Transcript for Are You Listening?

Hi Shankar, great to be here.

Oh, I've known him since kindergarten.

It was a lot of time ago now. I'm 38 now, so it seems like a different life time that I wasn't invited to a social event that I really wanted to be invited to. Many of the popular kids were there. And I was never not unpopular, but never in the popular group. And this friend was friends with some people in the popular group. The couple of days after I heard someone talking about this event and it didn't really anything to me until I heard this friend was there. Maybe that my friend was there and then I thought that he did not tell me about this event even though it was my best friend. This is what I thought initially and I felt really, really insulted.

Yeah, so I played passive aggressive for all titles. So I said, okay, I'm going to play insulted. So I I didn't answer the phone. He's called and so I avoided him for a few days until we eventually met in an unplanned way for me. And what happened at this meeting? So he came to me and I was very cold. I wanted him to understand that I'm angry. And he was like, well, what's your problem? Why are you being so distant and cold? And what did they do to you? And then I invented about him not inviting me or telling me about this event. I was like, how could he not invite me? Like, I always invite him to other events like this. And when he gets the chance, he doesn't reciprocate and that he uses this as an opportunity to be more in the popular group. And after so long, it's hard to remember the words, but I remember the feeling.

Exactly. Exactly. I didn't even want an apology like I wanted to make him feel like I felt.

Yeah, so he was saying words in the beginning. I had no idea what he said because he was too busy listening to myself. But when I get angry, I have a tendency to repeat the same thing over and over and over again. And after a few repetitions, I suddenly became a word that he's saying, you got it completely wrong. I did call you. I did text you. And then I called him a liar. Not only did you not invite me, but you're sorry. Thanks to me.

He felt so, so small. He felt like, wow, I completely misread the situation. I completely judged him. And without having given him the opportunity to explain it, and he was actually right. And I felt really bad about that afterwards.

My friend and I are about the same age. His colleagues is older than I, than I, than both of us. And like he looks, I felt like he's, he's looking through me and he actually said, well, why do you need him for? You get someone from our own college and I felt so insulted. Like he literally said, look, that he means well, why do you need him for? Like I don't exist. Why do you need him for?

Of course, it's a basic human need that they need to be long, they need to feel included and to be connected with other people. It goes with us through early childhood to our entire life.

Well, to remind you, I live in Israel. So I see more examples of poor listening than the other way around. Yeah. There is a sentence saying, two Israelis for opinions. So unfortunately, I see poor listening everywhere and even more unfortunately, it seems to be escalating as time goes by. Nowadays, with the televisions, at least in Israel, this is how I feel. So you, you, the norm, unfortunately, became to bring someone and start arguing with them. So if you don't argue with them, it's not interesting. It's all about arguing and the yelling and who yells stronger and who dominates the conversation. And two people yell, so the one that you hear is the person who yells the loudest, This is what I talk about a toxic atmosphere. It's always a guest bring someone from the opposite that we disagree with and see and get them start yelling and then we will respond and as a listening researcher, this really, I get a bad feeling from listening to it.

Yes, exactly, because listening is not that easy. Listening is costly. It requires motivation, it requires cognitive ability, it requires time and effort. And this is resources. They are limited resources. that we have and we need to decide how to allocate them, like the famous sentence time is money. And I think the reason that we think that listening is easy is often that we confuse listening with being silent, which is also not easy all the time, but listening is much harder than merely being silent.

the true and in addition to it, think about, think about the time when an employee of yours or maybe you or a torture supervisor came and said, well, I really need to talk to you. And even though you only had 60 seconds, but in addition, your mind wasn't clean to listen. You were bothered by your next meeting or your previous conversation or immediate meeting and other things. This is why you talk about the ability, the cognitive ability. So you might even have a little 60 seconds. You might have 10 minutes, but you're internal disturbances would prevent you from really listening to this person.

Oh, yes, yes. I have triggers. My little one is the hardest. The first grade, my little one Michal is in the fourth grade and my older one is in the sixth grade. And so, you know, as a father, we slept with girls and my wife, I lived with four women, so I'm constantly reminded that I need to be able to list her. But one story that really strikes me, it was an experience that, with Mihal, with my middle one, when she was in kindergarten. And we went to the playground. And you know, as the academic, I have a job that I often I work from home. So work on balance is really the lines really fuzzy. So it was me and her and you know, she was on the swing. And I was texting work things and she talked and I, you know, I was texting. And like two minutes after, she said, they want to go home. She wanted to go home. She wanted to go home. Yeah, go up here because we live in the to the apartment. We live in the building in the front day. I want to go up to home. And she really wanted to go to the background before. And then I caught my sex. I started listening and this is what I do. So, yeah, I have all the excuses in the world. I put the phone in my pocket. And then without the phone, after a few minutes, I asked, well, we still want to go up. She said, no. This is just one example.

