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

by Kate Murphy

shift responses are symptomatic of conversational narcissism, which quashes any chance of connection. Shift responses are usually self-referential statements while support responses are more often other-directed questions. But they have to be truly curious questions meant to elicit more information and not subtly impose your own opinion—open-ended questions like “What was your reaction?” not “Didn’t that piss you off?” The goal is to understand the speaker’s point of view, not to sway it.

Because people like to appear knowledgeable, they like to ask questions that suggest they already know the answer. Or they frame questions in ways that prompt the answers they want. Good questions don’t begin with: “Don’t you think…?” “Isn’t it true…?” “Wouldn’t you agree…?” And good questions definitely don’t end with “right?” These are actually camouflaged shift responses and will likely lead others to give incomplete or less-than-honest answers that fit the questioner’s opinions and expectations.

Look at it as an invitation to have a conversation, not as something to be fixed or get upset about.

the solutions to problems are often already within people, and just by listening, you help them access how best to handle things, now and also in the future.

If you were able to live to the age of ninety and retain either the mind or body of a thirty-year-old for the last sixty years of your life, which would you want?

2015 essay in The New York Times headlined TO FALL IN LOVE WITH ANYONE, DO THIS. Aron’s questions, subsequently renamed, “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love,”

Before hearing the story, half the subjects were told the woman in bed with Lee is Arthur’s wife. The other cohort was told Arthur is paranoid and the woman is Lee’s girlfriend. That one differing detail was enough to significantly change the subjects’ brain patterns while listening to the story so that Hasson could easily tell who thought the wife was a two-timer and who thought she was faithful. If that was all it took to separate people into neurally distinct groups, just think what’s happening in the brains of people habitually listening to, say, Fox News versus CNN. If you tell both factions the exact same thing, their brains will measurably hear it differently, as the signals are routed through distinct pathways depending on what they had previously heard. “It will reshape your mind,” Hasson told me. “It will affect the way you listen.”

Jerry Gibson, an electrical engineer and distinguished professor at the University of California–Santa Barbara, told me one of the reasons why it’s so hard to have a decent cell phone conversation is because voice calls are a low priority for service providers. There is higher demand for video and data, he said, so wireless providers have gotten stingy on the bandwidth, or bit rates, they allot for voice calls. The result is poor sound quality but fewer interruptions in service. “Their calculation is you will be less frustrated by a bad connection than a dropped connection,” said Gibson, who is an expert in mobile communication technology and author of several books on the subject with titles like Information Theory and Rate Distortion Theory for Communications and Compression. In other words, there are technological reasons contributing to your disinclination to talk on the phone. “You get low enough bandwidth and the call is tinny, breaks in and out, and doesn’t sound very good,” Gibson said. “It’s no wonder people would rather text.”

Research suggests that after people listen regularly to faster-paced speech, they have great difficulty maintaining their attention when addressed by someone who is talking normally—sort of like the feeling you get when you come off an expressway and have to go through a school zone.

constant ambient music—excellent for setting a mood but a distraction if you want to listen closely to a family member or friend. While you may think you can tune out these kinds of things, research consistently shows that you cannot. The ability to multitask is a delusion. Each input degrades your attention. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman memorably wrote, “The often used phrase ‘pay attention’ is apt: you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail.”

At a family dinner or any gathering, the gift of your full attention is a form of hospitality, according to literary scholar Ronald Sharp, who, with Eudora Welty, coedited The Norton Book of Friendship, an anthology of works on the importance and meaning of friendship in which listening figures prominently. “You’re welcoming another person’s words and feelings into your consciousness,” he told me. “You are allowing that person to cross over the threshold and take up residence in your world.”

In America, we say, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” while in Japan, “The silent man is the best to listen to.”

Research shows that being able to comfortably sit in silence is actually a sign of a secure relationship.

To be a good listener is to accept pauses and silences because filling them too soon, much less preemptively, prevents the speaker from communicating what they are perhaps struggling to say. It quashes elaboration and prevents real issues from coming to the surface.

Social dynamics change rapidly and are incredibly complicated. Every interpersonal decision and behavior is the result of myriad factors coming together at a particular moment between particular people. Depending on a number of variables, the same interaction can be insignificant or spin wildly out of control. Trying to understand this complexity is extremely challenging, Dunbar said, and that’s why “we’re so interested in listening to and examining lots and lots of examples to try to understand how the game is played so we can handle it better.”

This perhaps explains why social media is so seductive. The speed with which gossip can be accessed online, and the sheer quantity, is more than you could ever muster or manage in face-to-face interactions. It creates this imperative to keep checking to make sure you are still in the loop. But, of course, you can never keep up with it all, and with so many narratives and interpretations, the quality and value of the information plummets.

Pascal Bruckner argues in The Temptation of Innocence that modern individualism may be taking us backward. He observes that when one’s duty is foremost to one’s self, there is no sense of social obligation and “guided only by the lantern of his own understanding, the individual loses all assurance of a place, an order, a definition. He may have gained freedom, but he has lost security.” In our self-reliant society, we believe we are responsible for our own happiness and prosperity. “Everyone must sell himself as a person, in order to be accepted,” Bruckner writes. But this constant self-promotion and image cultivation comes at a cost. We lose touch with others and ultimately our sense of belonging and connection, which was all we really wanted in the first place.

when people feel the urgency to always sell themselves, they tend to exaggerate, which lowers the level of discourse and fosters cynicism. When asked his IQ score, the physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking said, “I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers.” This is from a man whom many considered the smartest person in the world. My great-great-aunt also observed that those who bragged the most were usually the least accomplished. Something to keep in mind when you’re tempted to promote yourself instead of finding out what’s great about whomever is in front of you.

