by Kate Murphy
If you think of the people in your life who can make you burst out laughing, it’s usually your closest confidants. That’s because you feel free enough to let loose with them but also because the things that are the funniest to us are often the most personal. There are likely inside jokes and familiar gags you have with your romantic partner or best friend that are side-splittingly funny to the two of you but leave others scratching their heads. And when you try to explain it, they are still baffled because they haven’t been listening in on the long-running conversation that has defined your relationship. They don’t have the same deep, mutual understanding. When people say, “I guess you had to be there,” it’s true. Funny is a by-product of honesty, intimacy, and familiarity.
Shared humor is a form of connectedness born out of listening. It’s a collaborative dynamic that involves the exploration and elaboration of ideas and feelings. The same improvisational interplay is required for any cooperative endeavor, which is why listening is so crucial in the modern workplace. Those who preempt, dominate, or otherwise curb the conversation are unlikely to succeed in their careers, much less have fulfilling personal relationships. Intimacy, innovative thinking, teamwork, and humor all come to those who free themselves from the need to control the narrative and have the patience and confidence to follow the story wherever it leads.
10
Conversational Sensitivity
What Terry Gross, LBJ, and Con Men Have in Common
In a near-dark recording studio at WHYY in Philadelphia, Terry Gross, host of the popular National Public Radio program Fresh Air, was interviewing a film director who was sitting in another studio on the West Coast. Lights blinked, needles jumped, and bars rose and fell in the control room as Gross, all but invisible behind an enormous microphone, talked to the director about a wide range of subjects, including his artistic process, his personal insecurities, an unsettling childhood experience, and the fact that horses will go up, but not down, stairs.
As the interview progressed, two of the show’s producers, Lauren Krenzel and Heidi Saman, clicked away on their laptops, keeping track of what the director was saying and noting the times during the interview when he was saying it. He talked for about an hour and fifteen minutes. It was Krenzel and Saman’s job, along with executive producer Danny Miller, to decide how to edit what he said down to the forty-five minutes that would eventually be broadcast.
Why put three people on a job any one of them could do on their own? Because they didn’t all hear the same interview. 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. Things like education, race, gender, age, relationship with the other person, frame of mind, connotations of words, and distractions all influence how the clay is shaped. Add more people to the game of catch and the complexity and range of meanings increases.
There are eight people on Fresh Air’s production staff, many of whom came to their jobs without much, and sometimes without any, radio experience. Miller told me the key qualification he looks for when hiring producers is “good ears,” meaning a superior ability to listen and detect what’s really going on in conversations. Miller calls it having command of conversations. Psychologists call it conversational sensitivity.
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. They are good at recognizing power differentials and are quick to distinguish affectation from genuine affection. They remember more of what people say and tend to enjoy, or at least be interested in, the conversation. Conversational sensitivity is also thought to be a precursor to empathy, which requires you to summon emotions felt and learned in previous interactions and apply them to subsequent situations.
Not surprisingly, conversational sensitivity is related to cognitive complexity, which, as discussed earlier, means you are open to a range of experiences and can cope with contradictory views. You can’t be good at detecting intricate cues in conversation if you haven’t listened to a lot of people. It is said that intuition, often called the sixth sense, is nothing more than recognition. The more people you listen to, the more aspects of humanity you will recognize, and the better your gut instinct will be. It’s a practiced skill that depends on exposure to a wide range of opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and emotions. Fresh Air producers and associate producers fit this profile, coming from many different backgrounds, including a former waitress, film director, and folklorist.
“When we meet to discuss the edit, we are making sure we are all on the same page about what the conversation was about,” said Miller. “There’s lots of comparing notes. We’re different ages and come from different places in life. We want to have different perspectives coming to it.” He described the process as “a combination of interpretation of what was said and how you felt about it.” He added diplomatically, “We have pretty active discussions about how to cut the interview.”
After the conclusion of Gross’s interview with the film director, producers Krenzel and Saman emerged from the darkened studio into the bright sunshine pouring through the floor-to-ceiling windows that front WHYY’s offices. They settled at a table to discuss their impressions. Krenzel, who is in her sixties and originally from Philadelphia, has had a long career in audio. Before Fresh Air, she produced audiobooks, broadcasts of professional sporting events, and several radio shows for WNYC in New York. Saman is in her thirties and a first-generation Egyptian American who grew up in Los Angeles. Her background is in filmmaking, and she continues to write and direct films. The two of them went through the interview line by line. “We could take that out … Let’s definitely keep that … Could that quote be shorter?… He said that twice … We’ll pick that part up later … Maybe that’s not as interesting … I thought that part was cool … That part surprised me … Is that important?”
