Become a Big Think member to unlock expert classes, premium print issues, exclusive events and more: Charles Duhigg, author of Super Communicators, spent years studying why smart, well-intentioned people consistently fail to connect. The answer comes down to a concept called the matching principle: every conversation falls into one of 3 types: practical, emotional, or social, and real connection only happens when both people are in the same one. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Buy Charles Duhigg's most recent book, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection, here: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- About Charles Duhigg: Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of The Power of Habit, which spent over three years on bestseller lists and has been translated into 40 languages, and Smarter Faster Better, also a bestseller. Mr. Duhigg writes for The New Yorker magazine and is a graduate of Yale University and the Harvard Business School. He has been a frequent contributor to CNBC, This American Life, NPR, The Colbert Report, NewsHour, and Frontline. He was also, for one terrifying day in 1999, a bike messenger in San Francisco.