by Kate Murphy
Regret came up repeatedly when I interviewed people for this book. So many of them expressed profound regret that they didn’t listen at a critical point in their lives. They were too distracted or maybe they had to “speak their truth” and neglected to take into account the potential impact. They reflected on a person who died, a relationship that ended, a job they lost, or a fight they had and wished they could go back and ask more questions and listen more carefully to the answers.
According to psychologist Amy Summerville, director of the Regret Lab at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, social regrets, which have to do with relationships, tend to be more intense than nonsocial regrets, such as where you went to school or an investment you made. Moreover, research shows that you regret most the things you could have done differently but can’t go back and do over. Not listening is ripe for regret because once you let the opportunity slip away, you can never re-create the moment and often don’t realize what you missed until it’s too late.
“Not listening is in that sweet spot of things that can really stir up regret over time,” Summerville told me. “It’s essential to relationships, and we can readily recognize it’s something fully under our control.” Regret is the second-most common emotional state, after love, she said, and the two feelings are intertwined since the most intense regret comes from neglecting those we love. Relationships most often fail due to neglect, and one of the principle kinds of neglect is not being attentive. Whether viewed as an evolutionary survival tactic, basic moral virtue, or what we owe the ones we love, listening is what unifies us as human beings.
Which brings me to a final note on my great-great-aunt. We were having breakfast, just the two of us, huddled at one end of the mahogany expanse that was her dining room table. It was springtime, and the smell of wisteria wafted through the open windows. We had been talking about someone who had lived to sorely regret some things he had done. I asked my great-great-aunt, then in her nineties, if she had any regrets. “What good would that do?” she said.
17
When to Stop Listening
A few years ago, I was working on a story for The Times about fake laughter. Curious why we so often laugh when nothing is funny, I called a psychologist and university professor who studies laughter. He began by telling a few jokes. Perhaps not surprising coming from a guy who studies laughter for a living, but they were not funny jokes. They were lame jokes. I did that forced ah-ha-ha you do to be polite. In other words, a fake laugh.
The professor then launched into a lengthy lecture on how human laughter evolved from apes panting. “I think that answers your question,” he said finally. “Well … not exactly,” I said, and I tried again to tell him that my story was about fake laughter, particularly why people laugh when they are uncomfortable. He corrected me. You can’t fake laughter. “You’ve laughed during this conversation, real laughter, and that’s a positive thing. Okay?” he said, not doubting the sincerity of my earlier ah-ha-ha. He went on, “Men are the most effective laugh getters. It’s not a matter of sexism in the entertainment industry; it’s just harder for women to get laughs than men. Around the world, class clowns are males. Males are the best laugh getters, whether as comedians or at the next cocktail party. Okay?”
On a deadline and my question still unanswered, I thanked him very much for his time. Not that the call wasn’t useful. He spectacularly proved my thesis about fake laughter. But it was time to stop listening to him. Four psychologists, three neuroscientists, and one humor expert later, I had new insight into why we laugh for real and for show, and how to tell the difference (hint: fake laughter has speech sounds in it like ah-ha-ha or eh-heh-heh or tee-hee-hee). I also learned there is likely no gender monopoly on humor, but women are more likely to fake laughter, as I had so ably demonstrated.
But the larger point here is sometimes you need to make the call to stop listening. While you can learn something from everyone, that doesn’t mean you have to listen to everyone until they run out of breath. Obviously, you can’t. As George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” Moreover, there are only so many hours in a day. So we make choices, consciously and unconsciously, about who gets our time and attention.
According to the British language philosopher and theorist Paul Grice, human beings, without realizing it, have certain expectations in conversation that, when violated (as happened with the unfunny laughter expert), make us less inclined to listen. It stems from the fact that communication is fundamentally a cooperative endeavor, so if we perceive our partners aren’t keeping up their ends of the bargain, we are going to feel cheated and want out of the deal. Grice summarized our conversational expectations in four maxims:
Maxim of Quality—we expect the truth.
Maxim of Quantity—we expect to get information we don’t already know and not so much that we feel overwhelmed.
Maxim of Relation—we expect relevance and logical flow.
Maxim of Manner—we expect the speaker to be reasonably brief, orderly, and unambiguous.
Some scholars have argued for the inclusion of politeness and fairness in turn taking, but Grice’s four maxims are widely recognized as what most people expect in civilized society, even if they aren’t aware of it. It explains why it’s so difficult to talk to people suffering from dementia or psychosis. No longer tethered to reality and social norms, they may spout fantastic, disorderly, ambiguous, vague, and/or disconnected ideas. It’s also why calling tech support is so incredibly aggravating. The scripted responses often have no logical link to what you said, provide too little or too much information and are often untrue—“It’s your equipment, not ours.”
