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  70 percent of our conversations are social in nature: This is an oversimplification of how our brains work, but a useful one for illustrative purposes. Usually, many different parts of our brains are working at the same time, and the distinctions between these portions of our brains can be unclear.

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  the decision-making mindset becoming dominant: As Beau Sievers wrote, there is “evidence that strongly suggests that when people are using the same brain networks, this is no guarantee that they are in the same mindset, and vice versa.” Sievers wrote that rather than rely on thinking of certain neural networks becoming activated, it is best to use the “notion of mindset that does not require specific and reliable recruitment of single brain networks. A mindset could just be a predisposition to use one’s whole brain in a particular way when presented with certain kinds of information. On this account, a brain being in a mindset is like an orchestra playing a symphony; many symphonies are possible, but only one at a time.”

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  Psychologists who study married couples: Caleb Kealoha, “We Are (Not) in Sync: Inter-brain Synchrony During Interpersonal Conflict” (honors thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 2020).

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  one prominent researcher, John Gottman: John M. Gottman, “Emotional Responsiveness in Marital Conversations,” Journal of Communication 32, no. 3 (1982): 108–20. There are many different reasons couples experience conflict and tension, and many ways to overcome them. Some are described here and in chapter 5. It is also worth noting that approaches to diagnosing and dealing with marital challenges are myriad. Gottman, himself, has written extensively about the “Four Horsemen” of communication issues that can harm relationships: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. In response to fact-checking inquiries, Gottman wrote that “there are several findings for the ‘masters’ of relationship: Maintaining trust and commitment, during conflict a positive-to-negative ratio equal to or exceeding 5 to 1, no four horsemen (criticism, defensiveness, contempt, stonewalling), turning toward bids for connection at least 86 percent of the time, love maps (knowing other person’s inner psychological world), expressing fondness and admiration, using softened startup, effective repair during conflict, and effective psychological smoothing during conflict, an ability to deal with the existential part of gridlocked conflict.”

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  Happy couples ask each other more questions: Adela C. Timmons, Gayla Margolin, and Darby E. Saxbe, “Physiological Linkage in Couples and Its Implications for Individual and Interpersonal Functioning: A Literature Review,” Journal of Family Psychology 29, no. 5 (2015): 720.

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  But she didn’t seem to mind: Lawler mentioned that his decision to play with her son while the woman was on the phone, in his opinion, was also what helped forge a connection. “That actually, I think, is what touched her,” he told me. “I did that simply because it was the right thing to do, not because I was trying to sell her any steel. It was just being human and the right thing to do.”

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  “A case officer creates an ever-deeper relationship”: Randy Burkett, “An Alternative Framework for Agent Recruitment: From MICE to RASCLS,” Studies in Intelligence 57, no. 1 (2013): 7–17.

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  A GUIDE TO USING THESE IDEAS, PART I: THE FOUR RULES FOR A MEANINGFUL CONVERSATION

  In one project: This project was described to me by participants on the condition of confidentiality.

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  CHAPTER TWO: EVERY CONVERSATION IS A NEGOTIATION

  a cold November morning in 1985: The jury deliberations in Wisconsin vs. Leroy Reed were filmed by television producers and portions of those recordings were eventually made into a program for Frontline titled “Inside the Jury Room.” For information on this trial and deliberations, I am indebted to Douglas Maynard, who was kind enough to share transcripts of the full deliberations with me (the Frontline program contains only a partial selection of jurors’ comments). I am also grateful to the producers of the Frontline episode. Transcripts are quoted nearly verbatim, though many exchanges, asides, and interstitial dialogues have not been included. I also relied upon “But Did He Know It Was a Gun?,” International Pragmatics Association Meeting, Mexico City, July 5, 1996; “Truth, But Not the Whole Truth,” The Wall Street Journal, April 14, 1986; Douglas W. Maynard and John F. Manzo, “On the Sociology of Justice: Theoretical Notes from an Actual Jury Deliberation,” Sociological Theory (1993): 171–93.

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  “not be swayed by sympathy”: Taken from Wis JI-Criminal 460, Wisconsin Criminal Jury Instructions.

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  Dr. Behfar Ehdaie specialized in treating prostate cancer: For more on the work of Drs. Ehdaie and Malhotra, please see “Negotiation Strategies for Doctors—and Hospitals,” Harvard Business Review, October 21, 2013; “Bargaining Over How to Treat Cancer,” The Wall Street Journal, September 2, 2017; Behfar Ehdaie et al., “A Systematic Approach to Discussing Active Surveillance with Patients with Low-Risk Prostate Cancer,” European Urology 71, no. 6 (2017): 866–71; Deepak Malhotra, Negotiating the Impossible: How to Break Deadlocks and Resolve Ugly Conflicts (Without Money or Muscle) (Oakland, Calif.: Berrett-Koehler, 2016). In response to fact-checking, Ehdaie clarified that he felt that patients could hear him, but he was not discussing prostate cancer risk in an effective manner.

