Learning How to Listen Is a Skill That Is Absolutely Unbeatable

my question is what does this uh listening posture look like over time um and with your knowledge of personal psychology i think we can all say we've somewhere encountered one of those relationships where one person does all the work and the other person can't engage in this even if they have been listened to over and over and over again but at our society level um if that does happen now let's try it i totally agree with you let's let's listen um if we wind up in this sometimes it's always listening and it never turns into

listening back um right what what does that look like over time you do test for reciprocity so children for example when children are investigating play potential play partners on the playground they'll they'll come up to a child let's assume a child of roughly the same age because that would be the most common situation maybe we're talking about kids who are four or five years old and they'll throw out a play gesture that's rather simple so maybe that a two-year-old could manage and then if the person manages a proper response then they throw it a little

more sophisticated gesture and if the person responds appropriately then they ratchet up to just above their developmental level and then they play like bad at that level and that'll make them friends and so partly what they're testing for there continually is whether there's something approximating reciprocal altruism right it's it's tit-for-tat in the positive sense and i would say that well we know there's actually a literature on this which is quite interesting this is also something very practical to know and i'll get to another practicality here so there have been psychologists who've done empirical investigations into

what predicts the longevity of a relationship and so here's one experiment that was conducted multiple times and i believe this is very reliable data so imagine you have the two partners in a marriage each rate the number of encounters they have with their other partner a day it's kind of an arbitrary and subjective measure but it doesn't matter you might say well i talked to my wife eight times today we had eight different interactions and then you'd say well did you rate those for whether they're positive or negative then you can calculate a ratio of

positive to negative and then you can use the ratio to predict the longevity of the relationship and the data show that if the relationship interactions fall below five positive to one negative then the relationship deteriorates and is generally doomed and so and so five to one that's preponderance of positive interactions but we're wired so that negative interactions hurt us more than positive interactions help us if they are of the same magnitude so for example people will work harder to avoid a loss of five dollars than they will to attain a gain of five dollars and

you might say well why is that and the answer is you can be absolutely dead but there's only so happy you can be and so it's better to err on the side of conservatism in the domain of negative emotion and so but interestingly enough um if the interactions rise so that they exceed 11 positive to one negative the relationship also deteriorates and so what that suggests is that there's some it's kind of like smiles with teeth right you want a fair bit of positive emotion and reflection from your partner but you don't want them to

be a naive dependent pushover who's afraid to stand up for themselves and so you want to you know because you're a nasty horrible human being and now and then you poke your partner just to see if there's anything there because that's what you're like and if you find out there isn't you'll run roughshod over them and you think you won't but you will especially if they're very good at implicitly encouraging that which dependent people sometimes are so so you do assess for reciprocity and the basic rule is you want approximately equal reciprocity in relationships that

you want to maintain now maybe you know you have enough additional resource to be the giver more often than receiver in some relationships but i don't even think that really works that well with children you know i mean you obviously have to take care of them but it's not like they don't deliver the goods to you if you have a good relationship with them and and you want to you want to some degree to enforce that reciprocity now you might say well what happens in relationships where that's impossible and well i give you a practical

piece of a suggestion on that front and this is another thing you can do in your own household this is so useful man if you get good at doing this your life will get so much better you can't believe it is watch the people around you and whenever they do anything that you would like to see repeated on a regular basis tell them exactly what they did in detail with you know be positive about it obviously and and just indicate that you noticed and because i saw this when i was grading student essays you know

and so i taught this seminar for a long time and i was trying to teach kids how to write they were in their fourth year of university in the honors psych program you'd think they'd bloody well already know how to write but they didn't and so i'd have them write a four page essay on a given topic and then they had to rewrite that to a six page essay and then they had to rewrite that to an age eight page essay and the first essay i graded i it was only five percent of their grade

and i told them i'm going to cut you into ribbons but it doesn't matter because it's you know five percent of your grade and so they could tolerate that and generally by the third essay they had written the best thing they'd ever written in their life and they learned so fast it was unbelievable but one of the things i noticed was that they did a little testing with the first essay they'd hand in something was just like god formulaic boring they weren't in it at all you know there was nothing of the person in there

there was no thought there was just the kind of cycle babble that they learned especially if they were in faculties of education and and it was dry and dull and and everything about it was wrong and so those are hard to grade right what's wrong with my essay well the words aren't right the phrases they're not so good they're not organized well into sentences the sentences aren't sequenced well in the paragraphs the peregrines paragraphs don't make a coherent argument and the entire thing is empty but other than that no problem was often easier just to

rewrite those essays than to grade them you know so in any case though one of the things i did learn was that even in an essay like that there was usually like one sentence or two sentences buried on like page three that was an actual thought and reasonably clearly stated and somewhat gripping you know it was like the person popped out from all the background rubbish and said well what about what about this and if you saw that and checked it and said hey you hit the mark right there the next essay would be like

two-thirds that and that was really fun to see and then maybe by the third essay maybe it was all like that and then they were really thrilled it's like wow i wrote this you know and sort of the culmination well it was a fourth year seminar it was the culmination of their their career as a psychology undergraduate so that was great fun but you can do that in your own household if if if if the envious part of you isn't jealous of the revelation of the goodness of the person and so here's the opposite tack

