You're Not Listening

by Kate Murphy

  A Dutch study showed people’s feelings of belonging and well-being diminished during video chat sessions with gaps or delays between responses. This occurred even when the subjects were told the conversational flow disruptions might be due to technical difficulties. The lead researcher, social psychologist Namkje Koudenburg, told me people might feel similarly unsettled and insecure, albeit subconsciously, when talking to someone on a cell connection that has a delay or even when someone doesn’t respond right away to a text.

  Certainly there are times when silences mean disapproval—think of the cricket silence after someone tells an inappropriate or off-color joke. But there’s a big difference between being “silent with” and being “silent to,” just like there’s a big difference between “laughing with” and “laughing at.” It’s more often the case in normal conversation that gaps are because the other person is just thinking or taking a breath before continuing. People pause while figuring out what, or how much, to tell you, or perhaps they need a moment to manage their emotions. Composer Gustav Mahler said, “What’s best in music is not to be found in the notes.” It’s often in the spaces between the notes; when the strands of sound attenuate and disappear. So, too, in conversation, it’s important to pay attention to what words conceal and silences reveal.

  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. As a journalist, it took me too long to realize that I didn’t have to say anything to keep the conversation going. Some of the most interesting and valuable bits of information have come not from my questioning but from keeping my mouth shut. You get so much more out of interactions when you allow people the time and space to gather their thoughts.

  Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and, in fact, most of the world’s religions from Bahá’í to Zen Buddhism incorporate some form of meditative or contemplative silence where the faithful try to listen to some higher order or, at least, to their best selves. Trappist monks believe silence opens the mind to the inspirations of the Holy Spirit. There is a teaching in the Talmud that says, “A word is worth one coin, silence is worth two.”

  The Quakers have something called waiting worship where congregants assemble and sit in silence so they are open and available to divine insight. But even Quakers can be uncomfortable with silence. A member of a Quaker congregation in Richmond, Indiana, told me that there’s no problem finding a seat on the one Sunday a month devoted to waiting worship because “a lot of people don’t go because they find the quiet too challenging.”

  This discomfort with silence has been known to trip up Western businesspeople when they try to negotiate deals with their less loquacious Asian counterparts. Charles Freeman, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s senior vice president for Asia, said Westerners—particularly Americans—can’t tolerate silence while Asians tend to embrace it. He said time and again he’s watched as Americans gab their way into bad bargaining positions during foreign trade negotiations.

  “Americans generally speak to fill up silence as if silences are bad things, but Asians are very different,” Freeman told me. “In a negotiating context, Asians actually get a lot of stuff done by just sitting there, being deferential and taking everything in. It’s a genuine advantage.” By remaining silent, he added, you can learn a lot about the other side’s mood and willingness to compromise as well as what will make them walk away, just by how they frame the issue. “If you are not listening in a negotiation context, you’re kind of screwed,” he said.

  For Canadian composer and music educator R. Murray Schafer, silence is a “pocket of possibility,” and to make the point, he sometimes required his students to remain silent for one day. His students at first didn’t like it because their thoughts were more audible and intrusive. Some said they felt hollow listening to themselves. But at the end of twenty-four hours, many students reported a greater awareness and appreciation of not only environmental sounds like the hiss of a lawn sprinkler or murmur of simmering soup but also subtleties in conversation that they would have missed had they been able to talk.

  An aspiring singer and songwriter in Los Angeles told me she had a similar experience when she had to go without speaking for six weeks after surgery on her vocal cords. She carried around a whiteboard that said, “Hi. I’m on vocal rest.” Forced silence, she said, made her realize that she wasn’t a very good listener. “As opposed to really listening, you tend to be always sharpening your knife, thinking how to prove your point; why you’re right,” she said. “I started understanding people better because I didn’t have the option to tell them my opinion, and it also made me more accepting of others because I was able to listen.” Like Schafer, she encourages taking a day to dive into the “pocket of possibility” that is silence. “If you can bear to do it for just twenty-four hours, you will learn to be a better listener,” she said. “You will learn the unimportance of your words and the importance of other people’s words.”

  If a full day seems daunting, try staying silent during a single conversation. Don’t say anything unless asked a question. See what happens. Take it from bartenders—the other person probably won’t notice. On slow nights, bartenders can listen to a customer go on for hours without having to utter a word. “You could say it’s because beer loosens the tongue,” said a longtime bar owner in New Orleans. “But I think it’s more that people aren’t used to being listened to, so they end up telling you stuff they don’t even tell their parents or significant others.”

