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  had been relatively brief: Soviet cosmonauts had done much longer missions.

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  Reagan ordered NASA: “History and Timeline of the ISS,” ISS National Laboratory.

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  “advent of the space station”: McGuire, Astronauts.

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  “social intelligence that involves”: Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer, “Emotional Intelligence,” Imagination, Cognition and Personality 9, no. 3 (1990): 185–211.

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  had found that this despondency: “It’s Not Rocket Science: The Importance of Psychology in Space Travel,” The Independent, February 17, 2021.

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  mission control’s tone of voice: Schirra had said, prior to this mission, that he intended to retire. In response to fact-checking inquiries, Andrew Chaikin, a historian of space travel, said, “The basic fact is that Schirra had a strong belief that during a flight the mission commander—that is, himself—was in charge, not mission control.”

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  Robert Provine had started: Robert R. Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (New York: Penguin, 2001); Chiara Mazzocconi, Ye Tian, and Jonathan Ginzburg, “What’s Your Laughter Doing There? A Taxonomy of the Pragmatic Functions of Laughter,” IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing 13, no. 3 (2020): 1302–21; Robert R. Provine, “Laughing, Tickling, and the Evolution of Speech and Self,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 13, no. 6 (2004): 215–18; Christopher Oveis et al., “Laughter Conveys Status,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 65 (2016): 109–15; Michael J. Owren and Jo-Anne Bachorowski, “Reconsidering the Evolution of Nonlinguistic Communication: The Case of Laughter,” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 27 (2003): 183–200; Jo-Anne Bachorowski and Michael J. Owren, “Not All Laughs Are Alike: Voiced but Not Unvoiced Laughter Readily Elicits Positive Affect,” Psychological Science 12, no. 3 (2001): 252–57; Robert R. Provine and Kenneth R. Fischer, “Laughing, Smiling, and Talking: Relation to Sleeping and Social Context in Humans,” Ethology 83, no. 4 (1989): 295–305.

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  “naturally occurring human laughter”: Robert R. Provine, “Laughter,” American Scientist 84, no. 1 (1996): 38–45.

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  “immediate and involuntary”: Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation.

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  tell when people felt aligned: Gregory A. Bryant, “Evolution, Structure, and Functions of Human Laughter,” in The Handbook of Communication Science and Biology (United Kingdom: Routledge, 2020), 63–77. In response to fact-checking inquiries, Bryant said that “listeners could distinguish between friends laughing together and strangers laughing together…. I think it’s a reasonable speculation that people are detecting alignment in some sense, but technically the task was just to detect friends versus strangers. Our interpretation was more general, which is that friends are more aroused when engaged in conversation, reflected in their genuine laughter, as opposed to the lower arousal volitional laughter more common between strangers. Listeners are highly sensitive to it. I do like the idea that people are looking for evidence of attempts to connect.”

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  “mood,” or what psychologists: The use of words mood and energy in this context, though conforming to dictionary definitions, does not align perfectly with how those words are sometimes used by research psychologists. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, explained that “ ‘mood’ is described by two properties, valence and arousal. Mood is not a synonym for valence. We use ‘affect’ to mean properties of consciousness, whether or not a person is emotional. We use ‘affect’ as synonymous with ‘mood.’ Some scientists use ‘mood’ to refer to moments of feeling that are not emotions, which they define as not linked to events in the world. I think that is incorrect, because a brain is always processing internal sensations, which gives rise to…your feelings, in conjunction with sense data from the world.” For more on these topics, please see James A. Russell, “A Circumplex Model of Affect,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39, no. 6 (1980): 1161; James A. Russell and Lisa Feldman Barrett, “Core Affect, Prototypical Emotional Episodes, and Other Things Called Emotion: Dissecting the Elephant,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76, no. 5 (1999): 805; Elizabeth A. Kensinger, “Remembering Emotional Experiences: The Contribution of Valence and Arousal,” Reviews in the Neurosciences 15, no. 4 (2004): 241–52; Elizabeth A. Kensinger and Suzanne Corkin, “Two Routes to Emotional Memory: Distinct Neural Processes for Valence and Arousal,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101, no. 9 (2004): 3310–15.

