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

by Kate Murphy

In social situations, we pass around a phone to look at pictures instead of describing what we’ve seen or experienced. Rather than finding shared humor in conversation, we show one another internet memes and YouTube videos. And if there is a difference of opinion, Google is the arbiter.

Much has been written about how teenagers today are less likely to date, hang out with friends, get a driver’s license, or even leave home without their parents. They are spending more time alone; blue in affect, as well as in appearance, thanks to the reflected glow of their devices. Studies indicate the greater the screen time, the greater the unhappiness. Eighth graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of clinical depression by 27 percent and are 56 percent more likely to say they are unhappy than their peers who spend less time on platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. Similarly, a meta-analysis of research on youths who habitually play video games showed they were more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression.

In her more reflective later years, Dorothy Parker said, “The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were. Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them … There was no truth in anything they said. It was the terrible day of the wisecrack, so there didn’t have to be any truth.”

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

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.

heavy metal musician Marilyn Manson was asked what he would say to the kids and to the people in the community where the school shooting took place, an act some said was inspired by his music. “I wouldn’t say a single word to them. I would listen to what they have to say,” he said. “And that’s what no one did.”

It brings to mind an often-told story about the late Dick Bass, son of a Texas oil baron. He was known for going on ambitious mountain-climbing expeditions and talking about them, at length, to anyone within earshot, including a man who happened to be seated next to him on an airplane. For the duration of the cross-country flight, Bass went on about the treacherous peaks of McKinley and Everest and about the time he almost died in the Himalayas and his plan to climb Everest again. As they were about to land, Bass realized he hadn’t properly introduced himself. “That’s okay,” the man said, extending his hand. “I’m Neil Armstrong. Nice to meet you.”

The upshot is that worrying about what to say next works against you. Your responses will be better, your connections will be stronger, and you’ll be more at ease if you free up your mind to listen. It also makes conversations that much more interesting because you are able to take in more information. Not only are you listening to the words, but you’re also using your leftover brainpower to notice the speaker’s body language and inflection as well as to consider the context and motivation.

One of the earliest examples of how focus groups shaped a product is Betty Crocker cake mixes, which originally contained powdered egg. All you had to do was add water. But the mixes weren’t catching on with American housewives. A focus group in the 1950s found out why—the women said they felt guilty because the mixes were too easy.

Which brings us to one of the more interesting and effective methods for improving employees’ listening skills: improvisational comedy. Many large companies, including Google, Cisco, American Express, Ford, Procter & Gamble, Deloitte, and DuPont, have given it a try.

It doesn’t matter if it’s their bottle cap collection; if they are passionate about it, it will be interesting.

Linguists and lexicographers estimate that English has about a million words and is expanding all the time.

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.

In the words of Miles Davis, “If you understood everything I said, you’d be me.”

Who does your inner voice remind you of? What does it tell you? Does your inner voice sound different in different situations? Is it friendly? Is it critical? These are all important things to ask yourself because your inner voice influences how you ponder things, interpret situations, make moral judgments, and solve problems.

“I have a background in landscape architecture and am an admirer of Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park and is an underrecognized genius in my opinion, and I travel extensively and I’m struck by the enduring vibrancy and popularity of the great parks like New York’s Central Park and St. James’s Park in London and the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, so I’m wondering if you agree that we need to have more grand ambitions when we think about green spaces?”

Seattle whose decades of observational studies indicate good interactions must outnumber negative ones by at least five to one for a relationship to succeed.

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

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.

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.”

tone as well as the flow of tone, called prosody.

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 These symptoms are not so much the result of hearing loss per se but the resulting inability to connect with people.

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.

For example, in one study of children at a device-free outdoor camp, researchers found that after just five days without phones or tablets and interacting with their peers, the kids were able to accurately read facial expressions and identify the emotions of people in photographs and videotaped scenes significantly better than controls who had not attended the camp and continued using their devices.

If you have to listen to someone remotely, 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. Recall that the way someone says sure can indicate whether that person is eager, ambivalent, or resistant to help with a request. Font styles notwithstanding, the word sure always looks the same on a screen.

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.

Comedy skits performed onstage at Second City in Chicago have gone from fifteen minutes to five minutes.

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.”

A group of Harvard researchers in 2010 collaborated on a pilot program they called the Family Dinner Project, formed to encourage device-free and listening-focused family meals. The impetus was a number of studies over the past fifteen years that showed families eating together and sharing stories led to lower rates of substance abuse, teen pregnancy, and depression while improving kids’ vocabularies, grade point averages, resilience, and self-esteem.

Among the conversation starters recommended by the Family Dinner Project are questions like “What is the best gift you ever received?” and “If you went back in time one hundred or two hundred years and could only bring three things with you, what would you bring?” 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.

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

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.