  Bartenders I interviewed also said that on busy nights, patrons don’t so much talk to one another as talk at one another, neither having much idea what the other is saying or what they, themselves, are saying. “People frequently talk to take up the empty space between them and a stranger,” said a bookbinder turned bartender in Asheville, North Carolina. “They are trying to fill the void of a relationship that has not started yet—or isn’t very deep—with noise.” She added, “It’s the people who are comfortable in their own skins that are okay with quiet.”

  Somehow lost in our self-promoting culture is the fact that you can’t talk your way into a relationship. Garrulousness fills the silence but erects a kind of word wall that separates you from others. Silence is what allows people in. There’s a generosity in silence but also a definite advantage. People who are comfortable with silence elicit more information and don’t say too much out of discomfort. Resisting the urge to jump in makes it more likely you will leave conversations with additional insight and greater understanding. And if you’re Gallery Furniture’s Greg Hopf, you’ll outsell everyone else on the floor.

  16

  The Morality of Listening

  Why Gossip Is Good for You

  Good gossip smells like bourbon to me. Both were served, straight up, during cocktail hour at my great-great-aunt’s house in Galveston, Texas. People angled for invitations, as much for the banter as the booze. Until her death at age ninety-seven, my great-great-aunt and I spent many uninterrupted hours together—deep-sea fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, cutting sweet peas in her garden, cruising with the top down in her vintage, electric-blue Oldsmobile convertible. Although she’d certainly bristle at being called a gossip, all we talked about was what we loved and what we loathed about other people.

  While gossip often has a negative connotation, it actually has a positive social function. There’s a reason why as much as two-thirds of adult conversation is gossip, defined as at least two people talking about someone who is absent. Men gossip as much as women, and children are adept gossipers by age five. We all do it (although not with as much flair as my great-great-aunt) because gossip allows us to judge who is trustworthy, who we want to emulate, how much we can get away with, and who are likely allies or adversaries. In this way, listening to gossip contributes to our
development as ethical, moral members of society.

  We are socialized by the gossip we hear from our families, friends, colleagues, teachers, and religious leaders. What are the Jesus parables and Buddha stories but recorded gossip? Dutch researchers found that listening to positive gossip made people try to behave in a similar way, and negative gossip made people feel better about themselves. Another study showed that the more shocked or upset you are by gossip, the more likely it is that you’ll learn a lesson from it.

  Of course, you are also likely to reform if you are the subject of gossip. Researchers at Stanford University and the University of California–Berkeley found that subjects, when given the opportunity, readily gossiped about others who were untrustworthy in a financial game, which in turn led the cheaters to play nice to get back into everyone’s good graces. The conclusion was that organizations that allow their members to gossip will be more cooperative and deter selfishness better than those that don’t.

  This is the case even when the gossip is not always entirely true. Social psychology and economics researchers in Australia and the UK collaborated on a study that showed any kind of gossip, accurate or not so accurate, creates a demand for “reputability.” They had subjects play a trust-based game involving the distribution of rewards, and when people could freely impugn or praise the integrity of fellow players, even if falsely, they behaved better and operated more efficiently compared to those who were not allowed to gossip. The researchers observed that inaccuracies were most often motivated by a desire to more severely punish bad actors (people sometimes made cheaters sound worse than they were). There’s also the thought that listening to how people talk about others, true or untrue, may say as much, or more, about them than the people they are talking about.

  No wonder gossip makes people reflexively lean in and lower their voices to a conspiratorial whisper. It’s valuable. My great-great-aunt and I would almost touch foreheads when discussing something particularly sensitive, even when no one else was around. Rather than being trivial, superficial, or simpleminded, a surprisingly large body of evidence indicates listening to gossip is an intelligent activity and essential to adaptation. Gossip scholars (there are more than you would think) say talking about people is an extension of observational learning, allowing you to learn from the triumphs and tribulations of those you know and even those you don’t know.

  British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, who you met in chapter 4, has studied gossip in conjunction with his work on friendship, and he told me that despite the widely held view that gossip is mostly malicious, only 3–4 percent of it is truly mean-spirited. “Gossip is hanging over the yard fence, sitting on the stoop, rocking in the rocking chair,” he said. “Most of it is discussing some difficulty going on between you and another person, but it’s also about what’s going on in the community and the status of people in the network—who’s fallen out with whom.”

  Social dynamics change rapidly and are incredibly complicated. Every interpersonal decision and behavior is the result of myriad factors coming together at a particular moment between particular people. Depending on a number of variables, the same interaction can be insignificant or spin wildly out of control. Trying to understand this complexity is extremely challenging, Dunbar said, and that’s why “we’re so interested in listening to and examining lots and lots of examples to try to understand how the game is played so we can handle it better.” Indeed, people came to my great-great-aunt’s cocktail parties to gather just such intelligence. Galveston may be a sleepy coastal town, but it was, and still is, hard to keep up with all the antics and intrigues.

