Matt Abrahams: While many of us focus on being direct, the reality is, being indirect strategically helps us accomplish much of our communication.

My name's Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast.

Today, I'm super excited to spend time with Steven Pinker.

Steven is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

He studies language, cognition, and social relations.

He has received many awards for his teaching.

He's written twelve insightful and impactful books, and his latest is, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.

Welcome, Steven.

I've been looking forward to this conversation ever since we set it up.

Steven Pinker: Me too.

Thanks for having me.

Matt Abrahams: Excellent.

Shall we get started?

Steven Pinker: Let's start.

Matt Abrahams: Much of your work looks at language and cognition.

You've distinguished between the what and the what you mean by it of language.

What do you mean by this distinction and how can we use this insight to become more persuasive and effective in the communication we have?

Steven Pinker: It's long been known by anyone who studies language that an awful lot of the time, we don't just blurt out what we mean in so many words, but we hint, we wink, we shilly-shally, we beat around the bush, we use euphemism, we use innuendo, counting on our listener to read between the lines, connect the dots, catch our drift.

And as someone who studies language, this has always been a puzzle.

Why don't we just blurt out what we mean?

So just some obvious examples.

Politeness, if you could pass the salt, that would be awesome.

Now that's an awful weird thing to say.

For one thing, it's certainly hyperbolic.

It wouldn't be awesome.

It might be nice, but also why are you pondering hypotheticals?

We all understand what it means.

Give me the salt.

Why don't we just say, give me the salt.

In more emotionally hot circumstances, there's uh, certainly a lot of indirectness.

So imagine you're trying to bribe your way into a restaurant by slipping a fifty dollar bill to the maître d'.

You probably wouldn't say, if I give you the fifty, will you less jump the queue and seat us right away?

You might say like, I was wondering if you might have a cancellation, or is there any way you could shorten my wait?

Or sexual come ons is a, as we all know, a big arena for indirectness and euphemism.

You wanna come up and see my etchings, you wanna come up for coffee, you wanna come up for Netflix and chill.

So in all these cases you might say, oh, plausible deniability.

But, come on.

How plausible is it?

As if any grown woman could, could be in any doubt as to what, do you wanna come up for coffee, means late at night.

So why do we do it?

And the answer that I came up with is that we avoid common knowledge.

Now my book is about common knowledge.

And common knowledge has a, a technical meaning in linguistics, in philosophy, in economics, in game theory, and political science, and a lot of academia.

What it means is, I know something, you know something.

I know that you know it, you know that I know it.

I know that you know that I know it, I know that you know that.

I know that you know that I know it, ad infinitum.

Common knowledge is important because it's necessary for coordination, for being on the same page.

If you're the only one who knows that you're supposed to drive on the right and everyone else thinks that you're supposed to drive on the left, you better drive on the left.

It's not enough that you know it.

Even if you're right, according to the law of the land, it doesn't matter.

What matters is what everyone knows that everyone else knows.

Relationships are propped up by common knowledge.

What makes us friends?

You know, it's not as if we sign a contract, I know that you consider us friends.

And what does that mean?

Well, it's 'cause you know that I consider us friends and so on, or lovers, or a boss and a subordinate, or an authority and a person who recognizes their authority.

We're two transaction partners.

The relationship exists in our heads, and it's a matter of common knowledge.

So direct speech, blurting something out, generates common knowledge.

It's not a question of whether it's deniable, it's a question of whether you know that the other person knows what you meant is deniable.

That is, is the common knowledge deniable.

And common knowledge is what ratifies or annuls social relationships, and that's why blurting something out that contradicts assumptions of the relationship can blow everything up and be deeply awkward.

Whereas hinting innuendo, they know, but they don't know you know they know.

And that allows you to maintain the previous relationship.

So in the case of, say, a sexual proposition, if Harry says, you wanna come up for coffee, and Sally says, no, she knows she's turned down a sexual overture and he knows she's turned down an overture.

But does she know that he knows she knows?

She could think, maybe he thinks I'm naive, maybe he thinks I, that I just turned down a coffee invitation.

And he doesn't know that she knows that he knows.

He could think maybe she thinks I'm dense.

Maybe she thinks I just interpret it as turning it down for coffee, even though I know she really turned down a sexual overture.

So without the common knowledge they can maintain the fiction of a purely platonic friendship.

Whereas if he said, do you wanna come up for sex?

And she says, no, it's never the same.

They can try to go back to a platonic friendship.

But once it was out there, once it's common knowledge, that changes everything.

So when everyone knows something, it's really different than when everyone knows it and everyone knows that everyone knows it.

