by Kate Murphy
As machines have increasingly competed for our attention over the past century, the average amount of time people have devoted to listening to one another during their waking hours has gone down almost by half, from 42 percent to 24 percent. And now even the time spent listening to recorded speech is going down, as speed-listening has become the new speed-reading. People listen to audiobooks at twice the original speed, often while doing something else like exercising or driving. Apps like Overcast allow people to listen to podcasts in double or triple time; a practice called podfasting. And the audiobook retailer and producer Audible has a “Take Me to the Good Parts,” feature that lets listeners jump to the steamy sections of romance titles in the company’s collection.
Though live and in-person stories can be infinitely more interesting, they take a degree of patience that can be hard for people accustomed to speeding up or sexing up audio content on their smartphones. Research suggests that after people listen regularly to faster-paced speech, they have great difficulty maintaining their attention when addressed by someone who is talking normally—sort of like the feeling you get when you come off an expressway and have to go through a school zone. Moreover, you lose your ability to perceive and appreciate nuance in conversation because things like tonal shifts, subtle sighs, foreign accents, and even voices made raspy by whiskey and cigarettes all but disappear when heard in double time.
Conversational partners become just another device to toggle between. People periodically check their phones rather than fully attending to whoever is talking, which only makes it more likely they’ll have slow and soul-sucking conversations. A study by psychologists at the University of Essex found that the mere presence of a phone on the table—even if it’s silent—makes those sitting around the table feel more disconnected and disinclined to talk about anything important or meaningful, knowing if they do, they will probably be interrupted. It’s a weird loop of the phone creating a circumstance where people will talk about things that aren’t worth listening to, which in turn makes you more likely to stop listening and look at your phone.
Several studies of caregiver-child interactions in public spaces like playgrounds and fast-food restaurants found that the vast majority of caregivers ignored their children in favor of their phones. Pediatric experts say such behavior impairs children’s development, which depends on being attended to by their parents. As mentioned earlier, we tend to listen as we were listened to as children, which suggests the so-called screen generation now coming of age may have greater difficulty connecting with others.
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But it’s not just mobile devices and the associated online distraction that are getting in the way of listening. It’s also the modern aural environments we have created for ourselves. Workplaces today, for example, from the smallest start-ups to the largest corporations, are typically “open office” designs, with few walls or enclosures, so every telephone call, keyboard click, and after-lunch belch contributes to a constant daily racket. It’s hard to hear yourself think, much less pay full attention to someone who might want to tell you something important.
Having a quiet conversation at a restaurant is even less likely. According to food industry research and investigative reporting by several news outlets, sound levels average 80 decibels at restaurants in the United States (recall that the typical conversation averages about 60 decibels). The most popular, trendy restaurants have sound levels that exceed 90 decibels, which can cause hearing loss before dessert is served. Indeed, the most recent Zagat Dining Trends Survey found that noise in restaurants was ranked as diners’ top complaint. There is also evidence that the clamor makes diners overeat and make less healthy food choices.
Stores like Abercrombie & Fitch, H&M, and Zara can have noise levels in the high 80 to low 90 decibels. Similarly, you can’t go to a coffee shop, grocery store, or even a car dealership without piped-in background music, which even at low levels divides attention and makes full comprehension of conversations difficult. The distraction makes customers more vulnerable to the hard sell and more prone to impulse buy. I can tell you from experience that you are at a disadvantage negotiating the price of car while Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” blares in the dealer’s showroom.
People haven’t made their homes refuges of quiet either. Televisions are almost always on with the drone of cable news, reruns, looping weather reports, or cooking shows. Most people now also have some form of sound system, even if it’s just a small, portable speaker plugged into an iPhone. Streaming services like Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify have allowed even those without large music collections to have constant ambient music—excellent for setting a mood but a distraction if you want to listen closely to a family member or friend.
While you may think you can tune out these kinds of things, research consistently shows that you cannot. The ability to multitask is a delusion. Each input degrades your attention. 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.”
All this is to say that you must cultivate the right environment if you want to truly listen, which is as much about a receptive physical space as a receptive state of mind. You need quiet and freedom from interruption. There shouldn’t be background noise, much less the intruding ping of a mobile device. It seems obvious, but how often do we actually do it?
It’s not that you can only effectively and meaningfully interact with people in secluded or soundproof spaces. That’s impossible. But you can wave someone into your office and put your computer to sleep. You can choose quiet restaurants and silence your phone and keep it out of sight. You can find a park bench, take a walk on a quiet street, or just duck into a doorway away from the stream of pedestrian traffic to have a word. All are ways of signaling your receptiveness; your willingness to listen to what someone has to say. Whether the conversation is long or short, about business or more personal, contentious or sedate, in offering a quiet moment, or a quieter moment in the surrounding chaos, you create a better opportunity to connect with that person and understand where they are coming from.
