You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

by Kate Murphy

In a 2018 survey of twenty thousand Americans, almost half said they did not have meaningful in-person social interactions, such as having an extended conversation with a friend, on a daily basis.

The 1 percent rule, or 90-9-1 rule, of internet culture holds that 90 percent of users of a given online platform (social media, blogs, wikis, news sites, etc.) just observe and do not participate, 9 percent comment or contribute sparingly, and a scant 1 percent create most of the content. While the number of users contributing may vary somewhat by platform, or perhaps when something in the news particularly stirs passions, the truth remains that the silent are the vast majority.

the most active users of social media and commenters on websites tend to be a very particular—and not representative—personality type who a) believe the world is entitled to their opinion and b) have time to routinely express it. Of course, what generates the most interest and attention online is outrage, snark, and hyperbole. Posts that are neutral, earnest, or measured don’t tend to go viral or get quoted in the media. This distorts dialogue and changes the tenor of conversations, casting doubt on how accurately the sentiments expressed track what people would say in the presence of a live, attentive listener.

the ability to listen carefully, like the ability to read carefully, degrades if you don’t do it often enough. If you start listening to everyone as you would scan headlines on a celebrity gossip website, you won’t discover the poetry and wisdom that is within people. And you withhold the gift that the people who love you, or could love you, most desire.

Everybody has something going on in their heads, whether it’s your child, your romantic partner, your coworker, a client, or whoever. To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know. It’s what we all crave; to be understood as a person with thoughts, emotions, and intentions that are unique and valuable and deserving of attention.

listening first rather than jumping in prematurely to explain or reassure in a way that missed the point,

Listening requires, more than anything, curiosity.

The most valuable lesson I’ve learned as a journalist is that everybody is interesting if you ask the right questions. If someone is dull or uninteresting, it’s on you.

Researchers at the University of Utah found that when talking to inattentive listeners, speakers remembered less information and were less articulate in the information they conveyed. Conversely, they found that attentive listeners elicited more information, relevant detail, and elaboration from speakers, even when the listeners didn’t ask any questions. So if you’re barely listening to someone because you think that person is boring or not worth your time, you will actually make it so.

It’s an eagerness to understand someone else’s worldview and an expectation that you will be surprised by what you hear and will learn from the experience. Put another way, it’s a lack of presumption that you already know what someone will say, much less that you know better.

People are fascinating because they are so unpredictable. The only certainty you achieve by not listening to people is that you will be bored and you will be boring because you won’t learn anything new.

Listening for things you have in common and gradually building rapport is the way to engage with anyone. Interrogation doesn’t work with terrorists, so why would it work when you meet someone at a social gathering? Peppering people with appraising and personal questions like “What do you do for a living?” or “What part of town do you live in?” or “What school did you go to?” or “Are you married?” is interrogating. You’re not trying to get to know them. You’re sizing them up. It makes people reflexively defensive and will likely shift the conversation into a superficial and less-than-illuminating résumé recitation or self-promoting elevator pitch.

Had they aggressively started asking personal questions about the person’s employment, education, and family, it wouldn’t have gone so well. Instead, they might have started out by talking about the commute or maybe noticing someone’s Chicago Cubs ball cap, asking if the person ever goes to games—listening and letting the conversation build organically. By being genuinely curious, courteous, and attentive, the study’s participants discovered how correspondingly gracious—and ultimately, interesting—their fellow commuters could be.

“The understanding, ‘What I know is different from what you know,’ is essential for effective communication to occur,” said Kenneth Savitsky, professor of psychology at Williams College and lead author of the study. “It is necessary for giving directions, for teaching a class, or for ordinary conversation. But that insight can be elusive when the ‘you’ in question is a close friend or spouse.”

It’s as if once you feel a connection with someone, you assume it will always be so. The sum of daily interactions and activities continually shapes us and adds nuance to our understanding of the world so that no one is the same as yesterday nor will today’s self be identical to tomorrow’s. Opinions, attitudes, and beliefs change. So it doesn’t matter how long you have known or how well you think you know people; if you stop listening, you will eventually lose your grasp of who they are and how to relate to them.

too, are rooted in false assumptions. Most notably, confirmation bias and expectancy bias, which are caused by our craving for order and consistency. To make sense of a large and complex world, we unconsciously create file folders in our heads into which we drop people, usually before they even start talking. The categories can be broad stereotypes influenced by our culture or more individualistic based on experience. They can be helpful and accurate in some instances. But if we’re not careful, our rush to categorize and classify can diminish our understanding and distort reality. It’s the “Yeah, yeah, I got it” syndrome that makes us jump to conclusions about people before we know who they really are. What happens is we meet someone who fits into one of our mental rubrics—maybe it has to do with gender, race, sexual preference, religion, profession, or appearance—and we immediately think we know them or at least certain aspects of them. Say I told you I’m a native Texan. Did that change how you think of me? Probably. Depending on your mental picture of a Texan, it might have raised or lowered me in your esteem. Same goes if you learn I’m covered with tattoos. It’s a reflexive mental tendency that gives you the illusion of understanding and, hence, lessens your curiosity and motivation to listen. Without realizing it, you start listening selectively, hearing only what fits your preconceived notions. Or you might even behave in ways that get me to confirm your expectations.

