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

by Kate Murphy

Perhaps you, yourself, are not the best listener. And you could be forgiven since, in many ways, you’ve been conditioned not to listen. Think back to when you were a little kid. If a parent said, “Listen to me!” (perhaps while holding you firmly by the shoulders), it’s a good bet you weren’t going to like what was coming next. When your teacher, Little League coach, or camp counselor beckoned, “Listen up!” what followed was usually a bunch of rules, instructions, and limits on your fun.

It was extraordinary how many people told me they considered it burdensome to ask family or friends to listen to them—not just about their problems but about anything more meaningful than the usual social niceties or jokey banter.

In a culture infused with existential angst and aggressive personal marketing, to be silent is to fall behind. To listen is to miss an opportunity to advance your brand and make your mark.

Listening is more of a mind-set than a checklist of dos and don’ts.

By the end of our first year, we have imprinted on our baby brains a template of how we think relationships work, based on how attuned our parents or primary caregivers were to our needs.

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 is not about teaching, shaping, critiquing, appraising, or showing how it should be done (“Here, let me show you.” “Don’t be shy.” “That’s awesome!” “Smile for Daddy.”). Listening is about the experience of being experienced. It’s when someone takes an interest in who you are and what you are doing. The lack of being known and accepted in this way leads to feelings of inadequacy and emptiness.

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.

To listen is to be interested, and the result is more interesting conversations. The goal is to leave the exchange having learned something. You already know about you. You don’t know about the person with whom you are speaking or what you can learn from that person’s experience.

While McManus’s title at the CIA was chief interrogator, he said interrogation was his least preferred and least effective tactic. “I’ve never been big on interrogation. Trust me, I know what it is. If I berate the hell out of you, you’re going to give me something. But is it credible and reliable?” He shook his head and continued, “I’ve got to take the time and be patient enough and be a good listener to get information that is going to be useful.” His approach was to ask suspects to tell him their stories, not bully them to fess up.

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.

I was there to find out why people so often feel unheard and misunderstood by their partners. Coche’s answer was pretty simple: people in long-term relationships tend to lose their curiosity for each other. Not necessarily in an unkind way; they just become convinced they know each other better than they do. They don’t listen because they think they already know what the other person will say.

We actually all tend to make assumptions when it comes to those we love. It’s called the closeness-communication bias. As wonderful as intimacy and familiarity are, they make us complacent, leading us to overestimate our ability to read those closest to us.

“The understanding, ‘What I know is different from what you know,’ is essential for effective communication to occur,”

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.

You’ve probably experienced the phenomenon when someone close to you (maybe your spouse, child, parent, friend, etc.) revealed something that you didn’t know when the two of you were talking to someone else. You might have even said, “I didn’t know that!” This likely occurred because the other person was listening differently than you previously had. Maybe that person showed more interest, asked the right questions, was less judging, or was less apt to interrupt.

“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,” Bodie told me. Trouble is, he and his colleagues have consistently found that most people are really bad at this. Their data suggests that listeners’ responses are emotionally attuned to what speakers are saying less than 5 percent of the time,

In conversation, people rarely tell you something unless it means something to them. It comes to mind and out of their mouths because it has valence, begging for a reaction. And it’s in understanding the intent and meaning beneath the words that you relate to that person.

The world is easier to navigate if you remember that people are governed by emotions, acting more often out of jealousy, pride, shame, desire, fear, or vanity than dispassionate logic. We act and react because we feel something. To discount this and listen superficially—or not at all—is to operate at a serious disadvantage. If people seem simple and devoid of feeling, that only means you don’t know them well enough.

Noesner likes to think of people’s stories as two concentric circles—like a doughnut—where the facts of what happened are on the inside and surrounding that are the more important feelings and emotions. “It’s not really what happens to us in life but how we feel about it,” he said.

“If you go into every situation thinking you already know everything, it limits your ability to grow, learn, connect, and evolve,” Noesner said. “I think a good listener is someone who is open to hearing someone else’s experiences and ideas and acknowledges their point of view.”