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  doctors advise against surgery: Laurence Klotz, “Active Surveillance for Prostate Cancer: For Whom?” Journal of Clinical Oncology 23, no. 32 (2005): 8165–69; Marc A. Dall’Era et al., “Active Surveillance for Prostate Cancer: A Systematic Review of the Literature,” European Urology 62, no. 6 (2012): 976–83.

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  Active surveillance carries its own risks: Ehdaie explained that “active surveillance aims to monitor a cancer closely and intervene within the window of cure to treat the prostate cancer…. Dying with prostate cancer may apply only to older and more unhealthy men…. We also enroll younger men with prostate cancer into active surveillance because the evidence demonstrates that these men do as well as men with initial surgery or radiation therapy because we are monitoring their cancer closely and can intervene within the window of cure, or the cancer will remain low risk for their lifetime and never require treatment.”

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  he felt active surveillance was the right decision: Ehdaie stressed that the risk associated with active surveillance is not equivalent to a 3 percent mortality and that, in fact, “studies demonstrate that there are no differences in survival between immediate treatment and active surveillance for low-risk disease.”

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  Surveys indicate that: According to the American Cancer Society, there are roughly 268,000 prostate cancer diagnoses per year, based on the most recent data. If roughly half of those are low-risk, and the rate of choosing active surveillance is roughly 60 percent (estimates provided by Dr. Ehdaie), then roughly 53,000 men per year are opting for surgeries that might not be necessary.

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  opt for unnecessary surgeries: Matthew R. Cooperberg, William Meeks, Raymond Fang, Franklin D. Gaylis, William J. Catalona, and Danil V. Makarov, “Time Trends and Variation in the Use of Active Surveillance for Management of Low-Risk Prostate Cancer in the US,” JAMA network open 6, no. 3 (2023): e231439-e231439.

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  negotiate a peace deal: The Colombia Negotiations Initiative, Harvard Law School.

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  Malhotra analyzed: Deepak Malhotra and M.A.L.Y. Hout, “Negotiating on Thin Ice: The 2004–2005 NHL Dispute (A),” Harvard Business School Cases 1 (2006).

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  describes formal negotiations: Malhotra, in response to fact-checking inquiries, said, “I’ve worked on many different kinds of negotiations for a long time, not just what you refer to here as ‘formal’ negotiations” and that “Dr. Ehdaie’s situation was not the first time I was dealing with something that most other people might not immediately think of as a ‘negotiation.’ ”

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  task in any negotiation: “Ask Better Negotiation Questions: Use Negotiation Questions to Gather Information That Will Expand the Possibilities,” Harvard Law School, August 8, 2022; Edward W. Miles, “Developing Strategies for Asking Questions in Negotiation,” Negotiation Journal 29, no. 4 (2013): 383–412.

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  a few weeks later: In keeping with patient confidentiality, this case was only described to me in general terms, and some details were changed to protect patient privacy.

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  training other surgeons: In addition to the interventions described in this chapter, Ehdaie and Malhotra developed additional methods of encouraging these conversations. For more, please see “Negotiation Strategies for Doctors—and Hospitals”; “Bargaining Over How to Treat Cancer”; and Malhotra’s Negotiating the Impossible.

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  “tell you who they are”: Ehdaie wrote that he would describe his work this way: “We created a systematic approach using all of the communication tools adapted from negotiation theory with Dr. Malhotra. People find credibility in situations in which someone is recommending opposite their perceived bias. In this case, I wanted to make sure patients realized that I am also a surgeon (not just the AS physician) and believe strongly in surgery for the appropriate patients. However, in patients with low-risk prostate cancer, I believe that AS is the preferred option…. We reduced surgery by 30%. We do believe that a systematic approach using these methods helps better communicate risk to patients, strengthen patient autonomy in their decisions, and helps medical decision making across disciplines.”

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  Numerous studies have found: In 2018—the last year for which reliable statistics are available—only 14 percent of people who opted for a jury trial for federal crimes were found innocent. Leroy Reed was being tried in state, rather than federal, court, but the trend is similar. John Gramlich, “Only 2% of Federal Criminal Defendants Go to Trial, and Most Who Do Are Found Guilty,” Pew Research Center, June 11, 2019.

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  “I want to listen”: In some places, including here, the transcript of deliberations has been edited or condensed for clarity.

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  “improve the theory”: “History of the Harvard Negotiation Project,” Harvard Law School.

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  Fisher, a Harvard law professor: Roger Fisher (1922–2012), Harvard Law School, August 27, 2012.

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  Fisher and his colleagues wrote: In response to a fact-checking email, Sheila Heen, a professor at Harvard Law School who worked with Fisher, wrote, “Fisher pointed out that each party actually needs to have their interests met in order to say yes to any agreement, and this means that each of us should care about finding ways to understand and meet others’ interests as well as our own, if we are to find solutions to our shared challenges.”