Matt Abrahams: It seems to me that the context also plays a role in what we all know about each other.

So taking flirtation, which I actually, in grad school, my research was on flirtation, not only because I wanted to get dates when I was that age, but I was always fascinated by strategic communication.

And I think flirtation is a wonderful venue to study that.

If you go see a doctor and the doctor says, how are you doing?

That has one meaning.

But if you're in a bar and somebody says, how are you doing?

That has a very different meaning.

Context seems to add an extra level of understanding of what you know and I know.

And so we have to be aware, not just of what's being said, but the context in which it's being said.

And clearly we can run into some mismatches if I'm not paying attention appropriately to the context.

So it sounds to me like we have the ability to assess and judge these circumstances and try our best to fit within that optimal space.

How do we learn to do this?

I don't ever remember taking a class on indirect, ambiguous communication.

How do we learn what's appropriate?

Steven Pinker: Kids often charm us because they just blurt things out.

They haven't mastered this yet, and it's, oh, grandpa just farted.

Or, how come you have hair growing outta your nose?

They just, you know, sort of say things, so you do have to master it.

Some of it is from feedback.

You say things that are, as you get older and the other kids stare at you, make fun of you.

Some of it is just an extension of conversation.

We don't lay out every last step in a logic of a conversation.

Conversation would be impossible.

There's so many missing links.

It would be like a legal contract and a legal contract is written so that it would be immune to an adversary trying to exploit loopholes.

When we have conversation, we start off cooperative.

That's what we mean by to be on speaking terms.

When you have two adversaries, there is no conversation.

Two coaches of two football teams don't get together for a chat before the game, so conversation presupposes some degree of cooperation.

That's a basic law of linguistics.

When you're cooperative, you can leave things out so that the conversation doesn't take all day and you just know that the other person will figure out what you meant on the assumption that you're both aiming at the same thing, namely information coordination.

And so knowing how a listener will connect the dots will fill in the blanks, allows you to sometimes to be creative in making one of these propositions.

And there are formulas like, could you please pass the salt?

No one even thinks about what that means.

Literally, it's a idle question, not what it really is, which is an imperative.

But still, that's the case where it's formulaic, but sometimes there is no formula and we think about something that's a prerequisite to the act, knowing that our hearer on the assumption that we're not crazy, that we're rational, that we really are trying to get at something, they then connect the dots and think, oh yeah, of course he wants me to do something, but he's too polite to boss me around.

So he's stating the precondition.

And we use our natural conversational skill at filling in the missing premises in order to convey the imperative.

The reason that we do this indirectness, this musing, you know, do you think you could please, et cetera, is friends and, or just casual acquaintances don't like to boss each other around like they're servants.

It's not like, Jeeves, bring me the butter.

You don't wanna treat a friend like that, but still the butter's at their end of the table and you want it.

How are you gonna get it without bossing them around?

Matt Abrahams: So there's this level of metacognition that's required to pull this off.

Steven Pinker: There is in novel.

When they're novel cases.

A lot of these circumstances are so familiar that we have formulas.

Do you think you could pass the salt?

Could you pass the salt?

Where you don't have to engage in the metacognition, in that circumstance, 'cause it's so familiar cliche that the English language gives you these formulas.

But when it's a one time thing then, or a novel situation, and you're calibrating it to the other person, a sexual come on being a classic example, much more is at stake than getting the salt.

Matt Abrahams: You mentioned in English, and I'm curious about cross-culturally if these things apply as well.

I'll share an experience I had, I was teaching a student who was a non-native speaker of English, and he came into my class thrilled.

I mean, he was elated, super excited.

So I said, Hey, what's going on?

Why are you so excited?

And he looked at me and said, the woman that I'm very interested in told me that she just wants to be friends.

And I'm really excited about that.

And I had to rain on his parade because let's just be friends, when he looked it up, is exactly what he was looking for.

But we all know that was saying something very different.

So have you found that these ideas of what you know and other people know and using the strategic ambiguity crosses cultures as well?

Steven Pinker: Do all cultures have some kinds of politeness?

Some kinds of indirectness?

The answer is yes.

Cultures can vary and often tourist, travelers, businessmen have to get used to the level of indirectness in a culture.

So Japan is famously indirect and polite, and there are many layers of honorifics and to the point where sometimes people get frustrated that you just never get down to business.

You exchange so many pleasantries.

Conversely, they're cultures like New York or Israel where people are famously blunt and people can easily get offended 'cause they don't realize that's just how you exchange information in that culture.

But all cultures have some.