“They worry that if they really pay attention or really understand the other side’s point of view, they will lose sight of what matters to them.” It’s why people listen to individuals and media that affirm their viewpoints. And it’s also why it’s so hard to refrain from jumping in to refute speakers with whom you disagree before hearing them out, much less keep from nonverbally communicating your resistance by folding your arms, sighing, or rolling your eyes. We almost can’t help ourselves because when our deeply held beliefs or positions are challenged, if there’s even a whiff that we might be wrong, it feels like an existential threat.

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.

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.

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. It doesn’t matter if it’s their bottle cap collection; if they are passionate about it, it will be interesting. And also respect boundaries by backing off if you suspect you’ve stumbled into a touchy area. Gently change the subject and be gracious in not knowing. Intimacy can’t be forced.

Personal interpretation also messes us up. Like when someone says, “I’d like to get to bed at a decent hour.” You could be thinking a decent hour is 10:00 p.m. when the other person has 2:00 a.m. in mind.

The meaning of hard labor, good sex, not far, and spicy food all depends on who’s saying it.

Things get even more complicated when you try to communicate with someone who grew up speaking a different language from yours. Then you get into linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that a person’s native language influences how they see or experience the world. A clever study by South African and British researchers demonstrated linguistic relativity quite elegantly. They had Swedish and Spanish speakers estimate the amount of time that elapsed while watching two animations: one of a line increasing in length and another of a container filling from the bottom. Because Swedish speakers describe time using distance terms like long or short and Spanish speakers use volume-related terms like big or small, the Swedish speakers tended to think the line that grew longer took longer, when it actually took less time, while the Spanish speakers thought that the fuller vessel took longer to fill when, in fact, it didn’t.

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. A spouse or close friend may have insight into what shuts you down or sets you off, or you may prefer a good psychotherapist. While it can be difficult to do this kind of self-assessment, the reward is a greater capacity to understand and connect with other people. You can only be as intimate with another person as you are with yourself.

We often miss lies, as well as truths, because when someone says something that doesn’t make sense, most of the time, we don’t stop the conversation and say, “Wait. Back up. I don’t understand.”

the shift response Crowe and McDowell described occurs when people, uncomfortable with others’ emotions, respond by trying to solve or explain away problems rather than listening and letting the upset or aggrieved feel what they feel and, through dialogue, find their own solutions. The authors advise squelching the impulses to: suggest you know how someone feels identify the cause of the problem tell someone what to do about the problem minimize their concerns bring perspective to a situation with forced positivity and platitudes admire the person’s strength Being aware of someone’s troubles does not mean you need to fix them. People usually aren’t looking for solutions from you anyway; they just want a sounding board. Moreover, you shut people down when you start telling them what they should do or how they should feel. No matter how good your intentions or how sage you think your advice, people reflexively resist and resent directives, even if gently delivered.

Say your son or daughter jumps into the car after soccer practice and says, “I hate it. I’m never going back. I quit.” This always strikes a nerve with parents who are likely to respond with: “You can’t quit. Where’s your team spirit?” or “Oh my God, what happened? I’m going to call the coach!” or “Are you hungry? Let’s go eat. You’ll feel better.” None of that is listening. Grilling them about what happened is interrogating. Telling them they shouldn’t feel how they feel is minimizing. And changing the subject is just maddening. Kids, like all of us, just want to be heard. Try instead, “Have you always felt this way?” or “What would quitting mean?” Look at it as an invitation to have a conversation, not as something to be fixed or get upset about.

Whether it’s your child, romantic partner, friend, colleague, or employee who comes to you with a personal problem, if you ask open and honest questions and listen attentively to the answers, it communicates, “I’m interested in hearing more from you,” and “Your feelings are valid.” If you jump in to fix, advise, correct, or distract, you are communicating that the other person doesn’t have the ability to handle the situation: “You’re not going to get this without me.” And you’re also telling them, “There’s no room for honest emotion in our relationship.” By questioning and listening carefully to the answers, the other person might in return begin to ask you questions so they can benefit from your experience. And that’s okay, too. In this way, you have earned the right to reflect on your own approaches to problems and offer counsel or consolation. And it also ensures the stories and sentiments you share are truly relevant and helpful.