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  feeling positive or negative: While some psychologists use the words positive or negative in this context, Barrett argues that a more appropriate framing “is ‘pleasant-unpleasant.’…‘Positive’ or ‘negative’…can be descriptive (like I feel good) or it can be evaluative (like it’s good that I feel this way)…. So it’s really ‘pleasant,’ ‘unpleasant.’ ”

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  your brain has evolved: Dacher Keltner et al., “Emotional Expression: Advances in Basic Emotion Theory,” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 43 (2019): 133–60; Alan S. Cowen et al., “Mapping 24 Emotions Conveyed by Brief Human Vocalization,” American Psychologist 74, no. 6 (2019): 698; Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas et al., “The Voice Conveys Specific Emotions: Evidence from Vocal Burst Displays,” Emotion 9, no. 6 (2009): 838; Ursula Hess and Agneta Fischer, “Emotional Mimicry as Social Regulation,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 17, no. 2 (2013): 142–57; Jean-Julien Aucouturier et al., “Covert Digital Manipulation of Vocal Emotion Alter Speakers’ Emotional States in a Congruent Direction,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 4 (2016): 948–53.

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  match someone’s mood: Barrett said that mirroring can be counterproductive if what your interlocutor needs is instrumental support: “I was trained as a therapist, like, a million years ago. But what a good communicator does is they figure out whether the person wants empathy, or they want instrumental support. If the person wants empathy, then you mirror them. If they want instrumental support, then you try to counteract what’s happening to them…. If I try to calm my daughter down when she just wants me to be empathic, it will be bad. On the other hand, if I’m empathic with her when she needs me to be instrumental, it might make things worse…. So a good communicator tries to figure out, do they want empathy or do they want an instrumental support?…In the lingo, we call it pacing and leading. When I was the therapist, I would pace the person first. I would actually match their breath, and then I’d slow my breath down and then they would slow theirs down. So first I would entrain them, and then I would manipulate my own signal and they would manipulate theirs too, because they’re already synced with me.”

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  McGuire suspected: It is worth noting that McGuire’s approach was informed by his interest in the “Process Communication Model,” which attempts to identify someone’s personality type by examining how they communicate. McGuire’s daughter, Bethany Sexton, in response to fact-checking inquiries, wrote that the approach described in this chapter “was something that Terry used not only with the astronauts but throughout his practice for decades. Additionally he formed a very keen relationship with a colleague named Taibi Kahler, PhD. At the time Taibi was studying transactional analysis and had put together a psychological and behavioral model called process communication. When Terry learned of Dr. Kahler’s work, they connected and became fast friends. Terry used Taibi’s model in the analysis of the astronauts…. Terry felt the model was so powerful it enabled him to assess the astronauts in a matter of minutes based on their word choice, mannerisms and ways of expression.” It is also worth noting that some of the approaches McGuire used in interviewing candidates did not align with the facts of his life. For instance, he never had a sister.

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  NASA selected the class: “90-006: 1990 Astronaut Candidates Selected,” NASA News; “Astronaut’s Right Stuff Is Different Now,” Associated Press, October 13, 1991.

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  “I was so close”: Radloff, Big Bang Theory.

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  “Significant improvement”: Some dialogue was excluded for brevity and appropriateness.

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  “the audience went wild”: Radloff, Big Bang Theory.

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  “characters you like”: “Emmy Watch: Critics’ Picks,” Associated Press, June 22, 2009.

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  CHAPTER FIVE: CONNECTING AMID CONFLICT

  the lockdown was over: Jeffcoat told me the lockdown was caused by an altercation near the campus, but not on it.

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  daughters to a movie: Earlier that year, a gunman in Aurora, Colorado, had opened fire in a theater, killing twelve people.

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  a public figure in the fight for gun control: Jeffcoat prefers the term “gun safety” to “gun control.”

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  final season of Lost: The final season of Lost, in case you were wondering, was great.

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  Roughly half the nation: Charles Duhigg, “The Real Roots of American Rage,” The Atlantic, January/February, 2019; “Political Polarization,” Pew Research Center, 2014.

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  Roughly four in ten: “Political Polarization and Media Habits,” Pew Research Center, October 21, 2014.

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  Over 80 percent: Jeff Hayes, “Workplace Conflict and How Businesses Can Harness It to Thrive,” CPP Global Human Capital Report, 2008.

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  “Peace is not the absence”: This quote has also been attributed to Gandhi. Its original provenance, like many oft-quoted statements, is somewhat murky.

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  event Jeffcoat had agreed: The organizers of this project included Spaceship Media, Advance Local, Alabama Media Group, Essential Partners, journalists from various newspapers, and others.

