Radiolab founder and creator Jad Abumrad presents “How to Talk to a Human” at Sanders Theatre
Abumrad: “Actual listening is something much, much different.”
Photo courtesy of Lizzy Johnston
Jad Abumrad
“How to Talk to a Human”
Celebrity Series of Boston
Sanders Theatre
Jan. 31, 2025
On Jan. 31, radio host and producer Jad Abumrad presented “How to Talk to a Human,” his latest project at the Sanders Theatre. A three-time Peabody Awards recipient and 2011 MacArthur Fellow, Abumrad is the creator and former co-host of NPR’s Radiolab, a radio program broadcasted on nearly six hundred radio stations across the country. Using an investigative journalism approach, Radiolab covers topics across various disciplines, such as science and history.
In “How to Talk to a Human,” Abumrad, a Distinguished Research Professor of Communication of Science and Technology at Vanderbilt University, shared his insights on how people can have better conversations in many kinds of settings, from conducting interviews to talking to a family member. Although Abumrad is a journalist with extensive experience, he admitted that he is still in the process of understanding how to talk to a human.
Abumrad’s dissatisfaction with the quality of his interviews in 2021 inspired him to investigate this topic. “I hit this run of interviews where suddenly all the interviews I was doing, were just sucking,” he said. As a result, Abumrad became interested in talking to other journalists to learn how they conducted interviews, but he then realized that “we all do the same thing,” which elicited laughter from the audience. So Abumrad started talking to professionals outside journalism whose jobs required effective communication, from therapists to lawyers to even hostage negotiators. Eventually, his search ended up taking a broader scope of learning how to talk to a human, hence the title of his talk.
Abumrad began his presentation by introducing resonance, a concept in which two people are truly engaged in a conversation. Although people think that they are good at listening in a conversation, Abumrad argued that people are sometimes just waiting for the other person to pause before responding.
“We’re all pretty good at miming listening,” Abumrad said. “Actual listening is something much, much different.”
To practice resonance, Abumrad had the audience form pairs and participate in an interactive activity. In the activity, each person had two minutes to answer the question, and the other person had thirty seconds to respond to the person’s answer. The main rule of the timed conversation was to use phrases to build resonance, such as “I was impacted” or “I was right there.” Abumrad also emphasized things to avoid in the conversation, which included talking about themselves or sharing their opinions.
While the rules sounded straightforward, the exercise served as a friendly reminder for the audience to build resonance in a conversation, even if one may not agree with the other person. “It doesn’t actually mean you necessarily have to like them,” Abumrad said. “It just means you are here at this moment, and you share something together.”
After discussing the significance of resonance, Abumrad presented the choreography of conversation. Although choreography is typically associated with dance and theater, Abumrad argued that the orientation and location of people in a conversation are also relevant. One interesting example was Columbia Law lecturer Nicolas Grabar’s advice for law school students to sit next to a prisoner at a 90-degree angle in a conversation. According to Grabar, this allows the prisoner to “speak as much as he wants or as little as he wants.”
This powerful example transitioned into the next idea of how eye contact and closeness in conversation tend to be overemphasized. In certain cases, less eye contact and more space may be more effective than the default. Abumrad shared his own experience of how deviating from the standard face-to-face orientation helped his interview with country singer Dolly Parton. When he first interviewed her face-to-face, he said, “She steamrolled me.” He then altered the arrangement such that they sat on the couch with room for their “eyes and arms to wander.” In addition, the table had a laptop containing images and songs for Parton to respond to. These changes resulted in a much better conversation. “She got really reflective, really quiet,” Abumrad said. “It was just a beautiful, beautiful shift.”
Abumrad reiterated the importance of considering factors like orientation and location in a conversation instead of solely focusing on dialogue. “How can I change the choreography?” Abumrad asked the audience. “Forget what we are saying.”
Abumrad then spoke about the listening triangle, a framework used for improving communication. The listening triangle consists of three steps: asking an open-ended question, listening, and paraphrasing the response to verify. While the model is simple, people don’t use the listening triangle enough because of their overconfidence in understanding the other person. “The truth is, we project onto each other, and then relate each other’s projections,” Abumrad said. What the listening triangle offers is clarifying what the other person meant, allowing both sides to feel understood and heard.
Following the listening triangle was the topic of oneness and separateness, a concept coined by child psychologist Louise Kaplan. Before an infant is eighteen months old, they do not have a concept of self, causing them to feel “oneness.” Afterward, however, the child experiences “separateness” and realizes they have their own identity. The dichotomy between the two experiences inspired Abumrad to apply this concept when trying to help someone.
Based on his conversation with University of Michigan Psychology Professor Ethan Kross, Abumrad suggested to first use oneness and then separateness when talking to someone having a challenging time, such as failure. What Abumrad means by this approach is to first build social and emotional connections by relating to them. Afterwards, the person should be given space to understand what is happening so they can develop their own plan and move on.
While it may be unclear when one should go from oneness to separateness, Abumrad recommended simply asking the person if they would like advice, or aren’t ready yet. An analogy to oneness and separateness is the transition from empathy to compassion. While the two words sound synonymous, Abumrad argued that they fall under different stages. According to Abumrad, a person starts with empathy, the act of feeling another person’s emotions. Then, this develops to compassion, the act of helping someone in need.
Abumrad concluded his talk with a reprise called “Find the Third,” a concept based on an interesting conversation card game that nonprofit director Alisa del Tufo developed. To interview children from abused families, she had them draw cards that had questions. She also offered blank cards in the deck for them to write their personal questions. Abumrad found this method to be an inspiring way of approaching journalism from a different angle. Traditionally, interviewers follow a list of questions for the interviewee. “You give yourself the opportunity to ask questions, and you also give the other person a fair amount of control over the experience,” Abumrad said.
Abumrad left the audience with an enlightening question, asking, “What is your version of the card game? What is the thing that you can do when you are talking to ensure that people hear you and that you are listening to encourage people to share?”