Asking about someone’s beliefs or values (“How’d you decide to become a teacher?”) Asking someone to make a judgment (“Are you glad you went to law school?”) Asking about someone’s experiences (“What was it like to visit Europe?”) These kinds of questions don’t feel intrusive—asking “How’d you decide to become a teacher?” doesn’t seem overly

Epley wanted to nudge these hedge funders into a How Do We Feel? conversation. “When you open up to somebody,” Epley told me, “they get drawn in.” However, Epley knew that many people shy away from discussing intimate or emotional topics because we think it will be awkward, or unprofessional, or we’ll say the wrong thing, or the other person will

The beginnings of conversations are often awkward and fraught. We need to make decision after decision, at rapid speed (“What tone is appropriate?” “Is it okay to interrupt?” “Should I tell a joke?” “What does this person think of me?”), and there are lots of opportunities to miss something or fail to notice what goes unsaid. This is when the

In the same manner as Salma Mousa’s soccer league, Chamie’s conversations put everyone on equal footing—no one is an expert on parenting or God’s will.

She didn’t do anything except acknowledge that they both contained numerous identities, and that some of them—religious devotion, caring about children—overlapped and offered different perspectives on what constitutes “safety.” With that, the appointment was over.

Motivational interviewing seeks to draw out a person’s beliefs, values, and social identities, in the hopes that, once all these complexities and complicated beliefs are on the table, unexpected opportunities for change might appear.

First, try to draw out your conversational partners’ multiple identities. It’s important to remind everyone that we all contain multitudes; none of us is one-dimensional.

Salma Mousa, a PhD candidate at Stanford who was interested in testing what’s known as the contact hypothesis—the theory that, if you bring people with clashing social identities together under specific conditions, you can overcome old hatreds.

The stereotype threat had been neutralized by reminding women of the multitudes of identities they possessed. “Drawing self-concept maps with few nodes proved ineffective,” the researchers wrote. “Drawing self-concept maps with many nodes, in contrast, allowed women who had been placed under stereotype threat to perform significantly better.”