Making assumptions of uniformity or solidarity based on age, gender, skin color, economic status, religious background, political party, or sexual preference reduces and diminishes us all. By listening, you might find comfort in shared values and similar experiences, but you’ll also find many points where you diverge, and it’s by acknowledging and accepting those differences that you learn and develop understanding. Our listening suffers from broadly applied and collective ideas of identity, which discourages discovery of what makes us and other people unique.

There is an inverse relationship between signaling and listening. Say you see someone wearing a VEGANS MAKE BETTER LOVERS T-shirt or driving a truck with an NRA bumper sticker. You may feel that’s all you need to know about either person. It’s also fair to say that they may be so invested in those identities that it does tell you a lot. But it’s important to remember that what you know is a persona and not a person, and there’s a big difference. There’s more than you can imagine below the surface.

people are more likely to feel understood if a listener responds not by nodding, parroting, or paraphrasing but by giving descriptive and evaluative information.

“People want the sense you get why they are telling you the story, what it means to them, not so much that you know the details of the story,”

So it’s not that your friend lost his job that’s significant but how it’s impacting him emotionally. Sleuthing that out is the art of listening, particularly when people tend to bombard you with a lot of ancillary information (the commute, the fishing trip, and the detail about his wife). You are the detective, always asking, “Why is this person telling me this?” understanding that speakers sometimes may not know the answer themselves. Good listeners help speakers figure that out by asking questions and encouraging elaboration. You know you’ve succeeded as a listener when, after you respond, the other person says something like “Yes, exactly!” or “You totally get it!”

When someone says something to you, it’s as if they are tossing you a ball. Not listening or half listening is like keeping your arms pinned to your sides or looking away so the ball sails right past or bounces clumsily off you.

You miss out on opportunities (and can look like an idiot) when you don’t take a breath and listen. Talking about yourself doesn’t add anything to your knowledge base. Again, you already know about you.

When you leave a conversation, ask yourself, What did I just learn about that person? What was most concerning to that person today? How did that person feel about what we were talking about? If you can’t answer those questions, you probably need to work on your listening.

to be a good listener means using your available bandwidth not to take mental side trips but rather to double down on your efforts to understand and intuit what someone is saying. He said listening well is a matter of continually asking yourself if people’s messages are valid and what their motivations are for telling you whatever they are telling you.

committing a faux pas creates an opportunity to fix it, which strengthens your tie to the other person. First advanced by Austrian psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut in the 1960s but more widely embraced in the past ten years, self-psychology holds that repaired rifts are the fabric of relationships rather than patches on them. Indeed, if you think about the people whom you trust and feel closest to in your life, they are undoubtedly the ones who have come back after a flub and made it right.

Your responses will be better, your connections will be stronger, and you’ll be more at ease if you free up your mind to listen. It also makes conversations that much more interesting because you are able to take in more information. Not only are you listening to the words, but you’re also using your leftover brainpower to notice the speaker’s body language and inflection as well as to consider the context and motivation.

Good listeners, rather than getting mired in their own thoughts, insecurities, and superficial judgments, pick up on the subtext of what people say as well as subtle nonverbal details like the clenched jaw of the Ivy League alum or the solo wife twisting her wedding ring around and around her finger. Good listeners use their excess brain capacity to notice these things, gathering more than just words.

There’s no reason all conversations can’t be like that. Recognizing and resisting mental side trips is what frees you to inhabit someone else’s story.

must ask questions out of curiosity as opposed to questioning to prove a point, set a trap, change someone’s mind, or to make the other person look foolish.

people selectively listen to only those who make them feel secure in their positions, which breeds insular thinking and so-called alternative facts. President Donald Trump famously said, “My primary consultant is myself.” A prolific tweeter, Trump represents a transformation in the body politic: people on the right and the left can create their own realities online and drive their own unchallenged narratives—maligning, blocking, or deleting content and commentary they don’t like.

remind yourself to take a calm, open, and curious stance rather than an angry, aggravated, or alarmed stance. It’s far more useful to listen to find out how other people arrived at their conclusions and what you can learn from them—whether it changes or shores up your own thinking. At the moment you feel you are going to react with hostility toward those who disagree with you, take a breath and ask them a question, not to expose flawed logic but to truly expand your understanding of where they are coming from.

we only become secure in our convictions by allowing them to be challenged. Confident people don’t get riled by opinions different from their own, nor do they spew bile online by way of refutation. Secure people don’t decide others are irredeemably stupid or malicious without knowing who they are as individuals. People are so much more than their labels and political positions. And effective opposition only comes from having a complete understanding of another person’s point of view and how they came to develop it. How did they land where they landed? And how did you land where you landed? Listening is the only way to have an informed response. Moreover, listening begets listening. Someone who has been listened to is far more likely to listen to you.