Think of when your child comes home from school—you might ask a string of rapid-fire questions: “How was school?” “Have you eaten?” “Do you have homework?” “What did you get on your French test?” “Did you bring home your lunchbox?” Similarly, when greeting your spouse, you might ask, “How was work?” “Did you finish your proposal?” “Do you want to have the Murrays over for dinner on Friday?” “Do you have dry cleaning?” It sounds super friendly, caring, and curious, but Metzger said, “It is actually you running down a checklist to determine where things stand and what needs to happen next. It’s not a real conversation, and it’s not listening.” Not that practical questions shouldn’t be asked. Of course they should. It’s just when those are the only kinds of questions you ask, the relationship suffers. Open, honest, and exploratory questioning and the genuine curiosity and careful listening it presupposes can not only bring about greater clarity of what’s on someone’s mind but is also the very basis of intimacy. The question can be as simple as: “What did you learn today?” Another good one is: “What was the best part and what was the worst part of your day?”

What is love but listening to and wanting to be a part of another person’s evolving story? It’s true of all relationships—romantic and platonic. And listening to a stranger is possibly one of the kindest, most generous things you can do.

He and his colleagues had subjects listen to an adapted version of the J. D. Salinger short story “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes,” which describes a telephone conversation between Arthur and Lee. Arthur tells Lee he suspects his wife is having an affair while an unidentified woman lies in bed next to Lee. 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.” It’s an argument for listening to as many sources as possible to keep your brain as agile as possible. Otherwise, your brain becomes like a car that’s not firing on all cylinders or a computer circuit board where electrical impulses run through a limited number of channels, wasting its full capacity.

Our language comprehension is generally better and faster when heard in the right ear versus the left. It has to do with the lateralization of the brain so that what one hears in the right ear is routed first to the left side of the brain, where Wernicke’s area is located. There’s a left-ear advantage when it comes to the recognition of emotional aspects of speech as well as the perception and appreciation of music and sounds in nature. The opposite may be true for left-handed people whose brain wiring may be reversed. So, you may be better at picking up on the meaning of speech versus the emotional feelings that underlie speech depending on which ear you use.

This may have implications for which ear you want to incline toward a speaker or which ear you use to talk on the phone. For talking to your boss, tilt your head to the left so your right ear is up. If you’re having trouble figuring out whether your romantic partner is upset, switch your phone to the left ear. Do the reverse if you are left-handed.

Experts have begun referring to teenagers today as “Generation Deaf” because near chronic earbud or headphone use is ruining their hearing. The World Health Organization has warned that 1.1 billion young people are at risk of hearing loss because of earbud abuse. A good way to tell if kids are damaging their hearing is if you can hear any noise emanating from the earbuds or headphones they are wearing. The volume is at a safe level if you can’t hear anything. But of course, it’s not just young people. Adults, too, routinely crank up the volume on their phones to drown out ambient noise, or because the connection is bad.

During perfectly audible conversations, lipreading is responsible for as much as 20 percent of your comprehension. Moreover, it’s widely thought that at least 55 percent of the emotional content of a spoken message is, in fact, transmitted nonverbally. So, even if you’ve had your ears checked and your hearing is perfect, if you are looking at your phone or out the window while someone is talking to you, you’re not getting the whole story.

The face not only changes its expression in response to emotion, it also changes color. Not just beet red with embarrassment and ghostly white from shock but more subtle shades corresponding to a range of emotions. The changes occur due to slight shifts in blood flow around the nose, eyebrows, cheeks, and chin. Moreover, the color patterns, or color ratios, indicating different emotions are the same regardless of gender, ethnicity, or overall skin tone. Attentive listeners perceive those shifts, usually subconsciously. Researchers at Ohio State University superimposed the color signatures of various emotions on neutral faces and subjects were able to accurately tell what the person was feeling up to 74 percent of the time. Our faces have more blood vessels close to the surface of the skin than just about anywhere else in the body.

