The People We Don’t Listen To
There was a great article in the New York Times a few weeks ago about the closeness-communication bias: “The closer we feel toward someone, the less likely we are to listen carefully to them.”
It’s the auditory equivalent of tuning out your surroundings:
Once you know people well enough to feel close, there’s an unconscious tendency to tune them out because you think you already know what they are going to say. It’s kind of like when you’ve traveled a certain route several times and no longer notice signposts and scenery.
Which means that you miss major clues that your friends and family are giving you, while noticing more during a random interaction with a stranger in the elevator.
The studies, of course, found that we believe the opposite: that we better understand the people we love. But all proof is to the contrary.
Excuse me, I need to go listen to Josh.
7 comments
Interesting, and a good reminder to all of us.
I have to tune my husband out – I’m his sounding board for all of his internal anxiety. If I listened to everything he said, I would be exhausted. Also…he’s pretty predictable. I listen just enough to have answers for the quiz he gives when he’s decided I’m not listening to him. 😀
(Cough) my husband does this to me…
In the same boat with above commenters…
We call this “Yes, dear syndrome” in our house!
I suffer from this all the time. My husband ignores me, then asks me a question about something I’ve just told him! Just recently I’ve started calling him out. I’ve seen it too with our in-laws. For years we would tell them things, and they would ignore us. But if one of their doctors said something, or even one of the offspring who lived overseas, that was different. It is designed to drive us all crazy!
And so I’m now going to be extra careful I don’t do it too. Or that I do it less, at least. Thanks for the reminder.
Fascinating! And, I suspect, true. I’m going to be more aware of when I start to tune out with my close ones.