“Why people ‘click’ with some people, but not others, is one of the great unsolved mysteries of science,” neuroscientist Thalia Wheatley and her colleagues wrote in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass. When we align with someone through conversation, they explained, it feels wonderful, in part because our brains have evolved to crave these kinds of connections.
The desire to connect has pushed people to form communities, protect their offspring, seek out new friends and alliances. It’s one reason why our species has survived. “Human beings have the rare capacity,” they wrote, quoting the novelist Michael Dorris, “to connect with each other, against all odds.”
To communicate with someone, we must connect with them. When we absorb what someone is saying, and they comprehend what we say, it’s because our brains have, to some degree, aligned.
Sometimes this connection occurs with just one other person. Other times, it happens within a group, or a large audience. But whenever it happens, our brains and bodies become alike because we are, in the language of neuroscientists, neurally entrained.
As researchers have scrutinized how entrainment occurs, they have discovered that some people are particularly skilled at this kind of synchronization. Some individuals—let’s call them supercommunicators—seem to synchronize effortlessly with just about anyone.
Neuroscientist Beau Sievers, who earned his Ph.D. with Wheately, wanted to find out why. None of the studies he read seemed to explain why some people were better at synchronization than others. So he decided to stage an experiment to see if he could figure it out.
As researchers have scrutinized how neural entrainment occurs, they have discovered that some people are particularly skilled at this kind of synchronization.
To begin, Sievers and his colleagues gathered dozens of volunteers and asked them to watch a series of movie clips that were designed to be very difficult to understand. Some, for example, were in a foreign language. Others were brief scenes from the middle of a film, completely decontextualized. To make the clips even harder to follow, the researchers had removed all audio and subtitles, so what participants saw were confusing, silent performances: a bald irate man in strained conversation with a blond heavyset fellow. Are they friends or enemies? In another, a cowboy takes a bath while a second man observes from the doorway. Is he a sibling? A lover?
The volunteers’ brains were monitored as they watched these clips, and researchers saw that each person reacted slightly differently. Some were confused. Others were entertained. But no two brain scans were alike.
Then, each participant was assigned to a small group that was instructed to answer a few questions together: “Is the bald man angry at the blond man?” “Is the man in the doorframe sexually attracted to the man in the bath?”
After the groups spent an hour discussing their answers, they were put back into the brain scanners and shown the same clips. This time, the researchers saw that each person’s neural impulses had synchronized with their groupmates. Participating in a conversation—debating what they had seen, discussing plot points—had caused their brains to align.
However, there was a second, even more interesting discovery: some of the groups had become much more synchronized than others. The brains of these participants looked strikingly alike during the second scan, as if they had agreed to think precisely the same way.
Sievers suspected these groups included someone special, the type of person who made it easier for everyone to align. But who were they?
His first hypothesis was that having a strong leader made synchronization easier. Indeed, in some groups, there was one person who had taken charge from the start. “I think it’s gonna have a happy ending,” one such leader, known as Participant 4 in Group D, told his teammates regarding a clip of a child who appeared to be looking for his parents. Participant 4 was talkative and direct. He assigned people roles and kept them on task. Perhaps Participant 4, in addition to being a leader, was also a supercommunicator?
But when Sievers looked at the data, he found that those strong leaders often didn’t help people align. In fact, groups with a dominant leader had the least amount of neural synchrony. Participant 4 had made it harder for his groupmates to sync up. When he dominated the conversation, he pushed everyone else into their own, separate thoughts.
High centrality participants tended to ask ten to twenty times as many questions as other participants.
Rather, the groups with the greatest synchrony had one or two people who behaved very differently than Participant 4. These people tended to speak less than dominant leaders, and when they did open their mouths, it was usually to ask questions. They repeated others’ ideas and were quick to admit their own confusion or make fun of themselves. They encouraged their groupmates (“That’s really smart! Tell me more about what you think!”) and laughed at others’ jokes.
They didn’t necessarily stand out as particularly talkative or clever, but when they spoke, everyone listened closely. And, somehow, they made it easier for other people to speak up. They made conversations flow. Sievers began referring to these people as high centrality participants.
