You're Not Listening

by Kate Murphy

  It’s not that con artists are somehow inherently more skilled listeners and diviners of human frailty than their victims. The difference is that cons are more practiced and more motivated listeners, because they know it pays. Several studies have shown that people who are well motivated tend to be more accurate in their perceptions. Victims of cons are less motivated listeners because the fiction the con is feeding them at that moment in their lives is so appealing.

  So you could say, good listeners are better at both deceiving and detecting deceit. If you think back to the times in your life when you were fooled, if you’re honest, there were likely things you missed or chose to miss. The too-urgent tone. The facts that didn’t quite add up. The hostility or exasperation in the person’s voice when you asked questions. The facial expression that didn’t quite match what the person was saying. The slight discomfort in the pit of your stomach that you couldn’t quite put your finger on.

  We often miss lies, as well as truths, because when someone says something that doesn’t make sense, most of the time, we don’t stop the conversation and say, “Wait. Back up. I don’t understand.” In unedited versions of Fresh Air interviews, you frequently hear Terry Gross stopping her guests to get them to explain what they meant. But in everyday conversations, people more often shrug and move on because it doesn’t seem worth the trouble or they think they can guess what the other person meant. People are also reluctant to ask for clarification lest they appear dense. How many times has someone laughed at something you said that wasn’t intended as a joke? And how many times have you nodded when you had no idea what someone was talking about? Probably more times than you can count. “For whatever reason, often we are hesitant to stop and ask when we’re not sure what someone meant,” said communication researcher Graham Bodie at the University of Mississippi.

  In addition to his academic work, Bodie also does corporate consulting, particularly training salespeople to become more effective listeners. He said one of the major things he warns against is glossing over points in conversations that don’t make sense because it’s a leading cause of costly mistakes. “You’ve got to assume everything is relevant. If something doesn’t quite make sense to you, you need to pay attention,” he said. “Most of the time when it happens, we keep going even though we think there’s something weird here. But you should stop and clarify. Say something like ‘When you said X, I was confused.’”

  We hear about disasters resulting from the failure to clear up confusion all the time: the Challenger explosion, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and medical errors that cause around 250,000 deaths in the U.S. each year. But what about all the micro-miscommunications that fill our days? While the repercussions may not be as catastrophic, they are nonetheless consequential. For all the times we have that moment of “Oooh! Now I get it,” there are many more misunderstandings we fail to catch. We are oblivious to all the hurt feelings, missed opportunities, and botched jobs. All because we couldn’t be bothered to make sure we understood.

  Misunderstandings, like differences of opinion, are valuable reminders that others are not like us, or even remotely like us. Because we only really know ourselves, it’s a natural tendency to have a solipsistic view of the world. We incorrectly assume other people’s logic and motivations resemble our own. But, of course, they have different backstories and baggage.

  Intellectually, we know this, but nonetheless it’s always a rude awakening when someone thinks or behaves in ways that are beyond our expectations or imaginations. Misunderstandings, then, can be seen as an opportunity. They are an inspiration, or perhaps an aggravation, to listen more closely and inquire more deeply. In the words of Miles Davis, “If you understood everything I said, you’d be me.”

  11

  Listening to Yourself

  The Voluble Inner Voice

  I have a good friend who, like a lot of accomplished people, is really hard on herself. She’s enormously successful, attractive, warm, and witty, but when things go wrong in her life, her default is to self-loathe. All of a sudden, she’s an idiot, a complete failure, and can’t do anything right. When she gets on these self-critical jags, I tell her to stop listening to Spanky. Spanky is code for her mean inner voice—the one that pipes up during times of stress, mercilessly chastising her and making her feel small.

  We all have voices in our heads. In fact, we talk to ourselves constantly about things mundane and potentially profound. We have moral arguments and absurdist debates. We assign blame and make rationalizations. We analyze past events and rehearse future ones. The voices in our heads can be encouraging or defeating, caring or criticizing, complimentary or demeaning. Psychologist Charles Fernyhough at Durham University in the UK knows this better than most. He studies inner dialogue.

  His interest sprang from his doctoral thesis, which looked at how children talk out loud to themselves to work through problems and regulate their emotions. We continue talking to ourselves when we grow up, we just learn to do it in our heads—though it still occasionally slips out of our mouths. Who hasn’t found themselves wondering aloud where they put their keys or audibly cursing at something they heard on the news? “I have a constant inner dialogue that spills out into external speech,” Fernyhough told me. His wife has gotten used to it, but he gets funny looks when it happens on the bus. “Inner speech and talking to yourself is something we all do,” he said. “It’s a give-and-take. We are talking and listening inside our heads.”