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.
The project has since evolved from the original fifteen families in and around Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a nationwide initiative that provides resources, workshops, and tips on how to get families to share meals and have uninterrupted conversations. “I know you’re thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, have we gotten to the point where we need a workshop for that?’” said John Sarrouf, who was a director of the Family Dinner Project during its early years. “Yes, we have gotten to that point.”*
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.
At a family dinner or any gathering, the gift of your full attention is a form of hospitality, according to literary scholar Ronald Sharp, who, with Eudora Welty, coedite
d The Norton Book of Friendship, an anthology of works on the importance and meaning of friendship in which listening figures prominently. “You’re welcoming another person’s words and feelings into your consciousness,” he told me. “You are allowing that person to cross over the threshold and take up residence in your world.”
Welty was legendary for extending that kind of hospitality. Sharp said she was one of the most attentive listeners he has ever known, which was not only the basis of her intelligence and humor, so evident in her writing, but also her capacity for friendship. “So many people thought she was the most amazing friend they ever had,” he said. Sharp echoed others who were close to her, recalling how she always made time for him and expressed genuine interest in what he had to say. “She never rushed you or tried to finish your thoughts,” Sharp said. “She invited you to tell your story, and, more importantly, she actually let you tell your story.”
An invitation like that can have a lasting influence. An example is former Dallas police chief David Brown, who gained national attention following the 2016 fatal shootings of five local police officers during a protest against racially motivated police violence. Brown, who is African American, was widely praised at the time for encouraging people to sit down and listen to one another rather than protest in the streets and online. He famously invited protesters to join the police force to bring about meaningful change. Following his nationally televised press conference, applications to the Dallas Police Department soared.
Brown later told an interviewer that what he was asking people to do was no different from what a white classmate did when he invited Brown home for dinner when they were eleven years old. Approaching his friend’s house, Brown said he felt like Sidney Poitier in the movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, worried he might get uninvited when his friend’s parents found out he was black. But they welcomed him, served him a potpie, and were interested in what he had to say. “Why aren’t we smarter than sixth graders? Why can’t we figure this out?” Brown said. “It takes not a big group, not yelling and screaming, but ‘Let’s sit down and listen to each other and invite someone home for dinner.’”
Back when Chief Brown had dinner with his childhood friend, there weren’t cell phones on the table. No one was checking newsfeeds between bites or taking pictures of the potpies to post on Instagram. When Ronald Sharp visited Eudora Welty, she didn’t have cable news on in the background or have a MacBook open on her lap. In both instances, there were no distractions. The focus was on, and the abiding interest was in, the guest. That simple courtesy made a lasting impression on the two men. They remembered the people who listened to them decades later with affection and gratitude.
15
What Words Conceal and Silences Reveal
It was the holiday shopping season, and I was seated at a highly polished cherrywood dining table at Gallery Furniture in Houston, Texas. Also seated at the table was Greg Hopf, Gallery Furniture’s top salesman, which is saying something in a megastore that does more than $200 million annually in sales. With us were Mrs. Horton, seventy-six, perched tentatively on the edge of her chair, and Mr. Horton, eighty-three, standing behind her and rocking heel to toe, heel to toe in his Roper work boots. They were considering buying the table for their breakfast nook. They were also thinking about a bureau for their guest bedroom that Hopf had shown them earlier.
Apparently gripped by indecision, the couple hadn’t said anything for maybe five to ten minutes. The quiet was getting oppressive, and I was getting fidgety. I was only there as an observer, but it was taking everything I had not to make a gentle comment or suggestion that might get them to make up their minds already. Hopf works on commissions that escalate with the number of sales he makes during the day. I knew he was missing out on other potential customers who, this being the holidays, were coming through the front door in droves.
But Hopf’s expression was as placid as a lake on a windless day. He looked at the couple with earnest concern; his liquid eyes seemed even more sympathetic magnified behind his large glasses. It was the same expression he’d had while Mrs. Horton told us how her leg still troubled her some six years after breaking it. And also while Mr. Horton described being on foot patrols during his military service in Korea. “Mud was up to here,” he said, indicating his mid-thigh. “And then’d rain, and then’d freeze.”
