel,” Prady told me. “It can’t be twenty-two minutes of jokes with nothing emotionally holding it together.”
The Big Bang Theory had failed to ignite. However, the studio bosses offered Lorre and Prady a lifeline: If they reworked the script, they could reshoot the pilot and try again. When he got the news, Lorre turned to Prady. “I told Bill, ‘We gotta dive into these wonderful, brilliant misfits and figure out how to make it clear who they really are.’ ”
FREEZE-DRIED ASTRONAUT FEELINGS
From infancy, even before we learn to speak, we absorb how to infer people’s emotions from their behaviors: Their body language, vocal inflections, glances and grimaces, sighs and laughs. As we grow older, however, this capacity can atrophy. We start to pay increasing attention to what people say rather than what they do, to the point where we can fail to notice nonlinguistic clues. Spoken language is so information rich, so easy to rely upon, that it lulls us into ignoring hints that someone might be, say, upset—crossed arms, creased brow, downcast eyes—and instead focus on their words when they say, It’s nothing. I feel fine.
Some people, however, have a talent for detecting emotions, even when they’re unspoken. They exhibit an emotional intelligence that seems to help them hear what’s unsaid. We all know people like this: Friends who seem to intuit when we’re feeling down, even if we haven’t said anything; managers who sense when a kind word is needed, or a bit of tough love, to help us get over a hump at work. It’s natural to assume these people are unusually observant, or uncommonly sensitive. Sometimes they are. But years of research indicates this is a skill anyone can develop. We can learn to identify the nonverbal clues that indicate someone’s true emotions and use these hints to understand what they are feeling.
In the 1980s, a NASA psychiatrist named Terence McGuire was thinking about this very thing, wondering if it was possible to test whether someone—like, say, a job applicant—possessed the skills to pick up on other people’s feelings. In particular, McGuire wanted to identify which of NASA’s astronaut candidates were talented at emotional communication. McGuire was NASA’s lead psychiatrist for manned flight, in charge of screening the thousands of men and women applying to be astronauts each year. His job was to evaluate their psychological readiness for the stresses of space.
NASA, at that moment, was confronting a new kind of challenge. For most of the agency’s history, manned space flights had been relatively brief, typically just a day or two, usually no longer than a week and a half. But in 1984, President Ronald Reagan ordered NASA to start work on an international space station where people could live for up to a year. To McGuire this meant NASA needed a new kind of astronaut—and new types of psychological evaluations. “The advent of the space station, with minimal tours of six months in a crowded environment from which there is no respite, suggests the need for greater attention to personality factors,” McGuire wrote to his bosses in 1987.
NASA already had exceedingly high standards for potential astronauts: Applicants had to pass strenuous physicals; they needed a degree in science or engineering and experience in tasks like piloting fighter jets; they couldn’t be too tall (anyone over six foot four wouldn’t fit in a spacesuit) or too short (less than four foot eight and your feet wouldn’t touch the floor and you might slip out of the shoulder belts); they had to show they could stay calm—one test sometimes used required them to keep their blood pressure steady during underwater maneuvers—and could handle the stresses (and, optimally, avoid vomiting) on an airplane simulating zero-g.
But now, McGuire was convinced that NASA needed to start screening for something else: Emotional intelligence. The concept was just then being defined by two psychologists at Yale, who argued that there was a form of “social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions.” People with emotional intelligence knew how to build relationships and empathize with colleagues, as well as regulate their own emotionality and the emotions of those around them. “These individuals,” the Yale researchers wrote in the journal Imagination, Cognition and Personality in 1990, “are aware of their own feelings and those of others. They are open to positive and negative aspects of internal experience, are able to label them, and when appropriate, communicate them…. The emotionally intelligent person is often a pleasure to be around and leaves others feeling better. The emotionally intelligent person, however, does not mindlessly seek pleasure, but rather attends to emotion in the path toward growth.”
Some recent events had made clear the importance of emotional intelligence while flying through space. In 1976, a Soviet space mission had been canceled midway through after the crew began experiencing shared delusions and complaining of a strange scent that was later determined to be imaginary. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had diagnosed depression among astronauts and cosmonauts during, and after, missions in space, and had found that this despondency could lead to bickering, paranoia, and defensiveness with colleagues.
But NASA’s biggest worries focused on breakdowns in communication. The agency was still haunted by the events of 1968, when the crew of the Apollo 7 began arguing with mission control as they hurtled through the atmosphere. The disputes had specific causes at first: The three astronauts complained they were being rushed to complete tasks and given unclear commands. But the arguments gradually morphed into a formless anger and expressions of general discontent, until the astronauts were fighting about even minor issues: The quality of the food, NASA’s orders to appear on an upcoming television broadcast, poor designs that made it difficult to use the bathroom, mission control’s tone of voice. Spurring on these battles was the on-board commander, Wally Schirra, a former navy test pilot with an exemplary career up to that point. NASA psychologists later suggested that, due to the emotional stresses of the mission and his grief over the recent deaths of three other astronauts in a cockpit fire, Schirra had become combative and suspicious as the trip progressed. After they returned to earth, Schirra and his co-astronauts never flew into space again.