Matt Abrahams: What it becomes really fascinating to me, is when you have people from lots of different cultures come together and they have conversation and you see this play out in how some people could be offended and others aren't.

So it sounds to me at the end of the day that this indirect communication is, while many of us say, Hey, just I want people to be direct and honest with me, none of this doublespeak or hypocrisy, this is actually really necessary for us to function.

Would you agree with that?

Steven Pinker: Well, yeah.

In the last chapter of, uh, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, it's about, it's called radical honesty, rational hypocrisy.

We're all kind of hypocrites about our hypocrisy.

That is, we say, this hypocrisy is just such a waste of time, and it's so annoying, people beating around the bush, and roleplaying and rituals.

Why don't we just cut the crap and say what we mean.

Wouldn't life be better?

The answer is no.

It would be awful.

A lot of our relationships really depend on common assumptions that are, at the end of the day, fictions.

They're not literally true.

One of them is that friends would do anything for each other and they value the other person's welfare as much as their own.

They value the friendship.

There's no limit on how much they value the friendship.

Of course that can't be true.

But if you were to say, okay, we've been on the phone for twenty-five minutes now, and twenty-five minutes is about all I can really take of talking to you and I, there are other things that I'd really rather do now.

That is often true.

But saying your friendship is worth only so much to me, but no more.

That kills the friendship.

It changes everything if you actually say it.

Matt Abrahams: So this kind of communication really does provide the lubricant for these interactions and allows them to keep going.

Steven Pinker: I wouldn't even say lubricants so much as the basis.

That is, they, that's what being friends means.

That's what being lovers means.

It means that you accept certain things as the ground rules.

You know that the other person accepts them, you know that they know that you accept them, and that's what makes relationships possible.

Matt Abrahams: In your book, The Sense of Style, you argue that good writing and communication is about clarity, conciseness, and grace.

I understand conciseness, but can you tell us a little bit more about grace, and then clarity?

Steven Pinker: So what makes a lot of academese, bureaucratize, corporatize, what makes it so frustrating to get through is often what's called the curse of knowledge.

The curse of knowledge is a psychological phenomenon in which, if you know something, it's very hard to imagine what it's like not to know it.

That is, it's false common knowledge.

You assume that your private knowledge is common knowledge.

That's why in bad writing, the writer doesn't spell out the abbreviations, doesn't explain the jargon, doesn't give examples, doesn't allow for a concrete image.

It doesn't occur to them because it's just so obvious, to them, and they don't realize it's not obvious to anyone else.

So that's what goes into a lot of clarity, is just the empathy of what does the reader know and what can they see in their mind's eye?

Sometimes clear writing may be a kind of graceless.

It may be an instruction manual.

It could be a memo.

But when we try to persuade, to charm, even to make our writing pleasurable enough that other people will pay for it, we wanna get a job as a columnist or reviewer, we just want an audience, the prose has to be compelling.

And there are many things that go into that.

There's, first of all, just clarity.

If you've got a struggle to figure out what the other person means, then you're gonna give up, and that makes prose graceless.

Imposing on the memory load of a reader.

If you've gotta hold too many words from the beginning of the sentence in mind before you get to the end of the sentence and know what they're doing.

Or if it's not clear where the end of one phrase is and the beginning of the next one is, and the reader has to work hard, and if they're trying too hard to parse the syntax of the sentence, instead of seeing through to the meaning, that makes prose less graceful.

But also even the melody and rhythm of speech.

In this case, there is no speech.

It's writing, but writing is mentally always speech.

When you read someone's words, you're always sounding it out to yourself as if they're speaking.

And so just the sheer mellifluousness of the sentence, as it would be said aloud, goes into grace.

And one other thing is the vividness of the mental picture that the reader is supposed to get.

And one of the things that makes bad writing bad is the reader doesn't have any image, nothing to grasp.

Instead of someone describing a study with kids and they talk about the experimental stimuli instead of the Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch puppets.

So being concrete, being visual, being vivid, is an important way for prose to be graceful.

The other component of grace is, and I have a whole chapter in The Sense of Style on this phenomenon of coherence.

That is, even if every sentence in a passage is a hundred percent comprehensible, the passage itself may be baffling if you don't know how one sentence leads into the next.

And that's why we use connector words like however, nonetheless, on the other hand, moreover, that is, for example, in general, they seem like silly little fillers, but they're really not.

They're the links, the glue that make one sentence flow into the next.

And a lot of the feeling of coherence, flow, indeed grace comes when you just know why the writer is saying what he's saying right now.

How does it fit into everything that I've read so far?

Matt Abrahams: This idea of coherence that helps people to really understand the flow of the message, super important, and I like that as a key component of grace.

