The Things We Don’t Say

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

When children are very small, their minds are often an open book. They say what they mean. They blurt out things.

This can come across as both cruel and charming. The little boy laughs aloud when someone slips on a banana peel and gets hurt. The little girl tells her uncle that his face is ugly.

In Hans Christian Anderson's famous folktale, The Emperor's New Clothes, a child is the only one who speaks truth to power. The king has been taken in by conmen who pretend to clothe him in marvelous robes that are actually non-existent.

The king's courtiers marvel at their majesty's fine garments, even though he is walking around naked. Finally, a small child blurts out what everyone can see, but no one wants to say aloud. The king is a fool.

The folktale has many parallels in real life. Authoritarian leaders throughout history have surrounded themselves with yes men who tell them their every action is wise and brave.

When we listen to stories like The Emperor's New Clothes, most of us identify with the child. We think that if we were in that situation, we too would be honest. We too would speak truth to power.

Today on the show, we explore the many ways in which we fail to say what we mean and mean what we say. It turns out, most of us are not the kid in the story. We are the courtiers.

The power and the peril of coming clean. This week on Hidden Brain.

Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram.

Instagram teen accounts automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts.

Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

Support for Hidden Brain comes from LinkedIn. Running a small business means every hire matters. A bad hire can cost you time, money and momentum.

A good hire, they can help grow your business. LinkedIn's new hiring pro screens candidates for you, so instead of sorting through applicants, you spend time talking to only the right ones. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com/hb.

Terms and conditions apply.

Support for Hidden Brain comes from ADT. Imagine you finally have a day off when your phone buzzes, a window's been broken at home.

You're miles away. In one second, everything can change. ADT security systems help keep your home safer with 24-7 monitoring.

They can be professionally installed and keep watch from day one. Don't wait to prepare for an emergency. When every second counts, count on ADT.

Visit adt.com or call 1-800-ADT-ASAP.

Get to the point. Don't mince your words.

Lay it all on me. We have countless expressions about the value of being direct with others. And yet, as we go through life, we often don't just say what we mean.

We hedge, we weave, we dodge. At Harvard University, psychologist Steven Pinker studies language, social relations, and the mind. He has thought deeply about what our evasions and euphemisms might reveal about us.

Steve Pinker, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thank you.

Steve, as an eminent member of the Harvard faculty, you are sometimes called upon to help the university president raise money. Tell me what this is like to you, to have to wine and dine potential donors?

Well, there was one episode that sticks in memory. That was when the president of the university recruited me to have dinner with a, as they say, a high net worth individual. That is a euphemism for filthy rich.

This was one of the world's highest net worth individuals, as the fundraising office says, or to use another euphemism, the development office. And I took a train to Manhattan for the event.

The goal, of course, was to solicit a very, very, very large donation, or again, another euphemism, a gift to Harvard from this high net worth individual. And it was at an expensive, quiet restaurant.

We were, me and the university president, were seated at a quiet remote table, waiting for our partner to join us. We conferred, and the president indicated that we would see how the conversation proceeded. We wouldn't bring up the gift, obviously.

In fact, I wouldn't bring it up at all. Establish a warm rapport, a mood of conviviality, of intimacy. And as we were having this conversation in this dark corner of a rather romantic restaurant, it reminded me of something.

Kind of reminded me of when I was single and I was on a hot date. Because both parties kind of know what you're there for, what issue is kind of hanging over them.

But it would be gauche to say the least, to just blurt it out, even though both sides know what the evening is ultimately about.

So I can imagine that one reason the university president wants you by his side is because the potential donor, this high net worth individual, will feel good about having dinner with a star member of the faculty.

So you're not the eye candy, but you're the brain candy?

I was the brain candy. On any date, or many dates, there's entertainment. You go to a concert, you go to a movie.

So that's kind of the entertainment.

But also, I was part of the deal insofar as a lot of tech entrepreneurs are very, very smart people who forwent a career in writing or academia or intellectual activities in order to pursue their goal of founding a successful company.

But they're very smart, they're very curious. They kind of miss the banter, the repartee, the intellectual discussion, being close to the cutting edge of ideas. They genuinely are intellectually curious and smart.

And forging a connection with a university is a way for them to be a member of a community that they long to be part of. And so, what are we to put it crudely? And again, this is exactly what you cannot do.

But what that evening was all about was, give us hundreds of millions of dollars, we'll name something after you, and you'll get to hang out with interesting people. That's the quid pro quo.

But when this gentleman sat down, the president said, hey, if you give us $150 million, then we'll name the program after you, and you can speak to Pinker and Michael Sandel and other Harvard faculty as often as you want.

