If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?

by Alan Alda

  All this from five points of similarity.

  As Gehlbach pointed out, this is only one study and it would be premature to make broad recommendations. But even though any single study is seldom the final answer to anything, it can point you in a direction that’s worth exploring.

  And an awareness of similarity seems to be worth exploring, because it’s helpful in figuring out what the other person is thinking.

  Scientists at Harvard, for instance, did MRI studies on people while they were attempting to read the state of mind of others and found they were better able to read their state of mind when they saw themselves as similar to the other people.

  A sense of similarity seems to help us sync up with one another. If that’s true, it probably doesn’t hurt to remind the people we’re communicating with of the points we have in common: The musical tastes a mother shares with a daughter, along with a few other points in common, might ease an otherwise more difficult conversation.

  For me, the most striking example of the power of similarity is the story of the so-called Christmas truce in 1914, during World War I.

  When Great Britain entered the war, many of the troops were sure they’d be home by Christmas. But as months went by and Christmas approached, they were still stuck in the trenches, with icy puddles, rodents and lice, and mold in their bread. After a while, the British noticed that the other side stopped firing around dinnertime—and then, an hour later, they would resume. The British took advantage of the lull to have their own meal. A routine evolved: As if to emphasize that they were taking a timeout from the war, both sides would fire furiously right up until the clock struck five and then there would be utter silence. At precisely six o’clock, the guns would begin again.

  Soon each side began making occasional offerings of a break in hostilities whether or not it was dinnertime. At one point, in a clear appeal to familiarity, there was a crucial bit of communication. A German voice called out, “We are Saxons, you are Anglo-Saxons. If you don’t fire, we won’t fire.” By Christmas Eve, the similarities in the culture they shared were becoming hard to ignore. The British could hear the Germans singing Christmas carols.

  Malcolm Brown, of the British War Museum, quotes a soldier remembering what he heard from his position in a trench in La Chapelle-d’Armentières: “It was a beautiful moonlit night, frost on the ground, white almost everywhere. And about seven or eight in the evening there was a lot of commotion in the German trenches and there were these lights.” The lights turned out to be candles burning on improvised Christmas trees. “And then,” the soldier recalled, “they sang ‘Silent Night’—Stille Nacht. I shall never forget it. It was one of the highlights of my life. I thought, what a beautiful tune.”

  The British soldiers answered the Germans by singing “The First Noël” and held up signs on which they had scrawled, “Have a happy Christmas.” They sang through the night, matching each other song for song.

  On Christmas morning, in many places along the front lines, men from both sides slowly climbed to the tops of their trenches and met in the middle of no-man’s-land, where they exchanged cigarettes and offered one another schnapps and chocolates. In three or four places along the line, someone was able to come up with a ball and, placing their hats on the frozen ground to mark off a pair of goals, the two enemies played soccer.

  One British infantryman even had his hair cut by a man who had been his barber in London and was now a German soldier. There was a sense of relief and a measure of hilarity for both sides.

  I tell this story because it seems like such a profound example of the power of commonality. If people are shooting at you repeatedly for months, and if reminding them you share something in common can silence the guns for a while, something important is going on. It ought to be even easier to do when all you want is to get them to pay attention to what you’re saying.

  There were, however, a few generals on both sides of the war with whom all this familiarity did not go over so well. They let the troops know that fraternization was treason, and from then on the only time either side would climb out of the trenches was with fixed bayonets.

  In order to fight a war (probably the most extreme form of poor communication), unfamiliarity is the preferred state of mind.

  LETHAL UNFAMILIARITY

  By the time U.S. forces entered the war in 1918, General John J. Pershing felt that the French soldiers had become passive and less aggressive, and he was worried that trench warfare would affect his American troops in the same way—especially because they seemed reluctant to stab other humans in the neck.

  He made sure the Americans practiced on bayonet dummies filled with straw. The object was to rid the enemy of any sense of familiarity and dehumanize the target of your bayonet. You were to aim at a circular patch on an inanimate bag, and if you thought of the opponent at all, it was as a monster. One instructor was quoted as saying, “When you drive your bayonets into those dummies out there, think of them as representing the enemy. Think that he has begun the practice in this war of running bayonets through wounds, [those] gasping-on-the-ground and the defenseless prisoners….So, abandon all ideas of fighting them in the sportsmanlike way. You’ve got to hate them.”

  While in war we doggedly emphasize our unfamiliarity with the enemy, in peace we often reach awkwardly for signs of how alike we are.

  Campaigning politicians go through bizarre rituals to fit in with the locals, like eating deep-fried things on a stick when in fact they might prefer a little quiche and white wine. The rituals themselves are so familiar to us we don’t even question how fake they might be. They’re just what people do to get elected.

  Pulled by the magnetic field of the familiar, we go to sequels of movies, even though we suspect they won’t thrill us the way the originals did.

  Some studies have even shown that romantic attraction is more likely to occur when people show up repeatedly in your daily life. Which, I suppose, is the case with the office romance.