They were taking the conversation and distilling it to its most essential, checking in with each other to make sure they didn’t cut something that, while perhaps not interesting to them, might be interesting to someone else. “We are looking for what represents the interview best and what represents the person interviewed best,” Krenzel told me. “We obviously want it to make sense in terms of a narrative arc, but we also want to get people hooked into the emotion of it, so we might have to shape it or shorten it to fit in all the really great moments.”
Miller, a dervish of energy, walked up and made a few laps around the table where Krenzel and Saman were seated, providing input, quoting parts of the interview he liked from memory. His recall and sensitivity to conversational nuance reflect forty years working on the daily show. He started as an intern at WHYY in his twenties. I could almost see the three of them tossing Hampsten’s lump of clay around the table. “Really?… I didn’t get that … Oh yes … Wow, no … What did you think about that?… I get what you’re saying.”
While they may not agree on everything they want in the final cut of an interview, there’s generally unanimity when it comes to including parts that reveal the emotional depth of the person. This is in line with research that indicates conversational sensitivity is most aroused when personal stuff is discussed. Other things that make us alert in conversation are more variable, depending on the situation and our individual quirks, such as whether we happen to be in a good mood, can relate to what is being said, or find the subject matter surprising. Personal stuff, though, always perks up our ears.
The worst interviews, according to Krenzel, are those where people “don’t want to open up or reveal anything about their lives.” They just drum the beats their publicist has given them, she said, “and it all feels so disconnected and it’s just dry as dust because there’s no emotional resonance.” Lack of emotional resonance, of course, is what makes normal conversations dull
and boring. You have probably had exchanges with people who sound as if they are speaking from a script—delivering well-worn lines rather than sharing spontaneous thoughts and feelings unique to a back-and-forth with you. If you overheard them talking to someone else, you’d likely hear the same stories told the same way about their jobs, kids, dietary habits, medical issues, and so on.
More than 6 million people tune in to Fresh Air each week because Gross has a knack for getting guests to go off script. Listening to her do interviews pre-edit, you notice how she subtly nudges guests off their tired talking points. “That’s when the tape can get really interesting for us,” Saman told me. “Terry is trying to find the zone where they are comfortable. You can really hear it with the rhythm of their talking once she gets them in that place; sometimes it’s personal, or early work, anything that engages them. She’s trying to get them out of their head.” A good listener has the ability to elicit more than superficial or anxious chatter so people reveal more of who they really are.
Working to Gross’s advantage is the preparation she and her producers put into every show. Guests know by Gross’s questions that she has done her homework and is knowledgeable and keenly interested in their work. When people feel known and appreciated, they are more willing to share. Gross also assures them before the interview starts that they are free to stop her at any time if she ventures into an area that feels uncomfortable. So right there, she’s established that she cares about their feelings. These are things anyone who wants to be a better listener can emulate. Demonstrate interest either by learning about people beforehand or being inquisitive in the moment. Try to find what excites them. It doesn’t matter if it’s their bottle cap collection; if they are passionate about it, it will be interesting. And also respect boundaries by backing off if you suspect you’ve stumbled into a touchy area. Gently change the subject and be gracious in not knowing. Intimacy can’t be forced.
By the time a Fresh Air episode is finally aired, all three producers might listen to an interview three to four times. With each rewind and replay, they pick up not just subtleties in expression and meaning but also telling inhalations, pauses, and perhaps barely audible fidgeting in the background. Sitting with Saman while she deftly polishes an interview using a digital sound-editing program, you get down to the granular of conversations. When is an um or uh significant? Is that breath right there important? Why did he keep repeating that word? It makes you aware of how much information can be hidden in a single sentence. You also realize why it’s so much easier to listen to an edited interview than an ordinary, everyday conversation. Real conversations are not as clear or as clean. They are murkier and messier, and they meander.
* * *
Conversations in English, in particular, can get messy because of the complexity and expansiveness of the language. Linguists and lexicographers estimate that English has about a million words and is expanding all the time. The literary critic Cyril Connolly wrote that the English language is like a broad river “being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.” But the writer Walt Whitman more charitably described English as “the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.” Either way, English is one of the easiest languages to misunderstand even if you’re a native speaker.
Just within the borders of the continental United States, there are dozens of regional dialects that offer all kinds of opportunities for confusion. For example, west of the Ohio River, caramel begins shedding syllables. And how you say pecan pretty much depends on your time zone—from PEE-can to pa-CON to PICK-on. In some parts of the South, you’ll hear waste something instead of spill something. And a traffic circle is just that in the mid-Atlantic states but becomes a rotary in the Northeast and a roundabout in the West. On the way to Grandma’s house, drive slow around the rotary, or you’ll waste the CAR-mel pa-CON pie all over the seat of the car.
