In Supercommunicators (Random House, Feb.), Duhigg breaks down the roadblocks to productive dialogue and the skills needed to surmount them.

Why is it difficult to think about communication as a skill?

We’re raised to think of people as being good communicators or bad communicators as if it’s an innate trait, but it’s something that anyone can learn. Being a better communicator is about recognizing how conversations work—and once someone explains it to you, you notice it around you every time you open your mouth.

You write about sharing personal information in conversations to establish a common reality. Can you say more about that?

Often when we’re talking about shared realities, we think we’re having a practical conversation. How many people do guns kill? Does that number mean we should make guns illegal or legal? But the shared reality starts with an emotional conversation. We both care about our children. That shared reality is much easier for us to establish. Suddenly, the practical questions become easier to discuss. Most of the time we don’t start those conversations on an emotional plane. We start them on a purely practical plane, and then we’re surprised when we can’t communicate.

Do you think many of the country’s current political and social problems relate to communication failures?

I do. This country was born on conversations. It wasn’t a series of speeches, people talking at each other. It was debates, conversations—like the Federalist Papers. The country’s superpower is that we contain people who are different. And while we’ve partly forgotten how, it’s not hard to have a dialogue with someone you disagree with. It doesn’t mean you’re going to agree on anything, but you are going to walk away from that conversation feeling like you understand each other a little bit better.

Have social media and increased isolation made people worse communicators?

That’s certainly part of it—the fact that it’s so easy to find your own echo chamber is not great, for example. But it’s also that we lionize the person who’s willing to stand up and speak truth to power. While that person is important, historically leaders have also been celebrated because they were good communicators. Today Martin Luther King Jr. is mostly remembered for his “I Have a Dream” speech and his solitary leadership, but during his lifetime he believed deeply in coalition building—the civil rights movement of the 1960s and ’70s was very focused on conversation, on drawing others in. We’ve stopped celebrating that skill as much as in the past. But I think it’s going to come back. I think people are tired of fighting with each other. And I think people who want to have conversations will be celebrated.