The social contract implied by Grice’s maxims applies across cultures, whether the exchange is friendly or antagonistic. People can be really angry with one another but still follow the rules to have a productive argument. While Grice’s maxims are pretty universal, they are also universally flouted, to a greater or lesser extent, perhaps because people can have very different ideas about what is truthful, relevant, logical, brief, orderly, or unambiguous. But still, in our own minds, this is what we expect. And when we detect total bullshit in a conversation or someone throws out a non sequitur or drones on in mind-numbing detail about something we don’t care about—we tend to get annoyed, and we check out.
Strange as it may sound, most people who violate Grice’s maxims are not so much bad speakers as bad listeners. The best communicators, whether addressing a crowd or a single individual, are people who have listened, and listened well, in the past and continue to listen in the moment. They are able to engage, entertain, and inspire because they first try to get a sense of their audience and then choose their material and style of delivery accordingly.
And they also remain attuned to their audience while they are speaking, paying attention to verbal and nonverbal cues as well as the energy in the room to assess whether people are following them and care about the subject. It’s sort of like when you adopt a different narrative approach when talking to, say, your grandmother versus your girlfriend, a coworker versus a customer, or your liberal friend versus your conservative friend.
The stories you tell and the way you tell them depend on your read of your audience—or at least they should. You can have strong values and convictions, but you can’t make yourself compelling, clear, or convincing if you don’t take into account who is in front of you. Not everybody has the same interests, sensibilities, or level of understanding, and to not try to discern and respect those differences is the surest way to bore or aggravate people or otherwise make them shut down.
Listening is not just something you should do when someone else is talking; it’s also what you should do while you are talking. Is the other person indicating any real interest in hearing more about your kid’s oboe recital? Did the other person
wince when you started talking about politics? Was that a sigh of relief you heard when you said, “To make a long story short…”? If you’re not good at reading other people’s reactions as you speak, then just ask them. Check in. “Have I lost you?” “Did I overstep?” “What do you think?” “Are you still with me?” “Had enough?” “Am I boring you?” “Make sense?” “Too much?”
Conversation, at its best, is a continual listening feedback loop that shapes what people say and how they say it. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “’Tis the good reader that makes the good book.” Likewise, ’tis the good listener who makes the good conversation. When both parties in a conversation are focused and engaged, it’s like a fantastic dance where the two of you are listening intently to each other regardless of who is speaking. Not only are your brain waves in sync—as Uri Hasson and his colleagues discovered—but research shows you also start to physically and tonally align. You mirror each other’s speaking style, body posture, gazes, and gestures.
Conversing with someone who doesn’t listen well—who doesn’t follow what you are saying or take into account how you feel about what you are hearing—is like dancing with someone who is keeping to a different rhythm or has no rhythm. It’s awkward. And watch out for your toes. The person may have valuable things to say, but it takes much more energy and self-discipline to listen and find out what it is.
Or the person could just be a jerk. People rarely are, though. Their self-centered conversational style more often speaks to deep insecurities, anxieties, or blind spots. Sometimes just by listening, they begin to listen, too—not only to you but also to themselves. And when they do, the conversation becomes more coherent, relevant, and responsive. The power of the listener is that you get to decide how much effort you want to put in and when you’ve had enough.
Anyone who has suffered through a bad date knows how much work it is to be with someone when you are hopelessly out of sync. If you’ve forgotten, tune in to a few episodes of Second Date Update. For the uninitiated, it airs during morning drive time on pop and country music radio stations in larger markets like Houston, Seattle, Chicago, and Boston. What happens is a man or woman calls in after having a great time on a date and can’t understand why the other person isn’t responding to texts or calls for a second date. The morning radio hosts then call the guy or gal in question to ask what went wrong. This, while the person hoping for a second date and countless commuters eavesdrop on the conversation. It’s by turns fascinating and appalling, comic and tragic, as people, so hoping for connection, so utterly fail to listen to the objects of their desire.
Take Jonas, who didn’t pick up on Mary’s discomfort during their first date when he introduced her to his “little bandits,” which is what he called the wild raccoons that he hand-fed and liked to watch frolic in the raccoon playland he’d constructed in his yard. And then there was Hannah, who failed to register Nate’s disapproval when she started networking—handing out business cards and working the room—at a children’s charity event he had invited her to. One could argue whether consorting with animals known to carry rabies and tireless self-promotion are problematic in relationships, but the inability to attend to your date’s words and reactions surely is.
It’s what makes Second Date Update so cringeworthy. The callers didn’t listen to their dates when they were with them, all but guaranteeing no second date. Undeterred, they ask radio hosts to listen for them and then, when they overhear their dates explaining their feelings, they still don’t listen, usually breaking in on the call to insist that the other person has got it all wrong. “We can readily accept the fact that we can be wrong,” the Polish-born social psychologist Robert Zajonc wrote, “but we are never wrong about what we like or dislike.” Better to listen to how people feel than try to convince them to feel differently. You can’t argue your way into affection, but truly listening is the surest way to form a bond.
