Discover the rewards of discussing "deep things"
- sciart0
- Feb 7
- 1 min read
Excerpt: One common problem with conversations is that we don’t understand one another as well as we think we do. Writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2011, five scholars showed that even among friends and spouses, people believe they understand the intended meaning of what others say 85 percent of the time, whereas the true figure for the reliability of their comprehension is 44 percent.
As the researchers note, a query as innocent as “What have you been up to?” could convey genuine interest, annoyance at the other person’s lateness, or suspicion about what they’ve been doing.
This instability of meaning might be because of tonal ambiguity or because people actually don’t listen to one another well enough. In one recent experiment in which subjects were assigned the task of getting to know someone, a conversational partner was in fact not listening to the other person for 24 percent of the interaction.