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

by Kate Murphy

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.

In Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote, “Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone,7 but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away.”

A white man, a woman of color, an evangelical, an atheist, a homeless person, a billionaire, a straight person, a gay person, a boomer, a millennial—each has a singular experience that separates them from everyone else who shares that label. Making assumptions of uniformity or solidarity based on age, gender, skin color, economic status, religious background, political party, or sexual preference reduces and diminishes us all. By listening, you might find comfort in shared values and similar experiences, but you’ll also find many points where you diverge, and it’s by acknowledging and accepting those differences that you learn and develop understanding. Our listening suffers from broadly applied and collective ideas of identity, which discourages discovery of what makes us and other people unique.

“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,”

Pierpont Morgan said, “A man always has two reasons for what he does—a good one,3 and the real one.”

Criminologists have found that mass shooters are typically not psychotic but depressed and lonely, motivated most often by a desire for revenge.

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 helpful to think of listening as similar to meditation. You make yourself aware of and acknowledge distractions, then return to focus. But instead of focusing on your breathing or an image, you return your attention to the speaker.

it’s okay to say, “I don’t know what to say,” when you don’t. You can also say, “I’d like to think about that,” which conveys that you honor what the other person said by taking time to think about it, while, at the same time, honoring that part of you that is uncertain and needs time to process.

repaired rifts are the fabric of relationships rather than patches on them.

“Your internal stance should be one of curiosity,” Todd instructs her students. Which means they must ask questions out of curiosity as opposed to questioning to prove a point, set a trap, change someone’s mind, or to make the other person look foolish.

Student protestors in recent years have said listening to opposing views and opinions made them feel “unsafe.”2 According to a nationwide survey of college and university students conducted by the Brookings Institution,3 more than half, 51 percent, thought it was “acceptable” to shout down a speaker with whom they disagreed and almost a fifth, 19 percent, supported using violence to prevent a speaker from delivering an address.

Wow!

The truth is, we only become secure in our convictions by allowing them to be challenged. Confident people don’t get riled by opinions different from their own, nor do they spew bile online by way of refutation. Secure people don’t decide others are irredeemably stupid or malicious without knowing who they are as individuals. People are so much more than their labels and political positions. And effective opposition only comes from having a complete understanding of another person’s point of view and how they came to develop it. How did they land where they landed? And how did you land where you landed? Listening is the only way to have an informed response. Moreover, listening begets listening. Someone who has been listened to is far more likely to listen to you.

Disagreements and sharp differences of opinion are inevitable in life whether they are over political ideology, ethical issues, business dealings, or personal matters. 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.

The English romantic poet John Keats wrote to his brothers in 1817 that to be a person of achievement, one must have “negative capability,”21 which he described as “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

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.

a millennial with a nose ring

What's a nose ring got to do with it??!!

Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches may not get you the whole truth, Naomi said, but you will get a “truer truth.”

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

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.

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. At best, a quant can give you broad brushstrokes while a good qual can provide finer detail. Both approaches are valid and when used in concert can be extremely revealing. But when it comes to human interactions and divining individuals’ unique motivations, proclivities, and potentials, listening is, so far, the best and most accurate tool.

successful teams listened to one another. Members took turns, heard one another out, and paid attention to nonverbal cues to pick up on un-spoken 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.

A vast body of evidence indicates humor is an asset in forming and maintaining relationships both professionally and personally. In work environments, successful attempts at humor lead to perceptions of competence and confidence.7 In romantic relationships, successful humor is a gauge of intimacy and security.8 But the operative word here is successful. Unsuccessful humor has the opposite effect. Taking an improv class taught me that people don’t so much have a fixed sense of humor as a variable ability to sense humor, depending on how well they listen. Whether telling jokes in front of a crowd at a comedy club or just trying to inject a little levity into a normal conversation, you won’t be funny unless you accurately read your audience. The cartoon and humor editor for Esquire and former New Yorker cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff, told me, “Dating is a ritual of getting to know another person well enough to laugh.” To have an inside joke, to be able to make someone smile even when that person is mad at you, to have license to let down your guard and be silly, requires the investment of listening. “You have to listen to them long enough to be able to repeat back something they said and put a funny twist on it and also to know what the lines are that you’d better not cross,” said Mankoff, who has a background in experimental psychology and has taught humor theory at Fordham University and Swarthmore College. Making a joke also involves being vulnerable. You’re putting yourself...

Funny is a by-product of honesty, intimacy, and familiarity.

What about public humour that people find funny?

You can only be as intimate with another person as you are with yourself.

According to Derber, shift responses are symptomatic of conversational narcissism, which quashes any chance of connection. Shift responses are usually self-referential statements while support responses are more often other-directed questions. But they have to be truly curious questions meant to elicit more information and not subtly impose your own opinion

the worst questions are the ones that are never asked.

to say all women are better listeners than men is like saying all men are taller than women. I’ve interviewed and known personally many women who were horrible listeners and many men who were exceptional listeners. It has much more to do with background, life experience, and even the situation. Some people might be great listeners but only when listening to certain people or in certain circumstances.

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. 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.

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

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.

Processing what someone says, it turns out, is one of the most intricate and involved things we ask our brains to do.

there are more nerve tendrils reaching into the ear per square centimeter than just about anywhere else in the body.

Sigmund Freud said, “No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”

The ability to multitask is a delusion.

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. Give the other person a chance to pick up where they left off.

People tend to regret not listening more than listening and tend to regret things they said more than things they didn’t say. It seems giving people a piece of your mind isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. 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 feeling it. In fact, sometimes it’s better to wait until you aren’t feeling it quite so strongly.

sometimes you need to make the call to stop listening. While you can learn something from everyone, that doesn’t mean you have to listen to everyone until they run out of breath. Obviously, you can’t.

communication is fundamentally a cooperative endeavor, so if we perceive our partners aren’t keeping up their ends of the bargain, we are going to feel cheated and want out of the deal. 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. Some scholars have argued for the inclusion of politeness and fairness in turn taking,4 but Grice’s four maxims are widely recognized as what most people expect in civilized society, even if they aren’t aware of it.

Listening is not just something you should do when someone else is talking; it’s also what you should do while you are talking.

tis the good listener who makes the good conversation.

Better to listen to how people feel than try to convince them to feel differently. You can’t argue your way into affection, but truly listening is the surest way to form a bond.

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.

Listening is your gift to bestow. No one can make you listen.

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.