When engaged in any kind of dispute, the father of listening studies, Ralph Nichols, advised listening for evidence that you might be wrong rather than listening to poke holes in the other person’s argument, much less plugging your ears or cutting someone out of your life entirely. It requires a certain generosity of spirit, but if you remain open to the possibility that you might be wrong, or at least not entirely right, you’ll get far more out of the conversation.

The English romantic poet John Keats wrote to his brothers in 1817 that to be a person of achievement, one must have “negative capability,” which he described as “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Good listeners have negative capability. They are able to cope with contradictory ideas and gray areas. Good listeners know there is usually more to the story than first appears and are not so eager for tidy reasoning and immediate answers, which is perhaps the opposite to being narrow-minded. Negative capability is also at the root of creativity because it leads to new ways of thinking about things. In the psychological literature, negative capability is known as cognitive complexity, which research shows is positively related to self-compassion and negatively related to dogmatism. Because they are able to listen without anxiety and are open to hearing all sides, people who are more cognitively complex are better able to store, retrieve, organize, and generate information, which gives them greater facility for making associations and coming up with new ideas. It also enables them to make better judgments and sounder decisions.

To listen does not mean, or even imply, that you agree with someone. It simply means you accept the legitimacy of the other person’s point of view and that you might have something to learn from it. It also means that you embrace the possibility that there might be multiple truths and understanding them all might lead to a larger truth. Good listeners know understanding is not binary. It’s not that you have it or you don’t. Your understanding can always be improved.

Nor did Naomi simply ask why they shopped late at night because, she told me, “Why?” tends to make people defensive—like they have to justify themselves. Instead, Naomi turned her question into an invitation: “Tell me about the last time you went to the store after 11:00 p.m.”

Nearly all job growth since 1980 has been in occupations with higher levels of social interaction, whereas positions that require predominantly analytical and mathematical reasoning—that can be turned into an algorithm—have been disappearing.

one of the more interesting and effective methods for improving employees’ listening skills: improvisational comedy.

“I like to think of improv as medicine,” Anderson said. “Instead of thinking, ‘This person is a jerk and out for themselves,’ I think, ‘Oh, man, this person is really struggling to be seen.’” In her experience, it all boils down to insecurity. “Their concern is they are not enough,” she said. “So they will use whatever tactics they think will work for them.”

She first took improv classes as a de-stressor but soon realized that part of what was making her job stressful was she was more reactive than active in her listening. “At work, it was like I was this boulder on some shore and stormy water was crashing down on me,” she said. “I didn’t see trouble before it started because I wasn’t present. I was always thinking about the next thing.” With improv training, she said, she became more aware of and sensitive to signs of an impending outburst or aggression so she could intervene before a patient acted out or before a fellow staff member got too overwhelmed. “It’s an amazing thing to realize that you get to set the tone within your space,” Anderson said. “People don’t realize the power they have when they learn to listen.”

“I’m beginning to think my need to show what I can do is keeping me from finding out what other people can do and what we can do together.”

Intimacy, innovative thinking, teamwork, and humor all come to those who free themselves from the need to control the narrative and have the patience and confidence to follow the story wherever it leads.

It is said that intuition, often called the sixth sense, is nothing more than recognition. The more people you listen to, the more aspects of humanity you will recognize, and the better your gut instinct will be. It’s a practiced skill that depends on exposure to a wide range of opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and emotions.

A good listener has the ability to elicit more than superficial or anxious chatter so people reveal more of who they really are.

Guests know by Gross’s questions that she has done her homework and is knowledgeable and keenly interested in their work. When people feel known and appreciated, they are more willing to share. Gross also assures them before the interview starts that they are free to stop her at any time if she ventures into an area that feels uncomfortable. So right there, she’s established that she cares about their feelings. These are things anyone who wants to be a better listener can emulate. Demonstrate interest either by learning about people beforehand or being inquisitive in the moment. Try to find what excites them.

Virginia Woolf said, “Words are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries.”

Research indicates that people who have a higher degree of self-awareness, and a related concept known as self-monitoring, are better listeners in part because they know the sorts of things that lead them to jump to the wrong conclusions and thus are less likely to do so. Cultivating self-awareness is a matter of paying attention to your emotions while in conversation and recognizing when your fears and sensitivities—or perhaps your desires and dreams—hijack your ability to listen well.

This kind of private or inner speech is associated with higher performance on cognitive tasks by children as well as adults. The research suggests that the more people you listen to in the course of your life, the more sides to an issue you can argue in your head and the more solutions you can imagine. Inner dialogue fosters and supports cognitive complexity, that valuable ability to tolerate a range of views, make associations, and come up with new ideas.

By recording and transcribing more than a hundred informal dinner conversations, he identified two kinds of responses. More common was the shift response, which directs attention away from the speaker and toward the respondent. Less common, and Disraeli’s forte, was the support response, which encourages elaboration from the speaker to help the respondent gain greater understanding.