So there are numerous experiments using distractions where listeners were distracted. A great research by Manisha Pasopathy from the University of Utah. They brought participants to the laboratory. and they divided them to Perfs to Dietz Lissner and a speaker. You either were in the Lissner or in the speaker role. And your instruction as a listener was to Lissner, like you listened to a close friend. the speaker told you about a meaningful event that they happened to them and you were told to as a listener to listen like you listen to a close friend. In the distraction condition, the listeners were giving the same instructions, but we're also told, come to the number of times that the speaker said a word that starts with TH that these, those, there are many words in English language, that's other TH. So they cognitively distracted the listener. One interesting finding was that in the distraction condition, in the transcripts of the speakers, you could see a lot of the flow, the fluency of the speech was heard. So they went from there. There was no coherence in the story. So you start from the beginning to the end and then they went back to the middle and then and so and a lot of startering.

Exactly. And we have numerous experiments showing it. The listener determines more than 50% of the conversation. So the speaker's speech was heard, the fluency, more stuttering. The most interesting, in my view, with a few days afterwards, they invited the speakers back to tell about their own stories. The story that they told, and speakers would talk to distracted listeners, remember less from their own stories. And as a professor, I really resonate with it, for example, when I talk to a class and I see people not listening, you know, we have all this internal thoughts. And when we feel that the other person is not listening well to us, the volume of this internal thoughts goes out.

So your example is a great example of what's called negativity bias in us. So you can have so many people listening to you, but you will focus on the one person that increases your evaluation apprehension, this socially exclusion fear, which I think is so fundamental, but I think your example says it the best.

So this was in a press over dinner. We, it was around a very, very heated topic back then. Now, now it seems like a different world now. And it was about the radical reform that was supposed to happen in Israel. Many families were very divided. My family as well. You know, a Passover dinner with many of the family you don't see very often. you know there is there is a sense you don't speak politics at the dinner table but this was a very like this was the only thing people talked about back then. And I actually didn't want to get into it because it was very sensitive topic. And there are family members who I see maybe once every two years. So like, I don't want to get into an argument with them. It doesn't do good for anyone else from me, not to them, not to the relationship. But they brought one of them brought something up. And I thought, OK, I'm not going to say anything. I tell you something. I really opposed. And I called him, you know, it was like, it's like someone hitting you in the stomach, like, psychologically hitting me and like, and I responded and then he responded and then we got into this argument. And I felt that the more angry I got, to more of my mind became narrow. I could only think of very weak arguments. And even when I conveyed the arguments, even to me they sounded so weak. And then the frustration, because they know so much, and now when I present my arguments, because I'm so mad, I can't even think straight. So this was a very, even my wife told me afterwards, you know, don't argue anymore like this. When you argue, you sound ignorant. And she knows how much I know, but nothing came out.

Exactly, because in my story, for example, and then I see it in the lab many times, when we feel that our right to express our attitude, perspective, belief is being threatened, we become defensive. And when we become defensive, we try to bolster around attitudes. It makes the listening almost impossible when we're in such a state because when going back to this example, when this family member was speaking, I was listening to him. I was thinking, how I'm going to counter back. And when I was speaking, I saw he wasn't listening. He was thinking the same. So basically, we were talking test each other. We both come away with a more rigid attitude. So it wasn't a conversation. It was an exercise for both of us of how to bolster our attitude and that people are surprised that people are the polarization increases and people are becoming more extreme because we don't practice listening. We don't create the atmosphere, the openness that allows listening to happen.

And this is not my idea. This was suggested by Car Roger, one of the noted fathers of modern psychology. and Roger said that one of the reasons for our communication is that we fear that if you really listen, we might need to change. And when we are not the one who initiated the change, this can be threatening. Like, for me, it would be conversing with my wife. My wife is the person who knows me the best. We've been married last week, 13 years. We've been together for 14 years. She knows me better than I know myself. She could predict my behavior when I tell her, no, I'm not going to do that. She tells me, okay, you are going to do that. And I said, no, I'm not going to do it. You see. And then I called her and say, well, Okay, now yeah. Yeah, I'm coming home early. I'm not going to the gym as I plan to. So she knows me better than I know myself. So when she says something that bothers her about my behavior, I don't think she's right. But it's not comfortable for me to hear it because this is me. If I admit it, I basically admit that I need to change it and well, it changes hard work.

Yes, think about a person who wants a very extreme position, a very one-sided view on any topic. Now, if this person really listens to someone who also different attitude, they might realize that there is merit, to the opposite point of view. Now they're not saying they would change the edited, but if I'm very extreme and then this is a self-identifying edited, I might realize that I need to change. Now then how do I justify myself? How do I justify my behaviors? This defensive, this fear of change is something that is going with us in our daily lives.