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  conduct an experiment: In response to fact-checking inquiries, John Sarrouf of Essential Partners wrote, “I would say that the question at hand is whether we could sufficiently steep participants enough in a two-day dialogue experience and skill building to have them continue the conversation online for a month and keep the same kind of open and complex exchange that we were able to build in person.”

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  the vast majority of Americans: “The Vast Majority of Americans Support Universal Background Checks. Why Doesn’t Congress?,” Harvard Kennedy School, 2016.

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  Large majorities support bans: “Polling Is Clear: Americans Want Gun Control,” Vox, June 1, 2022.

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  “Everyone is so focused”: Sarrouf clarified that he believes “there is a lack of trust of one another and…the language we have to discuss this issue pulls people further apart.” His hope was to “illustrate the power of structured, intentional communication to repair trust, build relationships on mutual understanding, and generate the resilience to forces of polarization needed for collective action.”

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  Sheila Heen, a professor: Heen is a coauthor of one of my favorite books on communication: Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (New York: Penguin, 2010).

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  “acknowledge the emotions”: Heen elaborated that “the deeper problem is a relationship problem, spurred by how we each feel treated by the other. This involves feelings, to be sure, but the feelings are a symptom rather than the problem…. The deeper problem is how we feel treated by the other person. And that’s producing frustration, feeling alone or misunderstood and dismissed…. I think that for people who tend to say ‘you just shouldn’t be emotional’ they’re missing that actually it’s how you’re treating the other person that is the issue and possibly is a solution.”

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  furious and sad and worried: Heen added that it’s not just whether or not people in conflict admit their emotions, but also how they do so. “It could also be that they’re both saying that they’re furious and they’re both just blaming each other. They’re not getting to ‘okay, I’m listening, let me try to understand why you’re so mad.’ ”

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  no less important goal: Sarrouf described his goals this way: “Creating a space where what is invited from people is their deep listening, curiosity, desire to understand and be understood and experience a different way of engaging this topic; and teaching participants communication skills.” Sarrouf also emphasized that all the organizers’ goals were explained to participants before the event began.

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  “sense of psychological safety”: Dotan R. Castro et al., “Mere Listening Effect on Creativity and the Mediating Role of Psychological Safety,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 12, no. 4 (2018): 489.

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  expose their emotions: Sarrouf explained that while feelings are part of this dialogue, “my point is to get them to talk about reasons. I want to hear about their stories. I want to hear about the values that underlie their beliefs. And I want them to talk about the complexity of their beliefs. Emotions are just a part of what comes out when people talk about those…. I don’t want anybody to expose an emotion that they’re not comfortable exposing. What I want them to do is to tell us a story about themselves rather than having other people tell a story about them, which is what we do to each other when we’re in conflict. I have a story about you, and you have a story about me, and those stories are usually inaccurate. And this is an opportunity for you to re-author your own story.”

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  looping for understanding: I first learned about looping for understanding from the journalist Amanda Ripley in her wonderful book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021). During the communication training in Washington, D.C., organizers did not refer to this technique as looping for understanding, or teach it as such, but rather taught a more general approach. Sarrouf explained that he calls his approach “full-spectrum listening” and that it is often used in “an exercise where four people get together…. You tell a story and three people are listening to you. One of them is listening for what happens, you know, the facts of what happened to you. The second person is listening for your values, and the things that you most care about in that story…. And the third person is listening [for] what emotions are coming through for you…. And then each of the three people listening reports back what they heard—and not just tell them whether they heard it right or not (although yes, there’s definitely a little bit of that). More of what they’re doing is actually learning from the three people who listened about themselves—things that they didn’t even know were true for them, but because people were listening so deeply to them on different channels for different things, they came away with new insights about their own experience…. If you can learn to listen to all of the different messages that people are sharing when they speak you can actually learn not just the facts about their lives, but what’s important to them, about what’s important in their lives, what relationships they had, what their emotional journey was like, their commitments, their dilemmas.”

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  The goal is not to repeat: G. Itzchakov, H. T. Reis, and N. Weinstein, “How to Foster Perceived Partner Responsiveness: High-Quality Listening Is Key,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 16, no. 1 (2021); Brant R. Burleson, “What Counts as Effective Emotional Support,” Studies in Applied Interpersonal Communication (2008): 207–27.

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