People tend to regret not listening more than listening and tend to regret things they said more than things they didn’t say. It seems giving people a piece of your mind isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. While you may feel a sense of urgency to tell people how you feel, it’s not always helpful. You are putting your ego ahead of the other person’s vulnerability. This doesn’t mean you have to be dishonest or self-effacing, but you do need to listen enough to know when the other person is ready to hear what you have to say. Not everything needs to be said as you are feeling it.

Grice summarized our conversational expectations in four maxims: Maxim of Quality—we expect the truth. Maxim of Quantity—we expect to get information we don’t already know and not so much that we feel overwhelmed. Maxim of Relation—we expect relevance and logical flow. Maxim of Manner—we expect the speaker to be reasonably brief, orderly, and unambiguous. Some scholars have argued for the inclusion of politeness and fairness in turn taking, but Grice’s four maxims are widely recognized as what most people expect in civilized society, even if they aren’t aware of it.

Strange as it may sound, most people who violate Grice’s maxims are not so much bad speakers as bad listeners. The best communicators, whether addressing a crowd or a single individual, are people who have listened, and listened well, in the past and continue to listen in the moment. They are able to engage, entertain, and inspire because they first try to get a sense of their audience and then choose their material and style of delivery accordingly. And they also remain attuned to their audience while they are speaking, paying attention to verbal and nonverbal cues as well as the energy in the room to assess whether people are following them and care about the subject. It’s sort of like when you adopt a different narrative approach when talking to, say, your grandmother versus your girlfriend, a coworker versus a customer, or your liberal friend versus your conservative friend.

Not everybody has the same interests, sensibilities, or level of understanding, and to not try to discern and respect those differences is the surest way to bore or aggravate people or otherwise make them shut down.

Their self-centered conversational style more often speaks to deep insecurities, anxieties, or blind spots. Sometimes just by listening, they begin to listen, too—not only to you but also to themselves. And when they do, the conversation becomes more coherent, relevant, and responsive. The power of the listener is that you get to decide how much effort you want to put in and when you’ve had enough.

Second Date Update. For the uninitiated, it airs during morning drive time on pop and country music radio stations in larger markets like Houston, Seattle, Chicago, and Boston.

“We can readily accept the fact that we can be wrong,” the Polish-born social psychologist Robert Zajonc wrote, “but we are never wrong about what we like or dislike.” Better to listen to how people feel than try to convince them to feel differently. You can’t argue your way into affection, but truly listening is the surest way to form a bond.

Careful listening is draining, regardless of your personality, aptitude, or motivation. You can’t do it continuously.

The problem is that we tend to give up too soon. Few people, if any, are effortlessly eloquent and often need time to build up enough trust in you, and maybe also in themselves, to talk freely. Whether you are listening to your boss, colleagues, friends, loved ones, or strangers, it takes a while for people to get it out. They may beat around the bush or hide behind humor. They may say too much or too little. And they can even say things they don’t mean. A good listener takes the time and makes the effort to help people find their voice, and in so doing, intimacy and understanding are earned.

Listening can continue even when you are no longer in the presence of the speaker as you reflect on what the person said and gain added insight. This is not to recommend obsessive rumination or picking apart conversations, which psychiatrist Zerbe said usually has more to do with insecurity than honest reflection. You know you’re doing this when you are spinning your wheels going over and over how you feel about something someone said instead of considering the feelings that drove the other person to say it.

Journaling is a form of reflective listening for Anthony Doerr, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning book All the Light We Cannot See. Now forty-seven, he has kept a diary since he was sixteen. “It’s really a way to train yourself to look and listen,” he told me. “You slow down and translate a big confusing world, almost like a prayer.”

There’s a world of difference between gossip (talking about other people’s observed behavior to try to understand it) and betraying someone’s trust by divulging what the person told you in private.

You get to decide who deserves your attention. Listening is your gift to bestow. No one can make you listen. But just as you should be mindful and intentional when you grant the gift of your attention, you should try to be as mindful and intentional when you withhold it. While not listening is justified and a matter of practicality in some circumstances, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s a form of rejection. Consciously or unconsciously, you are choosing to attend to something else, which implies that person is not as interesting, as important, or as worthwhile, at least not at that moment.

As you become more attuned to the thoughts and emotions of others, you become more alive to the world and it becomes more alive to you. Life otherwise can become a muted existence, with days spent cocooned in unquestioned beliefs and fixed concepts, where, even though the world and the people in it are always changing, nothing is ventured beyond the borders of what you already know or accept as true. It feels safe, but it’s really just stifling. The

Our devices indulge our fear of intimacy by fooling us into thinking that we are socially connected even when we are achingly alone. We avoid the messiness and imperfections of others, retreating into the relative safety of our devices, swiping and deleting with abandon. The result is a loss of richness and nuance in our social interactions, and we suffer from a creeping sense of dissatisfaction.

Not listening reduces the level of discourse. We experience and evaluate our words differently when said aloud to an attentive listener versus when they are in our heads or tapped out in 140 characters. A listener has a reactive effect on the speaker. As a result, careful listening elevates the conversation because speakers become more responsible and aware of what they are saying.

Listening is often regarded as talking’s meek counterpart, but it is actually the more powerful position in communication. You learn when you listen. It’s how you divine truth and detect deception. And though listening requires that you let people have their say, it doesn’t mean you remain forever silent. In fact, how one responds is the measure of a good listener and, arguably, the measure of a good person.