  I think all this points to the idea that as long as it doesn’t seem fake, the more we establish familiarity with our audience—not speaking to them from left field or from on high—the better chance we have that they’ll listen to what we have to say. And possibly even accept it.

  CHAPTER 20

  Jargon and the Curse of Knowledge

  THE IRRESISTIBLE AROMA OF HYDROFLOXIA

  My wife and I are walking in a garden. It’s spring. New life is curling up toward the sun from the black, wintry earth. As we walk, she names the flowers beside the path. Hyacinth, ranunculus, iris. She names them because calling them by name is for her part of loving them. Happily, she goes on—anemone, crocus, lily of the valley. After a while, I can’t stand it anymore. I point to one she’s missed.

  “Look at that gorgeous hydrofloxia,” I say, and immediately I feel a surge of pleasure at having inside knowledge. Arlene is not impressed. She knows I’m making it up.

  For one brief moment, I had enjoyed speaking the private language of botany. It didn’t bother me that the word doesn’t exist. We both knew I was joking, but I got to use a fancy word and I loved it. There’s something appealing about a private language. It can be intoxicating. Jargon is like that, and the more rarefied it is—the fewer people who understand it besides you—the more it resembles the common hydrofloxia. It has a seductive aroma. You can get drunk on it.

  A nice example of this is the research paper by Ike Antkare called “Developing the Location-Identity Split Using Scalable Modalities.” The title is impressive. And so is the first sentence of the introduction:

  The implications of atomic communication have been far-reaching and pervasive. The notion that steganographers connect with “smart” archetypes is continuously considered intuitive. Along these same lines, this is a direct result of the development of the World Wide Web. Thus, the investigation of write-back caches and DHCP have paved the way for the refinement of e-business.

  The only problem with this paper is that, from beginning
to end, it’s utter nonsense. I don’t mean it seems like nonsense; I mean that it’s deliberately crafted to mean nothing, and it wasn’t even written by a human. The author is a machine.

  Ike Antkare is the name of a fake scientist created by the French researcher Cyril Labbé, who wanted to see if a mere golem like Antkare could make a name for himself on the Internet among real scientists.

  He certainly could. Labbé used a computer program called SCIgen (created by graduate students at MIT) to generate dozens of fake papers using just a few keystrokes. In a short time, the fictional Ike Antkare had so many citations, he became, according to Labbé, “one of the great stars in the scientific firmament.” This happened mainly because the fake papers were picked up by Google Scholar, which is used by other organizations to rate authors on how many times they’ve been cited. After Labbé was finished gaming the system, Google Scholar ranked Ike Antkare number twenty-one on the list of most cited authors. Ike didn’t have as many citations as Sigmund Freud, but he had more than Albert Einstein.

  The golem ruled.

  Labbé went further. He developed a program that could detect whether a paper had been created using SCIgen. He found 120 papers that had been accepted and published by peer-reviewed journals—all created by SCIgen and all fakes. The journals pulled the papers after Labbé notified them, and at least one said they would revise their acceptance process.

  I think it’s interesting that it wasn’t unintelligibility that caused the journals to pull the papers, but fake unintelligibility.

  The three computer scientists at MIT who created SCIgen had shown how easily jargon gone amok can open the door to fraudulent research papers: nonsense leading to non-science. They invented SCIgen as a way for other scientists to test conferences for their reliability. For instance, how easy would it be to get a bogus paper past them? It turned out to be surprisingly easy in too many cases.

  There are other jargon generators online. I used the “Automatic SBIR Proposal Generator” to write a fake application for a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It took less than a minute to create, and the full thing goes on for several pages. Here’s just a bit of it.

  The Hydrofloxia Effect

  Technical Abstract

  The technology in The Hydrofloxia Effect effectively addresses the indirect paradigm causing the bandlimited criterion by applying a laser-aligned orthogonality that varies. This technology will provide NIH with the quantitative memory….The successful development of The Hydrofloxia Effect will result in numerous spinoffs onto a symmetric mainframe for the benefit of all people in the world.

  It’s heartening to know that the study of hydrofloxia will benefit the people of the world. Even so, I decided not to submit my breakthrough research paper to the NIH. They’re too busy deciphering real applications.

  GOOD JARGON

  There are actually some nice things to say about jargon. First, of course, we have to recognize that there probably isn’t a line of work that hasn’t developed its own jargon. If you walked onto a movie set and someone asked you to “go get the gobo on the Century over there, and while you’re at it bring back a half apple and a kook—and hurry up, this is the Martini Shot,” you might be a little puzzled. Among other things, you’re being asked to get a couple of things that cast shadows. The gobo casts a hard shadow and is attached to a Century stand, manufactured by the Century Company and bearing its name. The kook, or cucoloris, is a board with a patterned cut-out for casting feathery shadows. A half apple is a small platform about the size of half an apple box. Cameras, lights, and height-challenged actors can be placed on them. And the Martini Shot is the last shot of the day, after which everyone goes home and has a martini.