Personal interpretation also messes us up. Like when someone says, “I’d like to get to bed at a decent hour.” You could be thinking a decent hour is 10:00 p.m. when the other person has 2:00 a.m. in mind. The meaning of hard labor, good sex, not far, and spicy food all depends on who’s saying it. And, of course, euphemisms like monthly visitor, passed away, big-boned, and between opportunities abound, as people are always coming up with alternative and sometimes cryptic ways of saying what they don’t want to come out and say. Virginia Woolf said, “Words are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries.”
Things get even more complicated when you try to communicate with someone who grew up speaking a different language from yours. Then you get into linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that a person’s native language influences how they see or experience the world. A clever study by South African and British researchers demonstrated linguistic relativity quite elegantly. 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.
But what most gets in the way of understanding is your emotions and personal sensitivities. Given that you interpret things according to your background and psychology—and you can’t convene a team of producers to collaboratively dissect conversations like they do on Fresh Air—knowing yourself and your vulnerabilities is an important aspect of being a good listener.
Say someone tells you that your outlook is “original.” If you are the type who often feels somewhat out of step, then you might take original to mean oddball when the person might have meant you were refreshingly unique. Knowing you have that tender point can help you to think more broadly about what the person meant and to engage further to find out for sure. It’s sort of like repositioning a rearview or side mirror on your car to help minimize blind spots.
Research indicates that people who have a higher degree of self-awareness, and a related concept known as self-monitoring, are better listeners in part because they know the sorts of things that lead them to jump to the wrong conclusions and thus are less likely to do so. Cultivating self-awareness is a matter of paying attention to your emotions while in conversation and recognizing when your fears and sensitivities—or perhaps your desires and dreams—hijack your ability to listen well. A spouse or close friend may have insight into what shuts you down or sets you off, or you may prefer a good psychotherapist. While it can be difficult to do this kind of self-assessment, the reward is a greater capacity to understand and connect with other people. You can only be as intimate with another person as you are with yourself.
Psychoanalysts have to go through their own analyses so their personal issues don’t get in the way of understanding the problems and feelings of those who seek their help. In his 1948 book, Listening with the Third Ear, Theodor Reik, an Austrian psychoanalyst who was one of Freud’s first students, wrote that to listen well is to note the feelings that bubble up from one’s own unconscious: “To observe and to record in memory thousands of little signs and to remain aware of their delicate effects.” For him, awareness of one’s reflexive reactions and intuitions is like having a third ear with which to listen.
Similarly, CIA recruits are subjected to an intense screening process, including psychological tests to weed out those who are not self-aware enough to tame their weaknesses in tense situations. During our conversation at the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C., former CIA agent Barry McManus told me, “If you don’t know your own stuff, you can’t do the job. We all have weaknesses, flaws, and vulnerabi
lities. I have them. You have them. But in this game, I’ve got to get to yours before you get to mine.”
Which brings us to the listener’s power to manipulate. In describing telephone recordings that revealed how Lyndon Johnson worked his influence in the Senate, his biographer Robert Caro said, “People think Johnson talks all the time. If you listen to these tapes, he often doesn’t talk at all for the first few minutes. You hear him, all he has is this sound—‘Mmmm-hmmm. Mmmm-hmmm.’ And you get the feeling, and then you see what’s coming, he’s listening for what the guy really wants, what he’s really afraid of.”
In much the same way, con artists, hustlers, and scammers also tend to be superb listeners. They pick up on subtle nonverbal cues and the deeper meanings in offhand comments to find out exactly what you most fear or desire. And with that understanding, they know exactly how to play you. But it must be said that lying is often a cooperative act. There’s the liar and the person who hears what they want to hear. People say, “Oh, I’d never fall for that,” not realizing how seriously their listening is impaired when they so want to believe somebody loves them or will make them rich or will cure what ails them.
The infamous con artist Mel Weinberg* had a wily understanding of the cooperative dynamic between liar and listener. It’s why the FBI drafted him in the late 1970s to help ensnare a U.S. senator and six U.S. congressmen in the Abscam sting. “When a guy is in a jam and lookin’ for money, it’s my philosophy to give hope,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 1982. “If you say you can’t do nothin’, you’re killin’ his hope. Everybody has to have hope. That’s why most people don’t turn us in to the cops. They keep hopin’ we’re for real.”