You're Not Listening

by Kate Murphy

  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.

  Take first introductions. We often miss what people are saying—including their names—because we are distracted sizing them up, thinking about how we are coming across and what we are going to say. Not so when you meet a dog, which is why you can more easily remember a dog’s name than its owner’s. But if you marshal your mental resources so you fully listen to someone’s opening gambit and nonverbal presentation, it’s enormously interesting and can quickly clue you in to that person’s insecurities and values. And you will be more likely to remember names.

  Say you meet two women separately at a party. One woman lets you know straightaway that she went to an Ivy League school, and the other immediately begins talking about her husband who couldn’t join her that evening. What are they really conveying? Perhaps it’s “I’m smart. Respect me” in the first instance and “I’m not alone in the world. Someone loves me” in the second.

  It’s kind of like the scene in Annie Hall where the characters played by Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are awkwardly talking on a rooftop terrace. Subtitles run at the bottom, translating what they are really saying. Good listeners, rather than getting mired in their own thoughts, insecurities, and superficial judgments, pick up on the subtext of what people say as well as subtle nonverbal details like the clenched jaw of the Ivy League alum or the solo wife twisting her wedding ring around and around her finger. Good listeners use their excess brain capacity to notice these things, gathering more than just words.

  You’ve probably had an experience when you became so engrossed in a conversation that you forgot yourself and lost track of the passage of time. There’s no reason all conversations can’t be like that. Recognizing and resisting mental side trips is what frees you to inhabit someone else’s story. Such listening experiences not only enthrall us in the moment, they accumulate within us and form our characters. Even when you don’t like someone and hope you never have to listen to that person again, this strategy can help.

  A few years ago, I interviewed a famous poet. Despite his sensitive and accessible verse, he was prickly in person. “Don’t you know anything?” he asked when I said I wasn’t familiar with a writer he admired. In situations like that, the work of Nichols and other communication experts shows that people generally stop listening. They become understandably consumed with thinking about how the speaker is a jerk and how they can get back at, or get away from, this person.

  In the case of the prickly poet, I had a job to do and was forced to continue listening. As a result, I realized how eager he was to impress by the way he crowbarred into the conversation celebrities he knew and awards he had received. His disdain for me seemed preemptive, lest I disapprove of him first. As he talked more about his life and interests, what came through was a melancholy and an insecurity that he was worthy of his acclaim. Had I been distracted, ruminating on his rudeness, I would have missed this. The conversation consisted of him repeatedly opening the door to his interior world a tiny crack and then slamming it in my face with a backhanded remark. While I can’t say I ended up liking him, I was able to develop a degree of understanding and even sympathy.

  7

  Listening to Opposing Views

  Why It Feels Like Being Chased by a Bear

  In Gillien Todd’s course on negotiation at Harvard Law School, she tells her students to always be mindful of their internal stances, or attitudes, while listening. She tells them that if they believe the other person has nothing to offer, is not worth their time, or is the enemy or inferior or dull, then no matter how much they nod, paraphrase, or look someone in the eye, it will come off as false, and their negotiations will be unsuccessful. “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.

  It’s a hard sell for her students. Most have advanced in their academic careers by arguing their points and positions clearly and forcefully. What if opening themselves up to hear another person’s opinion makes them less firm in their own? “My students articulate that fear very clearly,” Todd told me between classes. “They worry that if they really pay attention or really understand the other side’s point of view, they will lose sight of what matters to them.”

  It’s why people listen to individuals and media that affirm their viewpoints. And it’s also why it’s so hard to refrain from jumping in to refute speakers with whom you disagree before hearing them out, much less keep from nonverbally communicating your resistance by folding your arms, sighing, or rolling your eyes. We almost can’t help ourselves because when our deeply held beliefs or positions are challenged, if there’s even a whiff that we might be wrong, it feels like an existential threat.

  Neuroscientists at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles recruited subjects with staunch political positions and, using an fMRI scanner, looked at their brain activity when their beliefs were challenged. Parts of their brains lit up as if they were being chased by a bear. And when we are in this fight, flight, or freeze mode, it’s incredibly hard to listen. (“So tell me, Mr. Bear, why are you chasing me?”)