  Indeed, we engage the same parts of our brains when we talk to ourselves as we do when we talk to another person. These are the brain regions involved with so-called theory of mind, or social cognition, which allow us to empathize and read other people’s intentions, desires, and emotions.

  In his book The Voices Within, Fernyhough writes that many great philosophers and social theorists, including William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and George Herbert Mead, believed the self generates conversations with itself by taking the perspective of another. An example is an athlete who might internalize the voice of a coach. Or you might have a back-and-forth with yourself that resembles exchanges you’ve had with your mother, boss, spouse, sibling, friend, or maybe a therapist.

  Listening to others, then, determines the tone and quality of our inner dialogues. Our previous interactions teach us how to question, answer, and comment so we can do the same with ourselves when we need to solve problems, manage ethical dilemmas, and think creatively. This will work. Oh no, this way is better … I’m going to ask for a raise. But they only hired you two months ago … I want some ice cream. It’ll spoil your dinner … I’m really attracted to her. Move on, man, she’s married.

  This kind of private or inner speech is associated with higher performance on cognitive tasks by children as well as adults. The research suggests that the more people you listen to in the course of your life, the more sides to an issue you can argue in your head and the more solutions you can imagine. Inner dialogue fosters and supports cognitive complexity, that valuable ability to tolerate a range of views, make associations, and come up with new ideas.

  More sophisticated private speech has been found to be associated with having more involved parents and higher socioeconomic status. Private speech development is hindered in children who have grown up in circumstances where their listening opportunities were limited. For example, children brought up in low-income Appalachian families, a culture where children can be isolated and treated as better “seen and not heard,” show delays in private speech, as do children from low-income urban families with a history of neglect.

  This is significant because how you talk to yourself affects how you hear other people. For example, someone who has a critical inner voice will hear someone else’s words very differently than someone whose inner voice tends to blame others. It’s all your fault versus It’s all their fault. In other words, our inner dialogue influences and distorts what other people say and thus how we behave in relationships.

  Remember psychologist a
nd attachment expert Miriam Steele from chapter 2? Her research, building on the work of other attachment experts dating back to the 1950s, indicates that the voices that get replayed in one’s head echo those heard in childhood. When early attachments are secure—if you had parents or caregivers who listened and attended to your wants and needs—then you develop an inner voice that is, as Steele put it, “friendlier.”

  We all have guilt and wrestle with ourselves, Steele told me, but an inner voice that says, Are you sure you want to do that? Why don’t you put yourself in their shoes? and Yeah, that was hurtful, but maybe they didn’t intend to hurt you, is a very different voice from the one that says, They are all out to get me and I’m no good. The latter voice is the one that makes you react in ways that are not to your benefit.

  People’s inner voices have tremendous influence in part because they’re actually perceived as louder. Researchers in the United States and China found that subjects who were asked to imagine repeating the syllable da rated external sounds as softer. Their internal voices dampened, or drowned out, what they heard. Moreover, their brains showed less auditory activation when the external sounds were played. If this is the effect of saying a single syllable to yourself, imagine what happens when a full-on dialogue is going on inside your head. He seems standoffish. Did I offend him? Maybe he’s just having a bad day. No, I think he’s mad at me.

  Some theorists argue that reading is a form of inner speech. Research indicates that we sound out words in our heads as we read. If a word takes you longer to say, it will take you longer to read. Another study showed that when subjects heard recordings of two people, one who spoke rapidly and another who spoke very slowly, and then were asked to read excerpts of works supposedly written by the slow or fast talker, the subjects read at a pace consistent with the speech rate of whoever they thought the writer was.

  Many readers who come to love a particular writer report that they hear that author’s unique voice, or the voice they imagine the writer has. They also might hear the distinct voices of the writer’s characters. Indeed, studies have found that the voice-sensitive areas of the auditory cortex are activated more when reading direct versus indirect speech—that is, your brain reacts as if it’s hearing an actual person speak when you read: “He said, ‘I’m in love with her,’” but not so much if you read: “He said he was in love with her.”

  Fernyhough and colleagues teamed up with The Guardian newspaper to survey 1,566 readers, and 89 percent said they heard the voices of characters in books, often vividly. Fifty-six percent of respondents said some characters’ voices stayed with them even when they weren’t reading, influencing the tone and content of their inner speech. Of course, many fiction writers say their characters talk to them and determine the course of their novels. When asked about his daily writing routine, Ray Bradbury responded that his morning ritual was to lie in bed and listen to the voices in his head. “I call it my morning theater,” he said. “My characters talk to one another, and when it reaches a certain pitch of excitement, I jump out of bed and run and trap them before they are gone.”