So, it was a great study. And the researchers conducted the aquallitative study, they conducted interview with, and I think it was bank workers, a financial industry. They found employees confuse listening to complying with their requests. So for example, if you're my manager and why am I asking you to take a few days off, you might listen well to me, but if you afterwards do not accept my request, there is a very good chance that I will say, Shankar is not a good listener. Now even though you did listen to me, but I will confuse listening with compliance. And this often happens in asymmetric relationship when there is a power difference. So the listener has not only a conversation partner, but has also resources that the speaker wants. And this study nicely showed how there is a risk of being perceived unfairly as a bad listener, even though you the manager did list them, but did not comply. It doesn't happen all the time, but it doesn't happen in the workplace. I also sit in my daily life, for example, I go to the supermarket and a few days ago. I hear this mother saying to her son, you don't listen. I told you so many times you can't get this candy. Now he isn't to her. He just didn't agree with her. There's a difference. There's a difference. No, I have the same issue with my girls. You didn't listen to me, I asked you for this. I listened to you, but I didn't accept what you said.

That's true because as you mentioned, like you create an expectation that if you listen so attentively, you saw the merit in the request and you're about to, so you create expectation that you cannot meet. However, there is a positive side to it. I don't want to present listening as in, I want to give you the, the respected deserve because although when you're in a managerial role and by the way, the higher in the hierarchy in the organizational hierarchy, who are the more time you spend listening during your We work day when you listen well, this is another different research, but when you listen well, to your employee. There is a bigger chance that they will understand why you did not accept their request. So it's not, I don't want to come away saying, well, don't listen, so don't build expectations. It's about communicating expectations clearly, but listening is a double edge sword in this way, I think. People often think that listening well to someone or being, which part of it is being nonjudgmental toward the speaker means that they have to agree with the speaker. And this is a misperception. Good listening is not equal to agreement. I can be nonjudgmental towards my speaker, which means giving them the freedom and autonomy to express what they think. their views which is nowadays it's a rare you know it's a rare ingredient while still holding a different attitude so being non-judgmental and a good listener does not mean that I need to agree so agreement is not a prerequisite for good listening

So it was a very recent conversation about a week ago. And we hold the opposite views. we talked before about the poorly listening experience I had with my family member. Now this was the exact opposite. He really listened well to me, even though he completely disagreed with what I was saying. This time I could think clearly, I was able to articulate my arguments in a way that was actually able to see also the other the opposite side. And when I was educating in favor of acts, I could also see the problem with acts. It allowed me to see the multiplicity within my attitude. which was the complete opposite of the one-sidedness that I expressed and felt during the argument in the previous segment. It was a great listener. He responded both nonverbal. He kept, he kept, I can't act. He asked questions that really show that he's trying to get my point of even though I know he disagrees. I felt that it doesn't judge me for this attitude. I asked him questions and it was easier for me to listen to him after he listened so well to me and I think he did a good job in listening back to him and the interesting thing is that although we talked about the topic that is so polarizing and we hold different editors on this topic we managed to shift to the next topic like you know it was so smooth because good listening was present when we talked about this divisive topic.

Yeah, happy to. This was about listening during disagreements. So I will give you one example of one of the study. It was a package for experiments that we went. Israel was the first country who implemented the vaccination cards during the pandemic. And this was a big issue because it divided the population to two. If you have the vaccination card, you can get to many places. And if you don't have there are many, many places, you remember how it was. And Israel, we were the first. There was a lot of divide around this topic. And during this time, we said, OK, isn't it perfect time to do a study about it? So students sign up for this study. They first wrote and indicated their editor. If they are raw or against or they hold a neutral position, they wrote a brief essay justifying their editor. And then we told them that a few days later, they're going to be conversing with a listener. And so for example, if you indicated that you were against vaccination cards, you will be prepared with a list of who supposedly was in favor. And then we had my research assistants in my lab, they go through a 15 to 20 hours of listening training as they do both good listening condition and normal listening, or we call a moderate listening condition. And so the speakers share their attitudes either randomly assigned to either with a listener who exhibited a good listening behavior such as their reflection, question asking, validation which goes something like, thank you Shankar for sharing this with me. I'm sure it wasn't easy for you. And the listeners reminded them that they held an opposite attitude

They didn't shift their editor, but they moved more towards the midpoint. So they did move towards the listeners' editor, but they still kept their own valence or positivity or negativity. Now the most interesting thing was that we measured their attitude extremity, the extent to each of their attitude is one sided before the conversation and after and the change was significantly greater in the high-quality listening condition, meaning that their attitude became less one sided. And we replicated this finding across for experiments, different topics. So this was a really interesting finding.