  Student protestors in recent years have said listening to opposing views and opinions made them feel “unsafe.” According to a nationwide survey of college and university students conducted by the Brookings Institution, 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.

  Politicians likewise refuse to consider their opponents’ proposals, calling their ideas “dangerous.” It’s inconceivable today for political adversaries to be cordial, like the Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill and Republican president Ronald Reagan, who often had drinks together at the White House. After a particularly partisan fight, O’Neill told Reagan, “Old buddy, that’s politics—after six o’clock, we can be friends.” That willingness to engage, let down their guards, and listen is why historians say the two were able to compromise and pass landmark Social Security reform legislation.

  Senator John McCain of Arizona served during the Reagan years and embraced the spirit of bipartisanship throughout his career. Before he died of brain cancer in 2018, he exhorted his colleagues to return to “regular order” under which legislation is drafted by committees with members from both parties. He called upon his congressional colleagues to listen to those across the aisle rather than drafting one-party legislation that was dead on arrival, often never even offered up for a vote. “We might not like the compromises regular order requires, but we can and must live with them if we are to find real and lasting solutions,” McCain wrote in an editorial that appeared in The Washington Post. “All of us in Congress have the duty, in this sharply polarized atmosphere, to defend the necessity of compromise before the American public.”

  McCain would likely have been disappointed if he knew how his colleagues subsequently behaved during the infamous “talking stick” incident. During the first of two government shutdowns in 2018, Maine senator Susan Collins presented a colorful, beaded talking stick to colleagues assembled in her office for bipartisan budget negotiations, hoping to inject some civility into the proceedings. Talking sticks are an indigenous tribal tradition in North America and Africa. Only the holder of the stick can speak while everyone else listens. But in Collins’s office, it wasn’t long before one senator had h
urled the stick at another senator, chipping a glass elephant on her shelf.

  Of course, no one has to wait their turn or listen to views that make them uncomfortable on social media. It’s democratic in that everyone can air an unmediated and unedited opinion. But it’s undemocratic in that people selectively listen to only those who make them feel secure in their positions, which breeds insular thinking and so-called alternative facts. President Donald Trump famously said, “My primary consultant is myself.” A prolific tweeter, Trump represents a transformation in the body politic: people on the right and the left can create their own realities online and drive their own unchallenged narratives—maligning, blocking, or deleting content and commentary they don’t like.

  The result is we are no longer drawing on common sources of information. Anyone and any bot can instantaneously blast out opinions and critiques. These posts, often only as nuanced as what can be crammed into a 140-character tweet (with exclamation points!), are then retweeted or “liked” without consideration of source, motivation, or accuracy. The discourse is harsher—flying between disembodied Twitter handles and Facebook feeds—than it would be if people were face-to-face. The result is increasingly uncivil and extreme political and cultural debates that breed distrust, vitriol, and fear.

  Which brings us back to feeling like you’re being chased by a bear. The Pew Research Center found that large shares of the population now feel not only frustrated with and angry at members of the opposing political party but also afraid of them. A majority of Democrats, 55 percent, said they are fearful of the GOP, while 49 percent of Republicans are scared of the Democratic Party. In interviews with one thousand people about political dialogue, longtime political researcher Frank Luntz found that nearly a third said they had stopped talking to a friend or a family member because of disagreements over politics since the 2016 election.

  The National Institute for Civil Discourse* at the University of Arizona–Tucson has seen a surge in requests since 2016 to intervene in situations where political rancor is turning family members, church congregants, and coworkers against one another. Essential Partners, a similar organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has also reported a sharp increase in calls to help organize respectful dialogues between people riven by their opposing political views.

  Carolyn Lukensmeyer, executive director of the National Institute of Civil Discourse, told me her organization’s work previously had been limited mostly to working with state legislators who had become hopelessly partisan and deadlocked. “But now the big shift we’re seeing is hyperpartisanship in everyday situations—at work, at home, at school, at church—where people vilify and demonize each other,” she said. “The level of antipathy and shutting each other out is extreme and corrosive.”