NASA needed people who could control their feelings, were sensitive to others’ emotions, and could connect with colleagues, even when tensions were running high and they were stuck in a small can hundreds of miles above the earth. McGuire was brought into NASA around the same time as the Apollo 7 debacle, and for the next twenty years he screened astronaut candidates, looking for clues that they might be prone to depression or combativeness. But now, as space missions were set to get longer, he felt something more was needed: NASA had to find astronauts who were not only free of psychological weaknesses, but, in fact, the opposite: People with enough emotional intelligence to live alongside colleagues in space while navigating the tensions, boredom, arguments, and anxiety that come from being together in a small work area that doubles as living space, surrounded by vacuum, for months at a time.
However, McGuire also knew how hard it was to screen candidates for such traits. The biggest problem was that nearly every applicant’s psychological evaluation looked basically the same. No matter what tests he used, which questions he asked, he couldn’t get inside candidates’ heads deep enough to figure out how they would act during a six-month mission, or a tense moment in space. Every applicant seemed to know what they were supposed to say during interviews. They had practiced describing their biggest weaknesses and greatest regrets, had perfected explaining how they managed stress. McGuire’s psychological screenings couldn’t differentiate the emotionally intelligent from those who faked it really well. “I, like my predecessors, utilized a formidable battery of psychological testing,” McGuire wrote to his NASA bosses. “But I found myself disappointed with the yield.”
So McGuire began rereviewing twenty years of audio recordings from past applicant interviews, looking for clues that he had missed, the kinds of signals that differentiate the emotionally intelligent from everyone else. He had access to personnel records, so he knew, among those who had been selected, which candidates had gone on to become strong leaders, and which others had eventually washed out because they couldn’t play nice.
It was during these review sessions, as McGuire listened to old recordings of interviews, that he picked up on something he hadn’t noticed before: Some of the candidates laughed differently.
LAUGHING AT WHAT’S NOT FUNNY
Laughter might seem like a strange place to look for emotional intelligence, but, in fact, it’s an example of a basic truth of emotional communication: What’s important is not just hearing another person’s feelings but showing that we have heard them. Laughter is one way of proving that we hear how someone feels.
In the mid-1980s, a few years before McGuire began looking for new ways to test astronaut applicants, a psychologist at the University of Maryland named Robert Provine had started digging into when—and why—people laugh. Provine and a group of assistants had observed people at malls, eavesdropped in bars, and ridden buses while equipped with hidden audio recorders. Ultimately, they collected firsthand observations on 1,200 instances of “naturally occurring human laughter.”
Provine’s not-too-surprising hypothesis, at first, was that people laughed because they encountered something funny. He quickly realized this was wrong. “Contrary to our expectations,” he reported in the journal American Scientist, “we found that most conversational laughter is not a response to structured attempts at humor, such as jokes or stories. Less than 20 percent of the laughter in our sample was a response to anything resembling a formal effort at humor.”
Rather, people laughed because they wanted to connect with the person they were speaking with. The vast majority of laughs, Provine wrote, “seemed to follow rather banal remarks,” such as “Does anyone have a rubber band?”; “It was nice meeting you too”; and “I think I’m done.”
“Mutual playfulness, in-group feeling and positive emotional tone—not comedy—mark the social settings of most naturally occurring laughter,” Provine concluded. Laughter is powerful, he wrote, because it is contagious, “immediate and involuntary, involving the most direct communication possible between people: Brain to brain.”
We laugh, in other words, to show someone that we want to connect with them—and our companions laugh back to demonstrate they want to connect with us, as well. This is the same kind of reciprocity that powers the Fast Friends Procedure. It’s an example of emotional contagion. And so it follows that we exhibit emotional intelligence not just by hearing another person’s feelings, but by showing we have heard them. Laughter, and other nonlinguistic expressions such as gasps and sighs, or smiles and frowns, are embodiments of the matching principle, which says that we communicate by aligning our behaviors until our brains become entrained.
But how we match other people matters. While reviewing his recordings, Provine noticed something interesting: If two people were laughing at the same time, but one of them was caught up in a belly laugh, while the other was just chuckling, they usually didn’t feel closer afterward. When we laugh together, it’s not just the laughter that’s important. It’s similar intensities—the evidence of a desire to connect—that is critical. If someone gives a half-hearted chuckle while we are doubled over with laughter, we’re likely to sense their tepid enthusiasm and see it as a hint we’re not aligned, “a signal of dominance/submission or acceptance/rejection,” as Provine wrote. If we chuckle only slightly at someone’s joke, while they laugh uproariously, we’ll both see it as a sign that we’re not in sync—or, worse, that one of us is trying too hard, or the other is not trying hard enough.
