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

by Kate Murphy

To really listen is to be moved physically, chemically, emotionally, and intellectually by another person’s narrative.

The ability to listen to anyone has been replaced by the capacity to shut out everyone, particularly those who disagree with us or don’t get to the point fast enough.

Lonely people have no one with whom to share their thoughts and feelings, and, equally important, they have no one who shares thoughts and feelings with them.

Connectedness is necessarily a two-way street, each partner in the conversation listening and latching on to what the other said.

It’s estimated that 15–60 percent of social media accounts do not belong to real people.

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.

Hearing is passive. Listening is active. The best listeners focus their attention and recruit other senses to the effort. Their brains work hard to process all that incoming information and find meaning, which opens the door to creativity, empathy, insight, and knowledge. Understanding is the goal of listening, and it takes effort.

The more you listen to someone, such as a close friend or a family member, and the more that person listens to you, the more likely you two will be of like minds.

An insecure avoidant attachment style comes from growing up with caregivers who were mostly inattentive—or perhaps overly attentive, to the point of smothering. People raised this way are often bad listeners because they tend to shut down or leave relationships whenever things get too close. They resist listening because they don’t want to be disappointed or overwhelmed.

To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know.

Listening is about the experience of being experienced. It’s when someone takes an interest in who you are and what you are doing.

Listening requires, more than anything, curiosity.

It’s another tenet of attachment theory that if you have someone in your life who listens to you and who you feel connected to, then the safer you feel stepping out in the world and interacting with others. You know you will be okay if you hear something or find out things that upset you because you have someone, somewhere, you can confide in and who will relieve your distress. It’s called having a secure base, and it’s a bulwark against loneliness.

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.

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.

It’s called the closeness-communication bias.

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

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.

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.

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?

speech-thought differential, which refers to the fact that we can think a lot faster than someone can talk.

According to Nichols, 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.

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.

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.

The power of qualitative research—the power of listening—is that it explains the numbers and possibly reveals how the numbers come up short.

Data sets shed light only on what’s in the data set.

Salganik told me using social media data to learn about human behavior is like learning about human behavior by watching people in a casino. They are both highly engineered environments that tell you something about human behavior, but it’s not typical human behavior. Listening is the opposite of algorithmic approaches. “Algorithms aspire to make guesses that will be as accurate as possible,” Salganik said. “They don’t aspire to understand.”

“I think the more you understand about what you’re doing, the better the statistical model you will build, and if you actually really, deeply understand the people represented by the data, it will probably work even better.” In other words, even in the era of abundant data, we need to listen to get to understanding.

Information is only as useful as how it’s collected and interpreted. Algorithms are only as good as the scope and reliability of the data sets to which they are applied. So, too, the findings of a qualitative researcher are only as good as that individual’s neutrality, perceptiveness, and skill at eliciting anecdote and emotion—in other words, how well the qualitative researcher listens.

the most productive teams were the ones where members spoke in roughly the same proportion, known as “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.” The best teams also had higher “average social sensitivity,” which means they were good at intuiting one another’s feelings based on things like tone of voice, facial expressions, and other nonverbal cues.

In other words, Google found out that successful teams listened to one another. Members took turns, heard one another out, and paid attention to nonverbal cues to pick up on unspoken thoughts and feelings. This led to responses that were more considerate and on point. It also created an atmosphere of so-called psychological safety, where people were more likely to share information and ideas without fear of being talked over or dismissed.

Shared humor is a form of connectedness born out of listening. It’s a collaborative dynamic that involves the exploration and elaboration of ideas and feelings.

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.

People who have conversational sensitivity not only pay attention to spoken words, they also have a knack for picking up hidden meanings and nuances in tone. They are good at recognizing power differentials and are quick to distinguish affectation from genuine affection. They remember more of what people say and tend to enjoy, or at least be interested in, the conversation. Conversational sensitivity is also thought to be a precursor to empathy, which requires you to summon emotions felt and learned in previous interactions and apply them to subsequent situations.

Demonstrate interest either by learning about people beforehand or being inquisitive in the moment. Try to find what excites them.

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.

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.

Disraeli was master of what sociologist Charles Derber at Boston College calls the support response.

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.

Good listeners are all about the support response,

According to Derber, shift responses are symptomatic of conversational narcissism, which quashes any chance of connection.

In the book There Is No Good Card for This: What To Do and Say When Life Is Scary, Awful, and Unfair to People You Love, authors Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell indirectly identified another kind of shift response that arises from just this kind of avoidant behavior. Derber characterized the shift response as a narcissistic attempt to redirect the conversation back to one’s self. But 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 listening approach to problem solving underlies the Quaker practice of forming “clearness committees.”

a clearness committee of about a half dozen members convenes to listen to the so-called focus person lay out the problem. Then the committee members ask what they call “faithful” questions. It’s essentially a full-court support response. There is no wise counsel or sharing of similar personal experiences, nor is the questioning meant to guide or influence the person’s thinking. Rather, the clearness committee’s questioning is intended to help the focus person go deeper so an answer might emerge; so clearness can arise from within.

Open and honest questions don’t have a hidden agenda of fixing, saving, advising, or correcting.

But open and honest questioning is essential for basic understanding. It allows people to tell their stories, express their realities, and find the resources within themselves to figure out how they feel about a problem and decide on next steps.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University discovered that when mothers just listened, providing no assistance or critique, while their children explained the solutions to pattern recognition problems, it markedly improved the children’s later problem-solving ability—more so than if the children had explained the solution to themselves or repeated the solution over and over in their heads. Previous research has shown that adults provided with an attentive listener gave more detailed solutions with more alternative ideas and better justifications than solutions generated in isolation.

The more you know about and understand where someone is coming from, the closer you feel to them whether they are loved ones or strangers.

Good listeners are good questioners. Inquiry reinforces listening and vice versa because you have to listen to ask an appropriate and relevant question, and then, as a consequence of posing the question, you are invested in listening to the answer. Moreover, asking genuinely curious and openhearted questions makes for more meaningful and revelatory conversations—not to mention prevents misunderstandings. This, in turn, makes narratives more interesting, engaging, and even sympathetic, which is the basis for forming sincere and secure relationships.