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

by Kate Murphy

Since the 1970s, Derber has been interested in how people behave and compete for attention in social settings. 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.

Shift & support response

John: My dog got out last week, and it took three days to find him. Mary: Our dog is always digging under the fence, so we can’t let him out unless he’s on a leash. (shift response) John: My dog got out last week, and it took three days to find him. Mary: Oh no. Where did you finally find him? (support response) Sue: I watched this really good documentary about turtles last night. Bob: I’m not big on documentaries. I’m more of an action-film kind of guy. (shift response) Sue: I watched this really good documentary about turtles last night. Bob: Turtles? How did you happen to see that? Are you into turtles? (support response)

Example of shift & support responses

Good listeners are all about the support response, which is critical to providing the kind of acknowledgment and evaluative feedback

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.

“What made you decide to become a sociologist?” Becker’s face contorted as if he’d just smelled something dreadful. “You’re assuming it was a decision,” he said. “Better to ask, ‘How did it happen that you became a sociologist?’”

“Things go by you and you don’t know exactly what was meant, but you let it go because you think it’s not important, don’t need to know it, or feel embarrassed.”

“She is off-the-charts unbelievable at being able to read people. Founders barely start speaking and she understands their motivations and whether they are good or bad. It’s incredible. I’ve asked her to explain it to me, and she can’t really. She’s like my mom. She just knows. Maybe it’s a female thing.”

Girls are better listener

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.

Don't offer solution right away, try start from emotional perspective

You may be able to help someone fix a leaky faucet, edit a résumé, or find a good accountant, but you can’t help someone salvage a ruined career, repair a broken marriage, or emerge from the depths of despair. Your answer to someone else’s deepest difficulties merely reflects what you would do if you were that person, which you are not. The best you can do is listen. Try to understand what the person is facing and appreciate how it feels. This in itself can lead to solutions.

Try to feel from someone's shoes when they share bad experience

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.

Listening is quite tricky, I need a lot of practice

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.

Interesting study related to parenting

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.

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.

You can’t have meaningful exchanges with people, much less establish relationships, if you aren’t willing to listen to people’s stories, whether it’s where they come from, what their dreams are, what led them to do the work they do, or how they came to fear polka dots. 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.

People who make an effort to listen—and respond in ways that support rather than shift the conversation—end up collecting stories the way other people might collect stamps, shells, or coins. The result is they tend to have s...

“If you listen carefully, you can really get an awful lot of information about other people,” she said. “I think most people just aren’t listening that much.”

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.

Right vs Left ear

There was also an ingenious study by Italian researchers that showed, in noisy nightclubs, people more often offered their right ear when someone walked up and tried to talk to them and were also more likely to give someone a cigarette when the request was made in the right ear versus the left ear. It was a clever way of demonstrating the right-ear advantage in a natural setting, since there are not many environments where it’s possible to make a request into only one ear and have it not seem totally weird.

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. But you probably subconsciously choose the most advantageous ear already.

But noise-filtering plugs are not a bad investment for anyone who wants to go to a movie or music concert without damaging their ears. If you download a noise meter app onto your phone, you’ll find that the sound level during many movies far exceeds the upper limit recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

While some mishearings can be humorous, hearing loss, in the long run, leads to a litany of poor emotional and social outcomes, including, but not limited to: irritability, negativism, anger, fatigue, tension, stress, and depression avoidance or withdrawal from social situations social rejection and loneliness reduced job performance and earning power diminished psychological and overall health

You’d be surprised how a good ear cleaning once or twice a year by an otolaryngologist can improve your hearing.

Experts have raised concerns that we are even losing our ability to daydream, as fantasizing, too, requires some level of attention. Many of the greatest advances in science and arts and letters have come by way of daydreaming. Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, T. S. Eliot, and Lewis Carroll all attributed their genius to long periods of uninterrupted musing. Could you put away your phone for an hour? A half hour? Five minutes?