Like smokers nervously patting their pockets for cigarettes, people get jittery without their phones. Indeed, mental health experts say device dependency has many of the same behavioral, psychological, and neurobiological components as substance abuse. While our smartphones may not allow us to have a decent conversation (“Can you hear me now? How about now?”), they seem to offer us just about everything else—social media, games, news, maps, recipes, videos, music, movies, podcasts, shopping, and pornography, if you’re so inclined. In the end, none of it is as emotionally satisfying or as essential to our well-being as connecting with a live human being. And yet, like any addict, we keep tapping, scrolling, and swiping as if pulling a lever on a slot machine, hoping to eventually hit the jackpot. This compulsion, driven by a fear of missing out, prevents sustained attention, making listening—or any task requiring thought—difficult. It’s hard to concentrate on what’s happening in the real world when you’re preoccupied with what could be happening in the virtual one.

Research conducted by Microsoft found that since the year 2000, the average attention span dropped from twelve to eight seconds. For context, a goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds, according to the report. While journalists, psychologists, and neuroscientists have since quibbled with how one measures attention (of a human or a goldfish) and whether it’s really a declining ability or simply more divided, advertisers and media companies are living with the reality that it’s harder than ever to capture people’s attention.

Experts in web analytics say the majority of internet users give articles online about fifteen seconds before deciding to stay or go, and if a website takes more than three seconds to load, people get utterly exasperated and move on.

A study by a British advertising buyer found that, on average, when people are at home, they switch between devices (phone, tablet, or laptop) twenty-one times per hour, all while the television is on in the background.

Comedy skits performed onstage at Second City in Chicago have gone from fifteen minutes to five minutes. Acutely aware of their audiences’ diminished attention spans, directors told me they have to keep the action moving at a rapid clip as well as provide more active (moving, flashing, rotating) lighting. There is no thought of letting a joke slowly build to a big payoff. Directors and performers said people would be checking their phones before actors could arrive at the punch line.

Websites, mobile apps, video games, and social media platforms are designed to grab and keep your attention. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Epic Games (the creator of the popular third-person-shooter video game Fortnite) comingle computer science, neuroscience, and psychology to develop strategies to hook you, often by playing on your social anxieties, vanity, and greed. They do it because your taps, swipes, scrolls, and clicks are how they make money. Like it or not, we are participating in an attention economy, where advertisers pay billions to media companies to steal us away from whatever else we might want to focus on. Attention has become a commodity, bought and sold on sophisticated electronic exchanges where bidding occurs in real time based on data provided by your cell phone or web browser. The quality of your attention doesn’t matter. Indeed, the more divided your attention, the more persuadable you are. The more likely you are to click Buy Now.

Conversational partners become just another device to toggle between. People periodically check their phones rather than fully attending to whoever is talking, which only makes it more likely they’ll have slow and soul-sucking conversations. A study by psychologists at the University of Essex found that the mere presence of a phone on the table—even if it’s silent—makes those sitting around the table feel more disconnected and disinclined to talk about anything important or meaningful, knowing if they do, they will probably be interrupted. It’s a weird loop of the phone creating a circumstance where people will talk about things that aren’t worth listening to, which in turn makes you more likely to stop listening and look at your phone.

Having a quiet conversation at a restaurant is even less likely. According to food industry research and investigative reporting by several news outlets, sound levels average 80 decibels at restaurants in the United States (recall that the typical conversation averages about 60 decibels). The most popular, trendy restaurants have sound levels that exceed 90 decibels, which can cause hearing loss before dessert is served. Indeed, the most recent Zagat Dining Trends Survey found that noise in restaurants was ranked as diners’ top complaint. There is also evidence that the clamor makes diners overeat and make less healthy food choices.

People haven’t made their homes refuges of quiet either. Televisions are almost always on with the drone of cable news, reruns, looping weather reports, or cooking shows. Most people now also have some form of sound system, even if it’s just a small, portable speaker plugged into an iPhone. Streaming services like Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify have allowed even those without large music collections to have 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.”