While recently out of town, I picked up a copy of the local newspaper, the Post and Courier, and came across a column by Solomon Stevens, “3 New Year’s Tips for More Productive Conversations.”
The column piqued my interest and reminded me of the famous line quoted by Paul Newman in the movie Cool Hand Luke. While lying in a ditch after being beaten for his being confrontational to the chain gang guard, he sarcastically says, “what we’ve got here…is a failure to communicate.”
Failures to communicate abound these days. Whether it is because of a cultural faux pas, a generational misunderstanding, a lack of listening or just gross social naïveté, there are many reasons for our communication missteps.
As a forensic, I have seen a failure to communicate result in additional criminal charges and longer prison sentences. Recently, I saw a defendant who was both physically and verbally confrontational with his arresting officers. It did not help that he had a head injury and wasn’t in control of his impulsivity. The officers did not consider the defendant’s cognitive impairment and couldn’t, wouldn’t and shouldn’t excuse his behavior. But tempers flared, and rational discourse was not a part of the arrest protocol.
This is not an indictment of the police. This is not an excuse for inappropriate civil behavior. However, whether talking in public on a social media platform or when expressing our political beliefs in private conversations, we all share responsibility for our expression of discontent. Ill-tempered expressions of angry feelings and incivility are inexcusable regardless of the topic or venue.
How often do we shout our answers in opposition to what someone else has said? As the article by Stevens pointed out, our disagreements have become more provoking and seem to be taking on an angry tone. What’s behind the polarization? To me it looks like civility is on the decline. What’s your take?
On the bright side, Zara Abrams, in a November 2023 article in the Monitor (an American Psychological Association journal), found that “Conversations hold immense power. They help us form new connections and deepen existing ones.”
Mismatched goals prevent communications and foster arguments.
Are we being racially insensitive? Gender biased? Practicing ageism?
Could it be that we have something to prove? Are we intolerant because we are stressed? When given a forum to express ourselves, do we turn a simple disagreement into an excuse to unleash our frustrations?
Not all conversations are where the people are at odds with each other. Hopefully, if we are talking with our neighbor, family member, friend, or co-worker, then we are sharing a common interest or topic of agreement. But our current social climate shows that if we are at odds with our fellow conversationalist, look out!
I was at a restaurant and the television at the bar was playing a sports program. When I asked if they could turn on a popular news show instead, the bartender told me that news was not allowed due to too many fights, so it was sports or nothing at all!
Dr. Michael Yeomans, an assistant professor of strategy and organizational behavior at Imperial College London, along with Dr. Alison Wood Brooks, of Harvard Business School, developed an approach to analyze conversations called the “conversational circumplex.” They designed it as a way of conceptualizing the competing goals that motivate and shape conversations. In their article in the Current Opinion in Psychology, Vol. 44, 2022, they found not unexpectedly “Mismatched goals are another reason people may avoid conversations — or struggle to hold effective ones. People use conversations for a number of reasons — for example, to impress, flatter, help, hurt, persuade, understand, or deceive.”
Although there may be more than two people in the conversation at any one time, let’s deal with just two as an example for this discussion for the time being.
The communication process can be separated into multiple parts: the teller, the listener, the process and our state of mind. Communication seems simple enough, but if we look “beneath the hood” there is more than meets the eye or ear.
The person offering their opinion isn’t always respectful of their listener. Although their disrespect may be inexcusable, it is understandable.
We have three brains.
As humans, we have a brain that can be divided into three parts.
The neocortex is one part. Although it is the area responsible for our rational thought and logic would suggest because it is the largest part of our brain, it should be in charge of our behavior, but unfortunately “it isn’t necessarily so.”
Another part of the brain is the limbic brain, the part which controls our emotions. This is the part we can but do not necessarily control very well, especially in the heat of an argument.
The third brain is known as the reptilian brain, which is the oldest part and is responsible for our instincts and survival. Thank G-d we have this part as it helped us during our evolution to survive, but it sometimes misinterprets verbal communications or physical posturing (non-verbal angry faces or raised arms) as a physical threat. Sometimes the physical posturing reflects the other person’s agitation, excitement or non-verbal emphasis of their point. But our reptilian brain acts impulsively and takes the gesture as a threat.