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

Similar to the “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love” mentioned earlier, the conversation starters are curious rather than appraising, seeking to find out not what someone has achieved but who the person really is. So, it’s not just eating together that is beneficial. Anyone who’s suffered through a tense family meal knows that’s not the case. The potential to improve relationships and health outcomes results from using the meal as an opportunity to ask questions and truly listen to one another in a curious and openhearted way.

“So many people thought she was the most amazing friend they ever had,” he said. Sharp echoed others who were close to her, recalling how she always made time for him and expressed genuine interest in what he had to say. “She never rushed you or tried to finish your thoughts,” Sharp said. “She invited you to tell your story, and, more importantly, she actually let you tell your story.”

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.

As a journalist, it took me too long to realize that I didn’t have to say anything to keep the conversation going. Some of the most interesting and valuable bits of information have come not from my questioning but from keeping my mouth shut. You get so much more out of interactions when you allow people the time and space to gather their thoughts.

“As opposed to really listening, you tend to be always sharpening your knife, thinking how to prove your point; why you’re right,” she said. “I started understanding people better because I didn’t have the option to tell them my opinion, and it also made me more accepting of others because I was able to listen.”

Like Schafer, she encourages taking a day to dive into the “pocket of possibility” that is silence. “If you can bear to do it for just twenty-four hours, you will learn to be a better listener,” she said. “You will learn the unimportance of your words and the importance of other people’s words.”

Dutch researchers found that listening to positive gossip made people try to behave in a similar way, and negative gossip made people feel better about themselves. Another study showed that the more shocked or upset you are by gossip, the more likely it is that you’ll learn a lesson from it.

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.

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 f...

“You get mentally exhausted and mushy listening too long,” an air traffic controller in the Dallas–Fort Worth area told me. “You have to be careful because it happens to some people sooner than others.” He said he often feels like he has used up his capacity to listen once his shift is over. “There are days when I come home and the last thing I want is to engage with my family,” he said. “It makes everyone walk on eggshells around Dad, but I just can’t listen to anyone else.”

Not listening because you don’t agree with someone, you are self-absorbed, or you think you already know what someone will say makes you a bad listener. But not listening because you don’t have the intellectual or emotional energy to listen at that moment makes you human. At that point, it’s probably best to exit the conversation and circle back later. If you half listen to someone or listen as if you are skimming through a book, the other person will pick up on it. Even small children know when you’re not listening.

According to communication privacy management theory, private information is kind of like money. If you are indiscreet with other people’s private information, it’s like you are spending their money without their consent. You can give up as much information as you want about yourself, just as you are free to spend your own money any way you like.

Not listening to someone can be hurtful even when you don’t mean to be, and it can be cruel if used as a weapon. It’s why ghosting, where someone cuts off all communication with another person without warning or explanation, is so incredibly painful. A study published in Journal of Research in Personality found that compared to other breakup strategies, ghosting (technically, the avoidance/withdrawal strategy) was the most wounding and provoked the most anger and resentment from those on the receiving end. Those who were given the benefit of an explanation and the opportunity to have their say were less angry and aggrieved.

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.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 1. Has reading You’re Not Listening changed how you listen? In what way? 2. What was the most surprising thing you learned about listening? 3. Do you think listening is a skill you are born with or one you develop? 4. Who do you have trouble listening to? Why? 5. Who do you enjoy listening to? Why? 6. Do you find some situations or environments more or less conducive to listening than others? 7. Who’s the best/worst listener in your life? What makes that person a good/bad listener? 8. Do you recall a time when you didn’t listen but wish you had? 9. Do you recall a time when you were glad you listened? Like maybe when someone gave you good advice or said something that tipped you off that the speaker was untrustworthy? 10. Are there certain topics of conversation that make you more or less likely to listen? What rivets your attention and what makes you shut down? 11. When do you think it’s okay to stop listening to someone?