You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Thank you for downloading the Life Scientific from BBC Radio 4.

My guest today, the social psychologist Liz Stocco, is fascinated by conversation.

Not just the nuances of everyday chit chat but also the verbal abuse between

warring neighbors and police interviews of suspected criminals. Liz is

professor of social interaction at Loughborough University.

Her unusual approach involves collecting and analyzing the fine details of hundreds of real

spontaneous conversations as a source of raw data, rather than a more traditional means of finding out what people think,

using surveys and questionnaires.

Her most recent research has overturned ideas about the best ways to teach people how to communicate, negotiate or deal with

confrontation. Role play using actors to stage a scenario has been seen by many as a

gold standard training device, but Liz says there's no evidence to show that it works.

Her alternative technique is based on scientific research that is already being widely used

by different organizations, from the police to mediation services and even hospitals.

...