Mindful communication, the use of self-control when agreeing or disagreeing with others is when we use all three parts of our brain in the communication process.
For some this mindfulness of how and what we communicate is too complex or too much wasted effort. And if you are reading this it means you’re human, and it means you’ve had a few occasions when someone has really ticked you off and your limbic and reptilian brain took center stage. Now you know why you acted that way. But don’t feel alone, if you feel embarrassed or challenged.
After consulting with clients for 40+ years, I know that we have all had regrettable limbic and or reptilian episodes. But look at it this way. Now that you know, you can now react with discretion rather than impulse.
Waiting to pounce
The listener in our example of miscommunication may not really be listening so much as waiting for just the right moment to pounce. And the process can be a grudge match about issues unrelated to the topic at hand or a misguided sense of threat (remember the reptilian brain is ever vigilant).
This is where Active Listening helps. While the other person is talking, instead of waiting for them to take a breath so you can notice one of their weaker points, listen and when they have paused, don’t try to beat them to their next sentence, ask them if they’re finished. That gives them a chance to consider and compose themselves and gives you the opportunity to show respect for what they had to say. If they agree that they made their point, take a mindful breath, to disengage your reptilian brain, engage your neocortex and say back what you think you heard verbatim, without any editorial comment. Ask them if you heard them correctly, then before launching into your defense of your position and telling them how they do not know what they’re talking about, consider these three possibilities.
Do they want to be heard? Consider that they may not be asking for your critical thinking skills.
Or do they want to be helped? Maybe they want your thoughts and feelings.
Or do they want to be (metaphorically) hugged and nurtured because of their dilemma?
Research by Alison Wood Brooks in her article Management Science, Vol. 61, No. 6, 2015 has shown that seeking advice actually boosts perceptions of competence. She found “sometimes goals conflict within a person: For example, I may want to seek advice but avoid doing so for fear of looking incompetent. Goals can also conflict interpersonally: I want to give honest feedback during a company meeting, but my bosses do not want their ideas criticized in public. She goes on to say, “A lot of our conversations are about coordinating joint actions, which are negotiations of one kind or another.”
In an ideal communication with someone you care about or want to engage with in order to negotiate, convince or dissuade from their current path it takes some negotiation and nuance. Obviously, in a public debate or when with someone who is trying to direct a group, timing is everything. Debate and discourse have their place. Where you are being threatened by the speaker’s behavior, safety should be your primary objective.
As Maya Angelou said so profoundly- “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
If the speaker says “you have it all wrong” consider the wildly unpopular possibility that they may be right! It could be that we have been in one of those social network “silos” and have not heard the rest of the story. Remember, news networks are selling news, and they know our attention spans are limited so they only give us ten seconds on any topic. If you’ve been listening to the same twenty seconds twenty times, it does not mean you have 400 seconds of information, you still only have 20 seconds worth, and that’s far too little to know all there is on any topic.
Sun Tzu, a Chinese general and military strategist said it best “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.”
Want to improve your conversations? Asking follow-up questions improves conversation quality. Yeomans, Brooks, social psychologist Dr. Julia Minson, an associate professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and their colleagues in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 113, No. 3, 2017 found “Questions make you more likable, but the key is showing that you’re listening.”
But my own experience suggests that questions can also be overused and act as an obstacle. Consider asking questions that will allow the speaker to dig deeper with their own thoughts and feelings, not use them as a defensive tactic to withdraw from the conversation.
Thalia Wheatley, Dr. Emma Templeton, and their colleagues published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 119, No. 4, 2022. They found “Effective listening tends to lead to short gaps during conversations, which is linked to higher satisfaction among participants, according to research they found that between both friends and strangers, short pauses between speakers are linked with more feelings of connectedness. Long pauses between strangers are awkward, but between friends, they can actually signal connectedness — for instance, if one friend shares something personal and the other takes a moment to reflect before answering.”
There is an art to communication. We can listen, then pause and reflect. Ask questions. Share your thoughts and if in disagreement, resist making the disagreement about the other person’s character.
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Questions? Suggestions? Send me an email at psychology@americanisraelite.com. Be well. See you here next month.