Here, for instance, are two high centrality participants discussing that bathtub scene, which featured the actors Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck:
High Centrality Participant 1: What’s with that scene?
High Centrality Participant 2: I have no idea. I was lost. [Laughter.]
Participant 3: Casey is watching Brad in the bath. Based on the length of the stare, we think Casey is attracted to Brad. [Group laughter.] Unrequited love.
High Centrality Participant 2: Oh, I like that! I don’t know what “unrequited” means, but yeah!
Participant 3: Like, not returned.
High Centrality Participant 2: Oh, okay, yeah.
High Centrality Participant 1: What do you think will happen in the next scene?
Participant 3: I feel like they are gonna rob a bank. [Laughter.]
High Centrality Participant 1: I like that! I like that!
High Centrality Participant 2: Yeah. I was waiting for some other epiphany. [Laughter.]
High centrality participants tended to ask ten to twenty times as many questions as other participants. When a group got stuck, they made it easy for everyone to take a quick break by bringing up a new topic or interrupting an awkward silence with a small joke.
But the most important difference between high centrality participants and everyone else was that the high centrality participants were constantly adjusting how they communicated, in order to match their companions. They subtly reflected shifts in other people’s moods and attitudes. When someone got serious, they matched that seriousness. When a discussion went light, they were the first to play along. They changed their minds frequently and let themselves be swayed by their groupmates.
In one conversation, when a participant brought up an unexpectedly serious idea—that a character in a clip had been abandoned, the participant’s tone hinting that he might understand abandonment firsthand—the high centrality participant immediately matched his affect:
Participant 2: How do you think this movie will end?
Participant 6: I don’t think it’s a happy ending.
High Centrality Participant: You don’t think it’s a happy ending?
Participant 6: No.
High Centrality Participant: Why not?
Participant 6: I don’t know. This movie seemed to be more darker than . . . [Silence.]
. . .
High Centrality Participant: How will it end?
. . .
Participant 6: It might be the nephew and the parents died or something like this, and they . . .
Participant 3: He’s just been abandoned.
High Centrality Participant: Yeah, abandoned for the night. Yeah.
Within moments of that exchange, the entire group became serious-minded and started discussing what abandonment felt like. They made room for Participant 6 to discuss his emotions and experiences. The high centrality participant matched Participant 6’s gravity, which nudged others to do so as well.
The high centrality participants, Sievers and his coauthors wrote, were much more “likely to adapt their own brain activity to the group,” and “played an outsized role in creating group alignment by facilitating conversation.” But they didn’t merely mirror others—rather, they gently led people, nudging them to hear one another, or to explain themselves more clearly. They matched their groupmates’ conversational styles, making room for seriousness or laughter.
When polled afterward, few people realized how much the high centrality participants had swayed their own choices.
And they had enormous influence on how people ended up answering the questions they had been assigned. In fact, whichever opinion the high centrality participants endorsed usually became the group’s consensus answer. But that influence was almost invisible. When polled afterward, few people realized how much the high centrality participants had swayed their own choices. Not every group had such a person—but those that did all seemed closer to one another afterwards, and their brain scans showed they were more aligned.
When Sievers looked at the lives of high centrality participants, he found they were unusual in other respects. They had much larger social networks than the average person and were more likely to be elected to positions of authority or entrusted with power. Other people turned to them when they needed to discuss something serious or ask for advice. “And that makes sense,” Sievers told me. “Because if you’re the kind of person who’s easy to talk to, then lots of people are going to want to talk to you.”
In other words, the high centrality participants were supercommunicators. Something I’ve learned is that anyone can become a supercommunicator—and, in fact, many of us already are, if we learn to unlock our instincts. Every meaningful conversation is made up of countless small choices. There are fleeting moments when the right question, or a vulnerable admission, or an empathetic word can completely change a dialogue.
Adapted from Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg. Published by Random House. Copyright © 2024 by Charles Duhigg. All rights reserved.