You've discussed the concept of metaphors in language.

What are these and what do they mean for the way in which we communicate?

Steven Pinker: There are more metaphors in language than we realize.

Often we're completely unaware of them.

We know this from a brilliant work by the linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson in a book called Metaphors We Live By, I think it's forty-five years old now.

They noticed that some things that we talk about, we keep harking back to the same metaphorical image.

So a relationship is a journey.

We've gone through a lot together.

We're at a crossroads.

We might have to go our separate ways.

Look how far we've come, or argument is war.

I tried to defend my position, but he demolished it.

Knowing is seeing.

I see what you mean.

But that argument is cloudy or murky.

I can't make it out.

We don't even realize we do it, but we do it all the time.

Matt Abrahams: I have a colleague, Michele Gelfand, she likes to talk about mind your metaphors because in negotiation and influence and conflict, those metaphors impact how we approach it and the words we use.

So if I see a negotiation as a battle versus a problem to be solved, I approach it very differently.

Well, Steven, before we end, I'd like to ask you three questions.

One I create just for you and the rest I've asked everybody who's ever been on the show.

Are you up for that?

Steven Pinker: Sure thing.

Matt Abrahams: You have written about cursing, and it's fun to talk about, and I'm curious, how does cursing, swearing, how can we use it as an effective tool?

What value does it provide?

Steven Pinker: The thing that swearing does is it elicits involuntary emotional reaction.

Your primitive part of your brain, maybe your amygdala just gets pinged, usually with some, not just an offensive thought, excretion, feces, urine, cuckoldry, copulation, death, misfortune, those are the subject matter of swearing across languages.

But also there's common knowledge in the sense that when someone uses a profane word and they know that you're trying to get an emotional reaction out of them.

That's why we avoid swear words when we have no interest in getting an emotional reaction.

When you go into the doctor's office, the nurse might say, well, we'd like to take a stool sample.

She wouldn't say, we'd like to take a shit sample.

But shit does, it pings a little part of our brain.

Now, there is a, a rule for taboo language if used rarely and judiciously it can express something you can't express it any other way.

If you're angry, like, will you pick up your dog shit?

It's not a very nice way of putting it, but it's appropriate to be anger at the moment.

Matt Abrahams: Understood.

That was a damn good answer.

Thank you.

There's some research that I've heard when I talk and try to help people feel more comfortable and confident in their communication, manage their anxiety, that swearing actually releases some neurochemicals that can blunt the cortisol that comes about from anxiety.

So it can actually make you feel a little more confident or at least a little less unconfident, just by blurting out, not in front of public obviously, but you might do it behind the curtain before you get out on stage.

Let me ask you question number two.

Who is a communicator that you admire and why?

Steven Pinker: Oh, geez.

On the public stage, Barack Obama was a, has a deserved reputation as a communicator, particularly for the nonverbal component of trying to bring the country together in moments of crisis.

Now, he didn't succeed with everyone 'cause there were factions that still hated him, but just by virtue of conspicuously making the effort to bring people together, I think that had a positive effect.

Among writers, I think George Will has a way with words.

He's been around for quite some time.

Matt Abrahams: Obama certainly is recognized as a, as an amazing communicator, and I appreciate you highlighting the ability to bring people together.

Last question for you.

What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

Steven Pinker: Well, certainly empathy, not in the sense of necessarily feeling someone's pain, but getting inside their head.

Overcoming the curse of knowledge, knowing what they don't know.

The simultaneous awareness of the message to be communicated and the relationship that you have with your hearer.

That's what all this euphemism and indirectness and innuendo is, is all about calibrating it.

Finding the optimal level of directness or indirectness that's appropriate to the context, the nature of your relationship, the culture you're in, and the costs and benefits of the message going over your hearer's head or being so blatant that they know what you're up to.

Matt Abrahams: So empathy, making sure that you balance out, or think through, the message and the relationship you have, and trying to balance among all of those factors in terms of directness around context, relationship, cost, benefit, and culture.

Steven Pinker: Yeah.

Optimal directness.

Yes.

Matt Abrahams: Optimal directness.

Thank you, Steven, for all of the valuable insights.

Truly a masterclass in how to be more effective in our communication, and you've uncovered many insights into our indirect communication.

Thank you, and I wish you well with your newest book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life.

Steven Pinker: Thanks for having me on.

Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast.

To learn more about language and cognition, please listen to episode 91 with Valerie Fridland and episode 224 with Adam Aleksic.

This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams.

Our music is from Floyd Wonder.

With special thanks to Podium Podcast Company.

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