if you want to do this so imagine that you're a man who's managed to attract a mate and he believes he's punched above his weight so this woman is more attractive let's say more vivacious more desirable than he deserves so that's going to grate on his soul a fair bit right partly because her shining casts a dim light on his lack of utility let's say and so you can imagine someone like that being prone to jealousy for obvious reasons and so the best tact to manage in a situation like that if you're that man is

to wait till your wife dresses herself up in a particularly attractive manner and then either fail to notice by occupying yourself with something trivial while she's attempting to gain your attention or by criticizing her directly for what she's just managed to do and if you do that 50 times let's say you can be sure that she'll never reveal her attractiveness to anyone else for the rest of her life including you and you'll get exactly what you deserved so that's the opposite of watching people carefully now i learned this in part from skinner b.f skinner the

famous animal behaviorist because he was very he used all sorts of reinforcement contingencies to shape animal behavior and skinner was unbelievably good at this he trained pigeons in world war ii to guide missiles by pecking at photographs so they could map the photographs onto the missile trajectory viewing the territory underneath and peck accurately enough to guide the missile to its destination that was discontinued as the technology for guided missiles developed but skinner could do that and you know we think pigeons well they're not that bright it's like they're smarter than you think pigeons that's why

they can live in cities that's not easy for a bird to pull off you know it's not their natural habitat and so but skinner although he would use punishment technically speaking which is the the application of a certain amount of pain or threat which is the use of anxiety but what he believed was most effective was reward but it required a tremendous amount of attention so for example if skinner was trying to train a rat to climb up a little ladder and then across the ladder and then maybe do a pirouette and come down which

he could do with no problem he'd wait he'd just watch the rat and then when it get close to the ladder he'd give it a food pallet now his rats were starved by the way down to three quarters of their normal body weight so they were pretty eager to work for food it's not something you necessarily saw in the methodology section of the papers but um well and that's not a critique of skinner it's just an indication of how simplification takes place in laboratory experiments but in any case he'd wait for the rat to get

near the ladder and give it a food pellet and soon the rat would be hanging around the ladder quite a lot and then now and then just more or less randomly the rat would put a paw up on the ladders food pallet well then the rat would hang around the bottom of the ladder with pop well if he did that continually through observation he could get the rat to do pretty much anything that you could imagine a rat could do and then maybe some things you couldn't imagine and this isn't a manipulative technique by the

way although it can be used that way it's not effective unless you do it with a certain degree of wisdom you want to think well what do you want your house how about peace tranquility happiness and humor something like that it's not a bad first pass approximation and you've got to get that in your head it's like do you want that or do you want the delights of endless martyrdom because you have to make a choice and you might think i wouldn't pick martyrdom it's like really really you wouldn't eh you'd pick peace and happiness

and humor and so everywhere you go that's all you're ever surrounded with it's like highly on highly improbable so don't be so sure you're aiming up but if you can orient yourself in that direction and then and carefully and and knowing full well what the hellish alternative is because you need to know that then you can watch and see well when when is this manifesting itself in the people around me and then you can tell them in detail i noticed son i noticed today we're having a discussion at dinner you know and you made a

spectacularly witty remark right at the right time and it was provocative but not annoying and so good work and then the kid thinks oh my god he noticed and then he's like twice as funny the next day and maybe not in some unbearable manner and that really works it really works but like i said you have to quell the envy that would otherwise beset you and you have to want to aim up and then you have to not be jealous of the other person's goodness and you have to be extremely attentive but man as a

transformation technique even in extraordinarily difficult relationships which goes back to your point there isn't anything i know of that's more effective and i've been working with moderate democrats in the united states recently and with a number of republicans and suggesting that to the democrats that when the republicans do something that isn't absolutely malevolent and stupid in your opinion you might want to just say something like that's not as bad as it could have been you know something at least and the same for the republicans in relationship to the democrats and that because it's also one

of the ways that you can reduce the tit for tap proclivity right you want to give the devil as due especially when you're not actually talking to the devil but just the person who's sitting across you let's say in the house it's an unbelie and people that's another issue i mean if you want people to appreciate having you around learning how to listen that is that is a skill that is absolutely unbeatable and this this uh technique of summarizing to their satisfaction that works like a charm and it's not you know you might be a

little awkward when you first try it and might feel a little manipulative because you're not that good at it but if you get if you get expert at it it's and you have the greatest conversations with everyone you know i had people in my clinical practice who were extraordinarily impaired intellectually and suffering from all sorts of assorted pathologies in addition to that and if i was listening to them properly they were as fascinating as anybody i had on the say more able and competent end of the spectrum and you learn so much because there is

nothing that people won't tell you if you listen it is absolutely amazing what people will tell you and so quickly they'll reveal things they didn't even know about themselves and they need to know those things often they've been hidden for years it's so rewarding and then this this use of attentive reward that's also it's it's it's a it's it's fun in a game-like sense once you learn to play it because you're watching you think i'll just wait this person's going to do something good sooner or later it's like pat good work and people are so

thrilled that that little manifestation of goodness in their heart that managed to sneak out past their cynicism and boredom was recognized they're so what is it what is it it it it restores their faith in what's good inside them it really does it's unbelievably powerful and so that can work if you're if you're embroiled in a difficult relationship you know and you can't escape easily or maybe you can't escape on moral grounds that listening that's that helps a lot you might have to listen a lot but that use of judicious reward man that's a powerful

technique