  Toning down the inner alarm, or the “No, you’re stupid!” impulse that leads to ideological entrenchment is possible, as Gillien Todd tells her students, when you remind yourself to take a calm, open, and curious stance rather than an angry, aggravated, or alarmed stance. 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.

  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.

  This approach is backed up by science. Engaging higher-order thinking is what tamps down activity in your amygdala, one of two almond-shaped structures in the primitive part of the brain that primes us to react (racing pulse, tense muscles, and dilated pupils) when we perceive a threat. The amygdala is what makes you instinctively jump when you see a snake or reflexively duck out of the way if someone hurls something at you. But it’s also what propels people into a blind rage when someone cuts them off in traffic or makes someone tweet a bit of vitriol so out of proportion, it defies reason.

  Research shows there is an inverse relationship between amygdala activity and activity in areas of the brain involved in careful listening. If one of these brain regions is hot, the other is not. Amygdala activation clouds judgment, rendering us unthinking and irrational. When trial lawyers put clients through grueling mock cross-examinations, they are essentially training their clients’ amygdalae to tone it down, so during the actual trial they won’t get provoked into giving flustered or antagonistic answers that would harm their cases.

  Interestingly, people with an overactive amygdala are more apt to suffer from anxiety and depression, according to the research of Ahmad Hariri, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. His lab studies the amygdala and how individuals may vary in the degree to which their amygdalae get goosed during times of stress. For example, children who have so-called helicopter parents tend to have overactive amygdalae when faced with adversity. They have an exaggerated sense of threat likely because Mom and Dad have always run interference for them. Also notable is the discovery that people with autism have an excess of neurons in their amygdalae during childhood—making them overreactive—and then too few neurons when they are adults—often making them underreactive, or flat, in affect.

  Hariri told me that in the not-too-distant past, our amygdalae helped us fight or flee from existential threats like lions, tigers, and bears; but today, our biggest worries tend to be social rejection, isolation, and ostracism. “Our ascendancy to the apex of the animal kingdom has to do with our sociability, our ability to learn from each other and help one another, but, at the same time, it makes us more vulnerable to slights and insults,” he said. “Other people now represent the biggest threat to our well-being, and that manifests in these social-related anxieties.”

  This explains why people can get in vein-popping, eyes-bulging shouting matches when they disagree, rather than listening to each other. In the moment, the primitive brain interprets a difference of opinion as being abandoned by the tribe, alone and unprotected, so outrage and fear take over. It’s why political differences can ruin family dinners and friends can get in fistfights over something as insignificant as which is a better sci-fi franchise, Star Wars or Star Trek (this really happened in Oklahoma City, leading to an arrest for assault and battery). But listening is actually what keeps us safe and successful as a species, if we can overcome our amygdala-activated defensiveness.

  According to Carl Rogers, the psychologist who coined the term active listening, listening to opposing viewpoints is the only way to grow as an individual: “While I still hate to readjust my thinking, still hate to give up old ways of perceiving and conceptualizing, yet at some deeper level I have, to a considerable degree, come to realize th
at these painful reorganizations are what is known as learning.”

  Not that it’s easy to listen and to consider different opinions. Not for politicians who are often elected by promising to remain steadfast in their views. Not for people in the media whose audiences want affirmation of their beliefs. And not for the rest of us, as people increasingly limit their social circles to those who agree with their political leanings and ideologies.

  In today’s world, to associate with someone who holds opposing views is seen as an almost traitorous act. A landscape designer who leans left politically told me she would never speak to a childhood friend again after she saw on Facebook that he had attended a Trump rally. “He can’t take that back,” she said. “There is no explanation he can give me that would make that okay.” Likewise, a corporate pilot told me he will not fly with copilots who are supporters of Far Left politicians like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Shows they have poor judgment and lack basic analytical skills,” he said.

  The English romantic poet John Keats wrote to his brothers in 1817 that to be a person of achievement, one must have “negative capability,” which he described as “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Good listeners have negative capability. They are able to cope with contradictory ideas and gray areas. Good listeners know there is usually more to the story than first appears and are not so eager for tidy reasoning and immediate answers, which is perhaps the opposite to being narrow-minded. Negative capability is also at the root of creativity because it leads to new ways of thinking about things.