Yeah, I'm actually saying that if you listen well, you will get a bigger rope and there will be enough rope for both of you and a mutual rope. because you will see, you will be better able to see the needs and interest of your conversation, partner. People often think that if they will be more effective, if they dominate the conversation. So whoever speaks louder, it is very true. It's not true empirically, but it's also society-wise. If I speak louder, I'm dominating the conversation, and then I'm going to win. And that's another misconception. But it's not easy to tell a person, you need to let go. And if you let go, and really try to listen and understand your conversation partner who you probably disagree with, It will be your advantage, both of your advantages, but it's not an easy decision because we're so used to try to dominate the conversation and afraid that if we want dominate the conversation by speaking, we will lose. And then we end up by losing both of us.

I agree. I agree. So what I do with my students is I tell them a very simple task. Your goal for the upcoming week is to learn something new about a colleague of yours. One colleague each day. After each conversation, you need to reflect on your listening. What did you learn? What prevented you from listening well? What made you able to listen well? How can you improve the next time? So, the gist is, even forget all the behaviors. If you truly are interested in a person, you will be probably perceived as a good listener because you will do all this behavior, I thought like, think for example, think of a person you love. And this person comes and tells you, Shankar, I have something I want to share with you. You don't need me to tell you about what are the behaviors of good listening and the verbal and the nonverbal. You're interested in this person and your behaviors will reflect this interest. And this is, I think, is a decor. So now we can't be interested in every person. But I think the basic premise is if we adopt a mindset that every person and teach us something. Every person knows something that we don't. Every person has a story. If you're interested in this story, you will most likely be perceived as a good listener.

exactly. And this is why listening requires training because for the people who we love and are interested in, like you said, very easy, but the reality is that our life are filled with other people as well. So this is why listening requires training and a decision. to be a good listener. And it's really important, like we talked about being an unjudgmental towards the speaker. Also, it's really important to be an unjudgmental towards yourselves. When you realize that you might not be as good of a listener as you thought you are, most of us are not as good of listeners as we think we are. But even if you are a good listener, there are times when we cannot be. As we mentioned, listening is a resource that we don't always have.

So non-verbal behaviors are for example of facial expressions. nonverbal behavior such as nodding, such as open body posture, eye contact is very important. If the speaker sees that you are still paying attention to them, that you are still listening to them, you send them a metamessage. It's called the metamessage, not a direct message, but that you are important. You are the focus of my attention. I want to understand you. And this message relaxes them. They feel important. They feel validated. Now, listening also has a verbal component and this is something that is less known, because many things that listening is only silence. It's not. For example, part-trace. So when the speaker stops and doesn't have any more to add, or when you feel that you cannot encompass any more information, it's really important to Reflect or paraphrase or summarizing your own words or if you can. The closest you can to the speaker's words and it's really important to ask after words. Did I miss anything? Would you like to add anything? And this paraphrasing we found we find it in our experiment that is very powerful because it benefits both the listener and the speaker. It benefits the listener because the speaker tells you about point that you missed. And there are studies showing that even good listeners remember up to 50% of the content. So it's no one expects us to remember everything. So it helps the listener. Most importantly, it helps the speaker to feel understood what people usually do and say, yeah, Shankar, I understand you. That doesn't work. It's like me telling you, Shankar trust me. I can tell you to trust me. I need to show you that you could trust me. So by reflection, I show you I try to understand you. Another one is asking good questions that benefit the speaker's needs and interests. Very, very important. Good questions can deepen the conversation and help speakers bring from within them, inside that they didn't think that they about before validation, which is not, yeah, Shankara agree with you. Validation is especially a difficult conversation. Thank you for sharing with Shankara. I sure it wasn't easy for you. So it validates the effort that the speakers made and brings about closeness between the speaker and the user.

I think so last year in a class and there was a student who was very frustrated and she came to me at the end of the lesson and she she complained about you know about the tasks and about how they don't have enough time and the students have a variety of complaints and I didn't I didn't try to justify my session And I initially wanted to because I was tired. It was a four hour course. And then I decided to practice what I preach. And I did not defend myself. I asked a lot of questions. Okay, so I heard you're saying that this course is you feel that even though I reduced the number of article, this is still unfair. Why do you feel it? Do you have anything else at the end of the day? She shared with me that She was very frustrated because she had her boyfriend broke up with her. And she was very angry. And she took it out of many people around her. She knew she was upset about the breakup with the boyfriend. But she was actually hurting a lot because she was extrapolating the anger to the people around her family, even like professors, university friends. And she told me, like, after our conversation, it really helped me to relax, to unwind. And like, this made my day so good. Now, this made my day that I managed to really help her. And again, notice the power of listening. It's not easy. It's not easy. Every day is a challenge. But I don't want to believe that I'm that I'm making progress.

Thanks for very much for having me. You're a very good listener.

into so easy to listen to it and time just slow by, you know, listening is very requires a lot of effort. I didn't feel that I making any effort in listening to it because it was so interesting.