  The point of running through all this arcane etymology is that, although jargon often proceeds from misty origins, it usually has a specific and useful meaning. Sometimes one word can stand for five pages in plain English. If people in the same field share a knowledge of that meaning, they’re not going to use five pages if one word will do, and they shouldn’t be expected to. Speaking jargon to the right person can save time and it can also lead to fewer errors. “Bring me the gobo” is probably less prone to error than “Bring me the black fuzzy thing over there.”

  But the other person does need to define the jargon in the same way that you do. I heard about a meeting in Washington where a group of nanoscientists were brought together with a group of neuroscientists in the hope that they could collaborate on new ways to study the brain. Before they could even get started, they wasted hours in a cloud of confusion because they couldn’t agree on the meaning of one word: the word probe.

  Even an ordinary English word can become indecipherable jargon if the person you’re talking to uses it as their own indecipherable jargon.

  There’s another reason jargon creeps into almost every profession: It can feel good to speak jargon. It’s like the feeling I had the day I came up with hydrofloxia. I had the pleasure of speaking a secret language. It was a little too secret, because nobody else speaks it, but a private vocabulary is not a totally bad thing. People seem to bond when they share shorthand. We’re the ones who talk like this. At least in this way, we’re special. It may seem like a trivial way to bond, but if it helps build a team, it probably doesn’t do harm—unless it’s used to keep people out who ought to be let in. A doctor speaking to a patient in terms she can’t understand is certainly not engaged in a bonding experience.

  Probably the least useful reason for using jargon is that it makes us sound smart. If the other person understands the jargon, then he or she is just as smart as the person speaking, so there’s nothing gained. And if the listener does not understand jargon, then it probably doesn’t sound all that smart to be unintelligible.

  Jargon is dangerous because it usually buries the very thing you most want the other person to understand. The insidious thing about jargon is that we know how beautifully it expresses precisely what we want to say, and it simply doesn’t occur to us that the person we’re talking to doesn’t have a clue as to what we’re talking about. In these moments, we suffer from a very common malady.

  THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE

  I first became aware of this strange mental lapse when I read Made to Stick, the very useful book on communication by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Steven Pinker also talks about the curse of knowledge in his book on style. A number of writers have latched onto the concept as being central to good communication. I agree. I think it’s at the very heart of communication. But, interestingly, the term originated in 1989 when three economists wrote a paper, not on communication, but on business and finance.

  Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein, and Martin Weber did a study to see if it’s true that having more knowledge than another person, for instance about something you’re buying or selling, really does give you an advantage. Their shocking conclusion was that very often extra knowledge is a disadvantage. At first it seems nonsensical that knowledge could be a burden, and even a curse. The problem, of course, is not in the knowledge itself. The problem is when you can’t imagine what it’s like not to have that knowledge. This is because people are, according to the economists, “unable to ignore the additional information they possess.” There’s something about having knowledge that makes it difficult to take the beginner’s view, to be able to think the way you did before you had that knowledge. And unless you’re aware that you actually know something the other person doesn’t know, you can be at a disadvantage. When you forget you know more than they do, there’s a tendency to undervalue your position.

  It goes something like this: You’re selling a used car and you know the mileage is low, but you also know it’s been beat up its whole life on bad roads. You’re not required to reveal that information, but you can’t forget it. You unconsciously assume the buyer will know what you know, and you set your initial price lower than you need to.

  It’s not uncommon for this to happen in a negotiation, or even in buying and selling st
ocks—whenever the more knowledgeable person just can’t shake the feeling that if they know something, then it surely must be known by everybody.

  It strikes me that this is curiously similar to how a four-year-old thinks before she realizes that other people have thoughts that are different from hers; yet, this is a flaw in adult thinking. Accomplished adults, at that.

  Heath and Heath use an example from the world of business, in which an executive attempts to rally the workforce with an abstract strategy like “unlocking shareholder value.” The executive has condensed a lifetime of concrete experience into an abstract term that to a workforce lacking his experience sounds like a foreign language.

  Once we know something, it’s hard to unknow it, to remember what it’s like to be a beginner. It keeps us from considering the listener.

  Using shorthand that is incomprehensible to the other person, or referring to a process they’re unfamiliar with, we lock them out, and we don’t even realize it because we can’t believe we are the only person who knows this stuff.

  It was through Heath and Heath that I learned about a remarkable demonstration of the curse of knowledge, invented by a graduate student at Stanford in 1990. I’ve borrowed it and shown a version of it to audiences, who, almost without fail, get the idea instantly.

  The grad student, Elizabeth Newton, worked out a simple experiment at Stanford in which she divided people into two groups: tappers and listeners. The tappers had to decide on a well-known song, like “Happy Birthday,” and let the listener know what the song was. But they couldn’t hum the tune or recite the words; the only way they could communicate the song was by tapping out the rhythm on a table. Take a second now and try to guess how often the listeners were able to identify the song. Eighty percent of the time? Fifty percent?