This observation—that laughter is useful because it helps us determine if others genuinely want to connect—is important, because it tells us something about how the matching principle works: The reason why simply mimicking another person’s laughter, or the words they use, or their expressions doesn’t bring us closer is because it doesn’t really show anything. Simply mirroring someone doesn’t prove that we genuinely want to understand them. If you laugh loudly, and I merely smile, it won’t feel like I want to bond. It will feel like I’m uninterested, or patronizing. What matters isn’t speaking and acting alike, but rather matching one another in ways that convey the desire to align.
In one study published in 2016, participants who listened to one-second recordings of people laughing could accurately distinguish between friends laughing together, and strangers trying to laugh alike. Laughter, like many nonlinguistic expressions, is useful because it’s hard to fake. When someone isn’t genuinely laughing, we can tell. The participants listening to the recordings in that study, based on just one second of decontextualized sound, could tell when people felt aligned and when they were likely forcing it. A joke might not be funny, but if we both agree to laugh in similar ways, we’re signaling to each other that we want to connect.
MOOD AND ENERGY
So how do we signal to others that we’re trying to connect? How do we show others we’re listening to their feelings, and not just mimicking what they say and how they act?
The answer starts with a system that has evolved within our brains, a kind of quick-and-dirty method for gauging other people’s emotional temperature that we usually rely upon without consciously noticing it. This system comes alive whenever we encounter another person, and it functions by pushing us to pay attention to their “mood,” or what psychologists refer to as valence, and their “energy,” or arousal.[*]
When we see someone and they exhibit an emotional behavior—like a laugh, a scowl, or a smile—the first thing we usually notice is their mood (is this person feeling positive or negative?) and their energy level (are they high energy or low energy?). For instance, if you encounter someone who is frowning (negative) and quiet (low energy), you might assume they’re sad or frustrated, but you won’t assume they pose a threat. Your brain won’t start issuing warnings to flee.
However, if they are frowning (negative) and shouting and glaring (high energy) you’ll infer they’re angry or violent, and you’ll become wary. Your brain will generate a mild anxiety that prepares you to scurry away. All we need to make a prediction is to notice someone’s mood and energy. That’s enough to quickly evaluate what they are feeling.
You might not be fully aware that you have noticed someone’s mood and energy when you encounter them. It might occur nonconsciously, and just feel like an instinct. But your brain has evolved to use information on mood and energy to gauge whether someone is a friend or a threat. One benefit of this capacity is that we can judge others’ emotional states very rapidly, with little more than a glance and no prior knowledge of them. Noticing mood and energy allows us to immediately determine whether we should flee or stay, if they’re a potential friend or foe. That’s useful when, say, we’re trying to decide if a stranger is lost and frustrated and needs our help, or is angry and unstable and likely to turn their fury on us.
Mood and energy often show themselves via nonverbal cues. These cues are important because, while it would be nice to know at a glance if someone is angry or frustrated, those kinds of specific emotions “are really, really hard to read with any accuracy,” said Hillary Anger Elfenbein, a professor of organizational behavior at Washington University in St. Louis. Is someone’s brow furrowed because they’re anxious, or are they just concentrating? Are they smiling because they’re pleased to see us, or are they smiling in a way that suggests they are too excited, and a little creepy? Even if we genuinely want to know and match someone’s emotions, that’s hard to do, because we don’t know precisely what they are feeling.
So, instead, our brains have evolved this quick-acting system to examine mood and energy, which provides a general sense, in a split second, of someone’s emotional state. That’s usually enough to figure out how to align, and whether we should feel safe or alarmed.
As the laughter researchers conducted their studies, an interesting finding emerged: When people genuinely laughed together, their mood and energy almost always matched. If one person chuckled softly (positive, low energy), and their companion laughed in a similar way, they usually felt aligned. If another person exploded in laughter (positive, high energy), and their companion laughed back with the same basic volume, cadence, and forcefulness, they felt connected.
But when people were not connecting with each other—when one person was laughing and the other merely playing along—you could tell because, even if they sounded similar, their mood and energy levels didn’t match. Yes, they were both laughing. But one person was laughing loudly while the other was responding with a light chuckle. To someone half listening, they might sound alike. But to anyone paying attention, it was clear their volume and cadence—their energy and mood—were out of sync. The laughs were somewhat similar, but if the valence and arousal didn’t match, it was clear they weren’t aligned.