  According to Dunbar, to understand the origins of gossip, we need look no further than the grooming behavior of apes. It’s thought early humans—like apes—bonded socially by grooming one another. Mutual stroking and nitpicking fostered goodwill so that later on, the two might share bananas or come to each other’s defense. But as humans grew more intelligent and the complexity of our activities and the size of our communities grew, language—and, more specifically, gossip—replaced grooming as a way to establish and maintain alliances, although we still pet and stroke those closest to us.

  The advantage of gossip over grooming, Dunbar said, is that it is a more “efficient mechanism for our social bonding and social learning.” Grooming is very much a one-on-one activity that can take quite some time (depending on how tangled or louse-infested your partner is), whereas face-to-face conversations are quicker and can accommodate up to four individuals (one speaker and three listeners). Any larger and people tend to break off into smaller groups. You’ve probably seen this in action at large parties where guests naturally form various conversational pods of two to four people.

  This perhaps explains why social media is so seductive. The speed with which gossip can be accessed online, and the sheer quantity, is more than you could ever muster or manage in face-to-face interactions. It creates this imperative to keep checking to make sure you are still in the loop. But, of course, you can never keep up with it all, and with so many narratives and interpretations, the quality and value of the information plummets.

  * * *

  The social science literature often talks about gossip in economic terms, subject to the law of supply and demand. So, for example, the things that my great-great-aunt told me one-on-one and in strictest confidence were more valuable to me than what she tossed off at a cocktail party where everyone there was essentially free to tell anyone they wanted. You can probably guess how comparatively little economists would say gossip is worth on the internet. The value of information is inversely related to its availability and its triviality.

  University of Chicago sociologist Peter Michael Blau originated social exchange theory in the 1960s, which applied economics to social interactions, including the information we disclose to one another. Blau was a student of Robert Merton, the father of focus groups, and he maintained that listening to people’s stories was essentially a privilege that had to be earned. People start with minor transactions where the information isn’t so sensitive; therefore, it wouldn’t be a big deal if word got out. But as both partners prove their trustworthiness by their attentiveness, sensitivity, and discretion, their relationship deepens, which leads them to engage in more significant transactions (i.e., disclosing more tightly held information).

  Listening, then, is not only how we learn to be virtuous members of society, it is in itself a virtue that makes us worthy of the most valuable information. The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas believed human interactions are the foundation of personal ethics and that listening, and the understanding and empathy it engenders, gives our lives meaning and direction. Levinas, who was Jewish and was a prisoner of war during WWII, stressed the importance of experiencing the “other.” By this, he meant engaging with other people face-to-face and learning how all our stories are different and yet the same in terms of underlying emotions. Listening to the “other” is what reminds us of our common human vulnerability and fragility, and it imposes the ethical imperative, or duty, to do no harm.

  Integrity and character are not things you are born with; they develop day by day through the choices you make, and that very much includes to whom and how well you choose to listen. Ethical behavior requires that you take into account how your words and actions affect others, and you can’t get a sense of that without listening. In a purely practical and evolutionary context, we survived as a species by cooperating as we foraged for food and hunted big game. Early humans had to listen and collaborate or die. Norms of behavior and rules of civility emerged from those early joint activities, which later informed our ideas of morality.

  The contemporary French intellectual Pascal Bruckner argues in The Temptation of Innocence that modern individualism may be taking us backward. He observes that when one’s duty is foremost to one’s self, there is no sense of social obligation and “guided only by the lantern of his own understanding, the individual loses all assurance
of a place, an order, a definition. He may have gained freedom, but he has lost security.” In our self-reliant society, we believe we are responsible for our own happiness and prosperity. “Everyone must sell himself as a person, in order to be accepted,” Bruckner writes. But this constant self-promotion and image cultivation comes at a cost. We lose touch with others and ultimately our sense of belonging and connection, which was all we really wanted in the first place.

  Our modern selves talk more and listen less despite the fact that understanding and responsiveness to one another’s stories, ideas, and concerns have defined all our achievements from hunting woolly mammoths to putting a man on the moon. Not listening to one another diminishes what we can achieve and in that way, too, can be seen as a moral failing. We not only fail one another as individuals, we also fail to thrive as a society.

  Moreover, when people feel the urgency to always sell themselves, they tend to exaggerate, which lowers the level of discourse and fosters cynicism. When asked his IQ score, the physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking said, “I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers.” This is from a man whom many considered the smartest person in the world. My great-great-aunt also observed that those who bragged the most were usually the least accomplished. Something to keep in mind when you’re tempted to promote yourself instead of finding out what’s great about whomever is in front of you.

  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.