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As great as it is to find someone, a romantic partner or just a good friend, who is easy to talk to and gets you just as you get them, don’t expect that the two of you will be able to sustain that degree of connection all the time. Careful listening is draining, regardless of your personality, aptitude, or motivation. You can’t do it continuously. Indeed, air traffic controllers are limited to one-and-a-half-hour to two-hour shifts before they must take a break. Newer controllers can manage even less time because they haven’t built up enough stamina. Controllers not only have to listen for information like pilots’ requests and read backs of instructions, they also have to listen for any trace of unease or confusion in pilots’ voices to assess when things could be getting dicey in the cockpit.
“You get mentally exhausted and mushy listening too long,” an air traffic controller in the Dallas–Fort Worth area told me. “You have to be careful because it happens to some people sooner than others.” He said he often feels like he has used up his capacity to listen once his shift is over. “There are days when I come home and the last thing I want is to engage with my family,” he said. “It makes everyone walk on eggshells around Dad, but I just can’t listen to anyone else.”
Naomi Henderson, the focus group moderator, told me a downside of being a good listener is people are always calling her with their problems. She has been known to carry her phone to the front door and ring the bell so she can say, “Uh-oh. There’s someone at the door. I have to go.” Otherwise, she said, “You’re like a bowl of chocolate mousse and everybody’s got a spoon.” When someone listens to you, it can feel so much like love, some people may not know the difference. Part of being a good listener is knowing your limits and setting boundaries.
Not listening because you don’t agree with someone, you are self-absorbed, or you think you already know what someone will say makes you a bad listener. But not listening because you don’t have the intellectual or emotional energy to listen at that moment makes you human. At that point, it’s probably best to exit the conversation and circle back later. If you half listen to someone or listen as if you are skimming through a book, the other person will pick up on it. Even small children know when you’re not listening. Take, for example, my friends’ toddler who has repeatedly thrown his parents’ cell phones in the toilet—no other objects, just the cell phones. He knows precisely what keeps Mom and Dad from listening to him.
There are also times when you have to admit that, try as you might, you can’t get on someone’s wavelength. It could be that something inside you is preventing you from listening, or it could be that the other person doesn’t want to be heard and is being withholding. Or it could be the person is just toxic. These are people who, whenever you listen to them, you feel depressed, diminished, or distressed. You can’t listen someone out of being abusive or cruel. Kathryn Zerbe, professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, echoed several psychotherapists I interviewed when she said, “In our business, there are some patients you can’t treat. But also in life, there are some stories you just can’t hear. Every person has to know that. That’s the limit of human experience, and that’s okay.”
The problem is that we tend to give up too soon. Few people, if any, are effortlessly eloquent and often need time to build up enough trust in you, and maybe also in themselves, to talk freely. Whether you are listening to your boss, colleagues, friends, loved ones, or strangers, it takes a while for people to get it out. They may beat around the bush or hide behind humor. They may say too much or too little. And they can even say things they don’t mean. A good listener takes the time and makes the effort to help people find their voice, and in so doing, intimacy and understanding are earned. Listeners, through the gift or by dint of sustained attention, receive in return other people’s confidences. And besides, wouldn’t you want people to hang in there with you while you figured out or worked up to what you wanted or needed to say?
Sometimes it takes more than one conversation to hear someone. I have left interviews feeling like I understood everything and t
hen, after thinking about it awhile, gone back to ask additional questions or even asked the same questions again, perhaps in a different way, hoping for more clarity. Listening can continue even when you are no longer in the presence of the speaker as you reflect on what the person said and gain added insight. This is not to recommend obsessive rumination or picking apart conversations, which psychiatrist Zerbe said usually has more to do with insecurity than honest reflection. You know you’re doing this when you are spinning your wheels going over and over how you feel about something someone said instead of considering the feelings that drove the other person to say it.
Journaling is a form of reflective listening for Anthony Doerr, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning book All the Light We Cannot See. Now forty-seven, he has kept a diary since he was sixteen. “It’s really a way to train yourself to look and listen,” he told me. “You slow down and translate a big confusing world, almost like a prayer.” Good journalism has the same quality. Profiles in The New Yorker, for example, are the writer’s reflections on conversations with the subject, laying out not only what the person said but also noting what the person did not say, as well as mannerisms and demeanor. Perhaps not surprisingly, Gillien Todd tells students in her negotiation class at Harvard Law School to listen to the opposing side as if they were going to have to write a newspaper or magazine article about them.
I, myself, am an inveterate quote collector—I jot down any interesting, funny, or thought-provoking thing I hear, or overhear, during the course of the day. I have several notebooks as well as files on my computer filled with pithy and profound quotes from friends, family, colleagues, strangers, and, of course, people I have interviewed. When you start paying attention, you’d be surprised how many things you will find worth recording. And reading back over your quote collection, you start to pick up interesting themes that are as revealing about yourself as the people you are quoting.