Title: If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating

Author: Alan Alda

Completed: July 2023 (Full list of books)

Overview: This book boils down to a few points and a bunch of stories (many involving famous people), about problems with communication and potential solutions. Although a lot of it focuses on science communication and his work the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook, most of the points would improve communication in general. According to Alda, empathy is king when it comes to communication. The presenter must connect with the audience. He sees acting and specifically improv as a way to build empathy with the audience and quotes research to back that up. He also points out anything else that allows people to connect from walking/marching in sync with others to finding similar interests builds empathy and improves communication. Finally, he talks about the power of stories. Throughout this book, he showed his believe in the power of story-telling with anecdotes for every point he makes. Stories can certainly be a useful tool to draw the audience in… even if I didn’t use them here.

Highlights:

• If they could understand these things, why couldn’t I? An accountant would tell me about the tax code in a way that made no sense. A salesman would explain an insurance policy that didn’t seem to have a basis in reality. It wasn’t any consolation when I came to realize that pretty much everybody misunderstands everybody else.
• After a while, I saw that I was having trouble talking with them whenever I thought I knew more than I really did about their work. I was boxing in the scientists with questions that were based on false assumptions. I took a bold step and stopped reading the scientists’ research papers before I met with them. I would come in armed only with curiosity and my own natural ignorance. I was learning the value of bringing my ignorance to the surface. The scientists could see exactly how much I already understood, and they could start there. Ignorance was my ally as long as it was backed up by curiosity. Ignorance without curiosity is not so good,
• I saw how the pull of formality and jargon can yank someone into not relating.
• This is a natural stage in a child’s development. In fact, it’s not until about the age of four or five that it even occurs to children that deception is possible. There’s no point in lying if everybody knows what you’re thinking! But once Theory of Mind develops in a child, it also becomes clear that others might be lying to you, and it’s kind of important to know what’s going on inside these other people’s heads.
• The person who’s communicating something is responsible for how well the other person follows him. If I’m trying to explain something and you don’t follow me, it’s not simply your job to catch up. It’s my job to slow down. This is at the heart of communicating: If I tell you something without making sure you got it, did I really communicate anything?
• The simple act of walking in step produced greater cooperation? And more trust? It seemed hard to believe. But the tests of the groups’ cohesion were standardized. Their reliability had been verified many times over. In other studies, simply tapping in sync, like tapping on a table, produced the same results. After they had spent some time tapping in sync, the subjects paid more attention to the good of the group, and they made fewer selfish choices.
• Someone might be selling a product to the class, but the class has to work hard to guess what the product is, because the sales pitch is entirely in gibberish—nonsense sounds that sound like a language but have no meaning.
• Woolley’s group gathered 697 volunteers and divided them into small teams of two to five members each. They tested them at a number of tasks and found that the average intelligence of a group could not significantly predict the group’s performance. What could predict it, though, were three factors: the ability of the members of the group to freely take part in discussions, members’ scores on a standardized test of empathy, and, surprisingly, the presence of women in the group.
• studied the fifteen hundred S&P firms over a fifteen-year period and found that when they had women in the top managerial positions, the firms were more successful. Interestingly, firms that had a strategy of innovation enjoyed the most success (but those that had a less innovative strategy did no worse having women at the helm). The authors suggest that the presence of women in top management positions helps specifically in situations where the focus is innovation. This, they say, is because women’s social skills lead in part to better decision making overall and also because studies have shown that “gender diversity in particular facilitates creativity.”
• He struck a chord when he wrote about the pitfalls of assuming students are totally responsible for their own motivation, noting that “this can lead researchers to blame group members for their lack of motivation.” Instead, he feels that it’s up to the leader of the group to motivate the students, or else things can break down.
• All of this suggests to me that an inescapable product of improvisation is empathy.
• On the one hand, you can command good performance from someone in exchange for not firing them. On the other hand, you might be able to ignite the desire in a person to perform well by tuning in to their state of mind. And, in fact, this has been shown by research to be the better way.
• Instead of saying, “You’ve done a bad thing; don’t do it again,” he’s saying, “You’ve done really good things; do more.” The first gives them a vision of failure they somehow have to avoid, while the second gives them a model of success to live up to. The CEO I was having lunch with might not have realized it, but he was following the improv principle of Yes And. He was accepting what the other player was giving him and adding to it.
• not only is one of our core assumptions that a deep awareness of the other person is at the heart of good communication, but we also believe that empathy can be increased.
• researchers wondered if experience in acting would lead to growth in empathy and Theory of Mind. To test this hypothesis, they did two studies, one on elementary school students and the other on high school freshmen. All the students were given standard empathy and Theory of Mind tests before and after the training, to see if the training had any effect. It did. Both groups of students trained in acting showed significant gains in their empathy scores. Adolescents showed even more progress than younger kids: They had significant gains not only in empathy, but in a test of Theory of Mind, as well. Control groups that had been given other kinds of arts training, such as training in music or visual arts, showed no such improvement. Only theater training did it.
• The stereotypical view of empathy is that it makes you soft, that you have to abandon it if you need to be tough. On the contrary, when you have to be tough—or even if you choose to be cruel—empathy can be a useful tool. It doesn’t necessarily make you a nice guy.
• If the first principle of teaching is to start with what they know, I think the Flame Challenge suggests that next in importance is that a little autonomy can give students the joy of discovery.
• “So, how can we excite emotions in people who have no training in what we’re talking about?” I asked her. “Story,” she said.
• the trouble with a lecture is that it answers questions that haven’t been asked.
• We can identify with someone who has a goal, but we root for someone with both a goal and an obstacle.