  The tenor of our inner voices comes not only from listening to the actual people in our lives but is also likely influenced by the voices we regularly hear in the media. The tone and dialectical style of, say, Sean Hannity, Oprah Winfrey, or Judge Judy might begin to reverberate in your head, depending on how avid a follower you are. 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. This, in turn, influences how you are in the world; whether you see the best or worst in people and whether you see the best or worst in yourself.

  The trouble is, really tuning in to one’s self is something people go to great lengths to avoid. This was borne out in eleven experiments involving more than seven hundred people conducted by psychologists at the University of Virginia. The majority of subjects did not enjoy spending just six to fifteen minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think. In one experiment, 64 percent of men and 15 percent of women began self-administering shocks rather than be alone with their thoughts.

  This suggests a lot of people have inner voices that sound like my friend’s tormenter, Spanky. Even if your inner voice is friendlier, the dialogues you have with yourself often have to do with what’s weighing on you—things like relationship problems, professional disappointments, health concerns, and the like. Human beings are by nature problem solvers, so in quiet moments, this is where our minds go. Our fixation on what needs to be fixed is why some people can’t abide downtime and always have to have something to do so they won’t think about what’s wrong. However, trying to suppress your inner voice only gives it more power. It gets louder and more insistent, which makes some people get even busier and overscheduled to drown it out. It never works, though. Your inner voice is always there and, if it can’t get your attention during the day, it will roust you at 4:00 a.m. Hello! Remember me?

  Cognitive behavioral therapy is all about learning how to talk to yourself differently. An unhelpful inner voice that sounds like a belittling parent or negative friend is replaced by a voice that sounds more like your therapist, suggesting kinder or more open ways of thinking, which in turn has proven effective at fostering a greater sense of well-being. Listening to a wide variety of people, too, is helpful. Many voices bring many perspectives. Questioning people and considering their responses is how you get better at doing the same when you have dialogues with yourself. As difficult as a problem may be, having a dialogue with yourself is ultimately the only way to solve it, or at least come to terms with it.

  When the great physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman was examined for his fitness to serve in the military during WWII, a psychiatrist asked him, “Do you talk to yourself?” As Feynman told his biographer, “I didn’t tell him something which I can tell you, which is I find myself sometimes talking to myself in quite an elaborate fashion: ‘The integral will be larger than this sum of the terms, so that would make the pressure higher, you see?’ ‘No, you’re crazy.’ ‘No, I’m not! No, I’m not!’ I say. I argue with myself. I have two voices that work back and forth.”

  Feynman said the conversations he had with his father, wife, friends, and colleagues all influenced and found echoes in his inner dialogues. In his book of essays, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Feynman wrote, “By trying to put the points of view that we have in our head together and comparing one to the other, we make some progress in understanding and in appreciating where we are and what we are.”

  12

  Supporting, Not Shifting, the Conversation

  In the memoirs of American socialite Jennie Jerome, otherwise known as Lady Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill’s mother, she described dining separately with archrival British politicians Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone: “When I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But when I sat next to Disraeli, I left feeling that I was the cleverest woman.”

  No surprise she preferred Disraeli’s company. The two-time Tory prime minister was a brilliant orator but also a keen listener, solicitous and adept at steering conversations toward whomever he was with. It also made him a favorite of Queen Victoria’s, whose undisguised preference for Disraeli over Gladstone during elections some said verged on unconstitutional. But it wasn’t just aristocracy and royalty to whom Disraeli paid scrupulous attention. The Times of London famously wrote he was able to see a conservative voter in the workingman as a sculptor discerns “the angel in the marble.”

  Disraeli was master of what sociologist Charles Derber at Boston College calls the support response. 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 hund
red 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. Here are some hypothetical examples:

  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)

  Good listeners are all about the support response, which is critical to providing the kind of acknowledgment and evaluative feedback discussed in chapter 5 as well as avoiding the types of misunderstandings identified in chapter 10. 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—open-ended questions like “What was your reaction?” not “Didn’t that piss you off?” The goal is to understand the speaker’s point of view, not to sway it.

  Fill-in-the-blank questions are useful in this respect. “You and Roger got in a fight because…?” That way, it’s like you’re handing off a baton, allowing the speaker to go in whatever direction the person wants. Try to avoid asking about incidental details that knock people off their train of thought and feeling state: “Were you and Roger arguing at the coffee shop on Fifty-fifth Street or Sixty-seventh Street?” Where they were, what time, what they ordered—none of it matters as much as what happened and how it felt.