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

by Kate Murphy

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. Coche gave the example of spouses who answer questions or make decisions for each other. They might also give gifts that miss the mark, resulting in disappointment and hurt feelings. Parents can make the same sorts of mistakes, assuming they know what their children like or don’t like and what they would or would not do. 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.

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.

“prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.”

Katherine Hampsten, associate professor of communication studies at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, has a good analogy for what happens when we listen. She says it’s like a game of catch with a lump of clay. Each person catches it and molds it with their perceptions before tossing it back.

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.

Again, the solutions to problems are often already within people, and just by listening, you help them access how best to handle things,

Arthur Aron, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, conducted an experiment in which he paired students, who didn’t know each other, and had them ask each other thirty-six expansive questions like: Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why? What would constitute a “perfect” day for you? When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else? 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? After this reciprocal listening exercise, the paired strangers reported intense feelings of closeness, much more so than subjects paired for the same amount of time to solve a problem or accomplish a task.

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.

pitch, loudness, and tone as well as the flow of tone, called prosody.

Because nonverbal signals typically carry more than half, or 55 percent, of the emotional content of a message, if you take them out of the equation, you’re missing out on a lot of information. But on occasions when nonverbal indicators would get in the way of the articulation of the message or affect how accurately the message is interpreted, you need to take that into account.

phone is better than text or email because as much as 38 percent of someone’s feelings and attitudes are conveyed by tone of voice. This means that during many conversations, you get just 7 percent of the meaning from the actual words, which could be typed.

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.”

Research shows that being able to comfortably sit in silence is actually a sign of a secure relationship. Higher-status people also aren’t as likely to get agitated by gaps in conversation, presumably because they are more secure in their position.

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. Just wait.

The researchers observed that inaccuracies were most often motivated by a desire to more severely punish bad actors (people sometimes made cheaters sound worse than they were). There’s also the thought that listening to how people talk about others, true or untrue, may say as much, or more, about them than the people they are talking about. No wonder gossip makes people reflexively lean in and lower their voices to a conspiratorial whisper. It’s valuable. My great-great-aunt and I would almost touch foreheads when discussing something particularly sensitive, even when no one else was around. Rather than being trivial, superficial, or simpleminded, a surprisingly large body of evidence indicates listening to gossip is an intelligent activity and essential to adaptation. Gossip scholars (there are more than you would think) say talking about people is an extension of observational learning, allowing you to learn from the triumphs and tribulations of those you know and even those you don’t know.

The advantage of gossip over grooming, Dunbar said, is that it is a more “efficient mechanism for our social bonding and social learning.” Grooming is very much a one-on-one activity that can take quite some time (depending on how tangled or louse-infested your partner is), whereas face-to-face conversations are quicker and can accommodate up to four individuals (one speaker and three listeners). Any larger and people tend to break off into smaller groups. You’ve probably seen this in action at large parties where guests naturally form various conversational pods of two to four people.

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.

had new insight into why we laugh for real and for show, and how to tell the difference (hint: fake laughter has speech sounds in it like ah-ha-ha or eh-heh-heh or tee-hee-hee). I also learned there is likely no gender monopoly on humor, but women are more likely to fake laughter, as I had so ably demonstrated.

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.

explains why it’s so difficult to talk to people suffering from dementia or psychosis. No longer tethered to reality and social norms, they may spout fantastic, disorderly, ambiguous, vague, and/or disconnected ideas. It’s also why calling tech support is so incredibly aggravating. The scripted responses often have no logical link to what you said, provide too little or too much information and are often untrue—“It’s your equipment, not ours.”

And when we detect total bullshit in a conversation or someone throws out a non sequitur or drones on in mind-numbing detail about something we don’t care about—we tend to get annoyed, and we check out.

A good exercise is to think about the people in your life who you have a hard time listening to and ask yourself why that is. Are they judging? Do they tell the same stories over and over? Do they exaggerate? Give too much detail? Do they only talk about how great they are? Do they get their facts wrong? Are they too negative? Saccharine? Superficial? Insulting? Do they challenge your thinking? Disagree with you? Do they make you feel envious? Do they make references and use words you don’t know? Are their voices annoying? Are they not socially or professionally useful to you? Are you afraid of the intimacy that might develop? You have your reasons. Just know what they are and whether your reasons say more about you than they do about the other person. And also know that people change, and your view of them changes, when you truly listen. It often pays to first make the effort before you decide to pull the plug.

Even Father Gómez said there are times when he zones out. Listening is like playing a sport or musical instrument in that you can get better and better with practice and persistence, but you will never achieve total mastery. Some may have more natural ability and some may have to try harder, but everyone can benefit from making the effort.

Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.” It is flattering when someone listens to you, which is why we are drawn to those increasingly rare individuals who actually do. Listening is a courtesy and, more fundamentally, a sign of respect. It’s impossible to convince someone that you respect them by telling them so. It must be demonstrated, and listening is the simplest way to do that.

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.