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  logic of costs: The logic of costs and benefits and the logic of similarities can also be referred to as the logic of consequences and the logic of appropriateness. For more on these kinds of thinking, please see: Long Wang, Chen-Bo Zhong, and J. Keith Murnighan, “The Social and Ethical Consequences of a Calculative Mindset,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 125, no. 1 (2014): 39–49; J. Mark Weber, Shirli Kopelman, and David M. Messick, “A Conceptual Review of Decision Making in Social Dilemmas: Applying a Logic of Appropriateness,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 8, no. 3 (2004): 281–307; Johan P. Olsen and James G. March, The Logic of Appropriateness (Norway: ARENA, 2004); Daniel A. Newark and Markus C. Becker, “Bringing the Logic of Appropriateness into the Lab: An Experimental Study of Behavior and Cognition,” in Carnegie Goes to California: Advancing and Celebrating the Work of James G. March (United Kingdom: Emerald Publishing, 2021); Jason C. Coronel et al., “Evaluating Didactic and Exemplar Information: Noninvasive Brain Stimulation Reveals Message-Processing Mechanisms,” Communication Research 49, no. 2 (2022): 268–95; Tim Althoff, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Dan Jurafsky, “How to Ask for a Favor: A Case Study on the Success of Altruistic Requests,” Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 8, no. 1 (2014): 12–21.

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  They are now at nine votes: The transcript is slightly ambiguous regarding this vote: One ballot was not read aloud. But, based on subsequent dialogue, it appears there were three votes for guilt, and nine votes for acquittal.

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  “when the cop pulled me over”: This comment comes from an interview with juror James Pepper, not the transcript of the deliberations.

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  A GUIDE TO USING THESE IDEAS, PART II: ASKING QUESTIONS AND NOTICING CLUES

  researchers at Harvard: Michael Yeomans and Alison Wood Brooks, “Topic Preference Detection: A Novel Approach to Understand Perspective Taking in Conversation,” Harvard Business School Working Paper No. 20-077, February 2020.

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  Researchers at Harvard and other universities have looked: Ibid.; Anna Goldfarb, “Have an Upbeat Conversation,” New York Times, May 19, 2020.

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  CHAPTER THREE: THE LISTENING CURE

  Epley was just the person: For more on Nicholas Epley’s fascinating research, please let me recommend his book Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want (New York: Vintage, 2015).

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  The key to starting: For more on research into asking questions, let me recommend Alison Wood Brooks and Leslie K. John, “The Surprising Power of Questions,” Harvard Business Review 96, no. 3 (2018): 60–67; Karen Huang et al., “It Doesn’t Hurt to Ask: Question-Asking Increases Liking,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113, no. 3 (2017): 430; Einav Hart, Eric M. VanEpps, and Maurice E. Schweitzer, “The (Better Than Expected) Consequences of Asking Sensitive Questions,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 162 (2021): 136–54.

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  “I had to sit with that”: Epley wrote to me that some of the most powerful conversations after the second drunk-driving incident also occurred with his parents. “It hit me like a sledgehammer during this time that I had the capacity to really ruin my life. I stopped drinking immediately…including all through college…and have not been drunk a single time since.”

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  Psychology journals noted: Rachel A. Ryskin et al., “Perspective-Taking in Comprehension, Production, and Memory: An Individual Differences Approach,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 144, no. 5 (2015): 898.

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  “perspective taking”: Roderick M. Kramer and Todd L. Pittinsky, eds., Restoring Trust in Organizations and Leaders: Enduring Challenges and Emerging Answers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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  “constitutes a vital skill”: Sandra Pineda De Forsberg and Roland Reichenbach, Conflict, Negotiation and Perspective Taking (United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021).

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  psychology textbooks had it wrong: Epley wrote that “I wouldn’t say that ‘perspective-getting’ ever struck any of us as particularly insightful. It seemed ridiculously obvious.”

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  focused on perspective getting: Tal Eyal, Mary Steffel, and Nicholas Epley, “Perspective Mistaking: Accurately Understanding the Mind of Another Requires Getting Perspective, Not Taking Perspective,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 114, no. 4 (2018): 547; Haotian Zhou, Elizabeth A. Majka, and Nicholas Epley, “Inferring Perspective Versus Getting Perspective: Underestimating the Value of Being in Another Person’s Shoes,” Psychological Science 28, no. 4 (2017): 482–93. Epley said that “By perspective-taking, you’re trying to imagine what’s on the mind of another person, trying to put yourself in their shoes and see things from their point of view. Perspective-getting is when you actually ask them what’s on their mind, and what their point of view is, and you just listen to what they have to say. When I use the term ‘perspective-taking’ scientifically, typically what I mean is what psychologists are asking people to do in an experiment—to take somebody’s perspective, imagine trying to see things from their point of view. It’s all in-your-head mental gymnastics. ‘Perspective-getting’ is asking them what they think about X, Y, or Z, and then listening to what they say. You’re getting their perspective from them. Those are two very different things.”