They would have put a kind of poll over the evening.

It would be, even though it would have cut out a lot of time, these are busy individuals, but somehow offering to save that time would be like on a date saying, okay, so are we gonna have sex at the end of this or not?

There's a sense of a shocking thing to say and a not shocking thing to say at the same time because both parties know it.

They kind of know that the other one knows it, but they may not know that the other one knows that they know that the other one knows they know it. Language has to do two things at once. It's a channel of communication.

Bits and bytes are exchanged for particular purposes, sharing information, negotiating agreements. At the same time, it establishes a particular kind of social relationship. Are we just transactional partners?

Pure quid pro quo. Are we friends? Do we have like a communal, warm, intimate relationship?

Is it a relationship of dominance? That is, is one person clearly the dominant and the other is the subordinate? People care a lot about which of those relationships they have.

And the way you often cement them is with explicit verbal declarations. In the case of a romantic couple, it's like, I love you, and then they reciprocate with I love you. Or it can be non-verbal cues, having a nice dinner together.

That's often the way a friendship is cemented.

In the course of this dinner that you were having with this high net worth individual, how did the conversation go? I'm assuming you didn't start by talking about money, or perhaps money didn't come up at all through most of that conversation.

Money never came up. It was a lively conversation. This was a very smart person, intellectually curious.

He talked about the Human Genome Project, the development of the brain, issues facing the university, economics. The actual cold, hard financial transaction was I think relegated to the my people will call your people stage.

And some of that was out of earshot of me being the merely the entertainment, not one of the partners. But the idea, both on a date and in a solicitation for funds, is to avoid the impression that the relationship is transactional.

The idea is that we are in a relationship of sharing, of warmth, of intimacy, of mutual concern. And so all the signals have to indicate that.

Now, in the case of solicitation of a donation, as of course with sex and romance, there actually often is a genuine relationship together with the actual exchange of favors.

But still, it's a lot of emotional capital goes into preventing any impression that this is a transactional relationship.

Those do occur, but I suspect that probably the most munificent gifts tend to occur when they are considered to be, you know, as they say, a gift, something that is layered on top of a communal relationship.

And this is, you know, in the case of the university, the intellectual stimulation and exchange, together with the prestige of not being merely a capitalist profit maximizer, but also a philanthropist for cultural and educational institutions.

Those are the ultimate incentives.

So, I'm wondering at a dinner like this, and the analogy to sexual courtship is apt, they might come a point in the dinner where, in some ways, something actually has to be communicated, that this is not just a dinner.

In other words, what happens if a high net worth individual says, this was a delightful conversation, I really enjoyed meeting Steve Pinker, and then goes back to his hedge fund or his tech company to continue to make money and has no interest in

Harvard going forward. That would not be a successful dinner.

Exactly, and this is where a lot of what we informally we call social skills, social acumen, jargon of psychology, sometimes called theory of mind, that is your theory of what's going on in the other person's mind.

As you say, you don't let the moment slip. On the other hand, if you make it too overt, too early, then it feels like a transactional relationship, as opposed to one of mutual generosity.

I'm wondering, did the donor come through? Did you get the big gift?

I think not as big as had been hoped. So maybe I was not charming enough. Also, donors, well actually, there was a donor.

Now that I think of it, the donor did not have the entity named after himself. So there was a donation, but he chose having something named after him at Harvard, came second to the various buildings with his own name plastered on them.

I want to talk about an example of indirect speech in the political arena. In 2016, then presidential candidate Donald Trump insulted Nikki Haley, who was the governor of South Carolina.

Here's how a TV station in South Carolina described the exchange.

A Twitter battle tonight between Nikki Haley and Donald Trump, of all people. The Republican presidential frontrunner tweeted this message earlier today and it said, quote, the people of South Carolina are embarrassed by Nikki Haley.

Well, the South Carolina governor responded simply, bless your heart.

So Steve, when used by Americans from Southern states, does bless your heart mean bless your heart?

It does not mean bless your heart. And there was a rather clever on her part because he was obviously, they were in a contest for dominance. One way to play it is with in your face insults.

That's the kind of playground trash talk. Haley, rather than taking the bait and meeting him in the same arena, tries to step above it with the non sequitur. Bless your heart.

Doesn't make sense in context because that's not what you say to someone who just insulted you. So listeners have to then puzzle, well, geez, she's not just saying things at random. She had a reason to say that.

Why did she say that? And to read between the lines, it's this kind of trash talk does not wound me.

I consider myself to have a strong enough reputation and I have enough confidence that I can, and I believe that I will not be lowered in status because of the content of your insult by not playing that game.