Author Charles Duhigg is trying to help us have better conversations

NPR’s Scott Detrow speaks with Charles Duhigg about his new book Supercommunicators.

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

If you walk down the self-help aisle in a bookstore, you are likely to see a lot of titles encouraging you to add something to your life, to start a new workout routine, to optimize your schedule, to balance your budget better, to introduce a healthy habit. And then you might see Charles Duhigg’s newest book, which is not about adding to your life. It is about improving something that we do constantly every single day, and that is speaking to each other. His book is called “Supercommunicators.” Charles joins me now. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.

CHARLES DUHIGG: Thank you for having me on.

DETROW: You write in the book early on that this was a little bit of a selfish pursuit on your part, that you realized that maybe you weren’t communicating well and you put some thought into it.

DUHIGG: Yeah, I fell into this bad pattern with my wife where I would come home after a long day and I would start complaining about my day, and she very reasonably would suggest, like, a solution like, why don’t you take your boss out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other better? And instead of being able to hear what she was saying, I would get even more upset, and I’d be like, why aren’t you supporting me? You’re supposed to be on my side. And then she would get upset because I was attacking her for giving me good advice.

DETROW: I just – I feel like that actually – that exact spousal dynamic has repeatedly come up in interviews that I’ve done over the past year on a wide range of subjects.

DUHIGG: Yes.

DETROW: People, either they are the suggester or they are being suggested to, and even though it makes sense that that’s helpful, it’s not.

DUHIGG: Right. It’s a conundrum, right? Why does this happen? And so I called up all these experts, and I asked them. And they said, what we’ve learned is that most people assume a…