Just when I thought I was going to lose my mind in the awkward silence, certain these two weren’t going to buy anything, Mrs. Horton piped up. She’d take the table and also the matching chairs and oh, the bureau, too, and, what the heck, an entertainment console, just, well, because. I was stunned. Hopf, who has been selling furniture for thirty years, was not. “I’ve learned to be quiet,” he told me after we delivered the couple to the cashier. “I guarantee you if I’d said something while we were sitting there, they would have just bought the bureau or nothing at all.”
Hopf doesn’t quite fit with Gallery Furniture’s somewhat carnival atmosphere—there are caged parrots and monkeys, free cake and candy, and what looks like an acre of mattresses pushed together for kids to jump on. Gallery Furniture’s owner, Jim McIngvale, known locally as Mattress Mack, jumps up and down on mattresses in TV ads clutching fistfuls of cash while shouting, “Gallery Furniture saves you money!”
Hopf is more sedate, purposely shepherding customers to relatively quiet corners of the store and just letting them talk—or not talk—on occasions when they are mulling or just plain muddled. He doesn’t interrupt, wheedle, cajole, correct, or interject. When customers go off on tangents, he just listens, gathering intelligence. An older guy said he didn’t own a computer because computers were ruining the world, so Hopf knew it was pointless to show him a complicated HD television. A harried young mother complained about getting stuck in traffic while taking her four preschool-age kids to their grandmother’s house, and Hopf steered her toward sofas that are covered in durable materials that resist dirt and Popsicle stains.
“It may seem like it would take longer to let people go on, but it’s actually quicker and easier, and you make fewer mistakes,” Hopf said. I noticed, too, that his willingness to hear customers’ stories made them less guarded and more trusting toward him. It’s not a bad bet because, as Hopf told me, “when you hear people’s stories, you tend to want to do right by them.”
What’s most striking about Hopf is his unusually high tolerance for silence, remaining totally unperturbed when customers like the Hortons go mum. It’s a rare quality, particularly in Western cultures, where people get extremely uncomfortable when there are gaps in conversation. We call it dead air. A hesitation or pause is seen as unbearably awkward and something to actively avoid. People are poised to jump in at the slightest indication that a speaker might be trailing off, even if the person hasn’t quite completed a thought.
When researchers graphed around fifty thousand pauses or transitions that occurred during English language conversations, they got a dramatic bell curve between -1 and +1 seconds (negative numbers indicating the times people began talking before the other person stopped talking). The highest peak was around 0–200 milliseconds, which means there was no pause at all between speakers or there was a pause that lasted less than the blink of an eye. Studies of Dutch and German speakers yielded similar results.
People in Japan, by contrast, allow longer gaps in conversation. Studies have shown that Japanese businesspeople tolerate silences that last nearly twice as long as those Americans can withstand, 8.2 seconds versus 4.6 seconds. Doctor-patient interactions in Japan contain more silences than in America, 30 percent versus 8 percent. In America, we say, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” while in Japan, “The silent man is the best to listen to.”
There’s a similar comfort with silence in Nordic countries, most notably Finland. Like the Japanese, Finns place greater value on listening, modesty, and privacy than Americans and many Western Europeans. There’s some truth in the joke about two Finnish men on their way to work and one says, “It is h
ere that I lost my knife,” and on the way home that evening, the other man says, “Your knife, did you say?” It’s considered impolite and overbearing in Finland to be too quick to jump in when someone finishes a thought, much less to interrupt. Silences are not only okay there, they are basic decorum. But researchers have also suggested that people in quieter cultures may have greater fear of losing face or being humiliated, which makes them more reluctant to speak.
Regardless, when we talk about culturally determined tolerances for silence, the differences are usually only on the order of seconds, if not fractions of seconds. People universally don’t like so-called loss of conversational flow. If the silence goes on too long, longer than what the norm is in that culture, it makes people uneasy, particularly if they are talking to someone who is not a close friend. Intimacy and trust with a conversational partner make it less likely you will feel the need to rev up the chitchat when the conversation slows. Research shows that being able to comfortably sit in silence is actually a sign of a secure relationship. Higher-status people also aren’t as likely to get agitated by gaps in conversation, presumably because they are more secure in their position.
In Western cultures, people tend to interpret silences longer than about half a second as disapproval, sanction, or ostracism, so they rush to say something to try to raise their standing. A silence of just four seconds is enough for people to change or nuance their expressed opinion, taking the quiet to mean their views are out of line. Former tech executive turned author and career coach Kim Scott has written about Apple CEO Tim Cook’s propensity for silence: “A friend warned me that Tim tended to allow long silences and that I shouldn’t let it unnerve me or feel the need to fill them. Despite this warning, in our first interview I reacted to a long period of silence by anxiously talking nonstop, and in the process inadvertently told him far more about a mistake I’d made than I had intended.”