Supercommunicators Study Guide

Charles Duhigg, born in 1974, was raised in New Mexico as one of 10 siblings. He attended a magnet high school in Albuquerque and majored in history at Yale University. In 2001, a few years after graduating from Yale, he matriculated at Harvard Business School. He interned for a private-equity firm during business school but decided to pursue a journalism career after becoming fascinated by the public radio show This American Life. After earning his MBA, he interned at the Washington Post and then, in 2003, obtained a job at the Los Angeles Times. At the Los Angeles Times, he worked as a war reporter based in Baghdad, covering the Iraq War, and as a U.S.-based music journalist. Several years later, he took a job at the New York Times, where he was part of the journalistic team that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for their work on Apple’s impact on global business. While at the New York Times, he also published his first two books, nonfiction bestsellers The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (2012) and Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business (2016). After quitting the New York Times in 2017 to focus on longer-form journalism, Charles Duhigg became a reporter for the magazine The New Yorker. In 2024, he published his third book, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Communication. He currently lives in California with his wife, research scientist and marine biology professor Elizabeth Alter.

In the first chapter of Supercommunicators, Duhigg profiles a CIA agent named James Lawler. Lawler joined the CIA in the early 1980s, during the Cold War, a global power struggle between western capitalist powers led by the U.S. and eastern communist powers led by the USSR. The Cold War lasted from approximately the end of World War II until the dissolution of the USSR (1945–1991). Specifically, Duhigg describes how, in 1982, Lawler persuaded a woman who worked for her Middle Eastern country’s foreign ministry to pass information to the CIA. Though Lawler does not share this woman’s real name or the name of her country, he does note that the country was a major oil producer that had (as of 1982) recently undergone a conservative religious revolution and installed a government opposed to U.S. interests. These details imply that Lawler’s recruit was from Iran. In 1953, the CIA had worked with the English intelligence service MI6 to overthrow Iran’s socialist prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who wanted to nationalize Iran’s oil industry to the detriment of English oil companies. This U.S.- and UK-backed anti-communist coup made hereditary monarch Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi the ruler of Iran. Then, in 1979, the Iranian Revolution overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah and turned Iran from a secular state into an Islamic republic ruled by Shia Muslim cleric Ruhollah Khomeini. The historical context around Lawler’s recruitment of Yasmin hints at how, in the U.S., much research into communication, persuasion, and negotiation is funded by the government, which is interested in the research’s military and espionage applications. 

Supercommunicators is Charles Duhigg’s third nonfiction bestseller that uses psychological research to explain how readers can improve their skills in important areas. His first nonfiction work, The Power of Habit, summarizes psychological research on how people form and break habits and suggests a framework that readers can use to change their own habitual behaviors. His second, Smarter Faster Better, explains psychological and neuroscientific research around productivity that readers can apply to their own lives. In Supercommunicators, Duhigg also discusses at length an earlier seminal nonfiction work on the psychology of communication and negotiation, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without Giving In, by Roger Fisher and William Ury. Books about communication and negotiation published around the same time as Supercommunicators include Stanford professor Matt Abrahams’s Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You’re Put on the Spot  and lawyer Jefferson Fisher’s The Next Conversation: Argue Less, Talk More. In fact, Fisher interviewed Duhigg about Supercommunicators on his podcast about week after The Next Conversation came out. In addition to these nonfiction books, the endnotes of Supercommunicators recommend the espionage thrillers Living Lies and In the Twinkling of an Eye, novels written by retired CIA agent James Lawler, whom Duhigg interviewed for the book.