Kate Murphy's You're Not Listening, Applied to a Night With Friends

How well do people listen? Poorly and rarely, according to journalist Kate Murphy, who spent the better part of two years reading the academic literature before writing You’re Not Listening (Celadon Books, published January 7, 2020). Nobody has a single clean statistic for it. What she offers is an argument backed by interviews and research: listening is a demanding skill, almost nobody practices it, and the people closest to us often get the least of it.

This post covers what I could verify from her book and reviews, then turns it into a short set of things to try the next time a few friends get together.

What does Kate Murphy actually claim about listening?

Murphy is a New York Times contributor, and in the introduction (I read the publisher’s free sample) she describes her method: roughly two years in the research on how hearing works and how listening affects people, plus hundreds of hours of interviews with spies, priests, psychotherapists, bartenders, hostage negotiators, hairdressers, air traffic controllers, radio producers and focus group moderators.

Her starting complaint is about culture. She notes that schools run debate teams and rhetoric courses but rarely teach careful listening, and that you can earn a doctorate in speech communication or join Toastmasters, yet there is no comparable degree or club for listening. She quotes Calvin Coolidge, “No man ever listened himself out of a job,” and Epictetus, who said we have one tongue and two ears so that we may hear twice as much as we speak.

Kirkus Reviews, which called the book “a valuable corrective for a talkative culture,” says Murphy reports that academic research on listening is thinner than research on talking. It also summarizes one of her observations: assuming we already know what someone is going to say makes us least attentive to the people closest to us, such as spouses, children and friends.

A short definition worth keeping: listening, in Murphy’s account, is an active skill of paying attention to how someone speaks, what they do while speaking and how it lands in you, which is more than waiting out their turn.

Why do we drift while a friend is talking?

The book has a chapter on the speech-thought differential, the gap between how quickly people talk and how quickly they think. In an interview on the Celadon Books site, Murphy says that gap leaves a listener with spare capacity, and that it tends to get spent on what she calls mental side trips: worrying about spinach in your teeth, remembering errands, judging the speaker’s appearance, or rehearsing your own reply.

The rehearsed reply is the one to watch on a night with friends. Murphy compares planning your response while the other person talks to returning a tennis serve without watching the ball. The reply may be clever. It may also answer a question that was never asked.

The same interview offers three small habits: take in everything the other person says and then pause before you answer; if you are stuck, it is acceptable to say you do not know what to say; and “I’d like to think about that” shows respect while buying time.

Does it matter that friends listen to each other?

Murphy argues it does, and she ties it to loneliness. In the introduction she cites a 2018 survey of twenty thousand Americans in which, by her account, almost half said they lacked meaningful in-person social interactions, such as an extended conversation with a friend, on a daily basis. I read this in her sample; I did not open the underlying survey report, so treat the exact wording as hers. She also points out that connection runs both ways: each person has to listen and latch onto what the other said.

A caution on scope. This is a popular-science book by a journalist, and its strongest material is reported detail and synthesis, not new experiments. I could read only the publisher’s sample, the contents page and secondary coverage, not the whole text, so everything below is a practical reading of her ideas and not a protocol she wrote.

What can you do on a night with friends so people are actually heard?

Five practices that follow from the points above, in the order they usually matter:

1. Put phones in a pile before anyone sits down. Murphy’s complaint about phones in conversation is part of why she wrote the book. A pile makes the rule a shared one, so nobody has to be the person who asks.
2. Wait one beat before replying. This is her pause. It feels long to the person doing it and almost unnoticeable to everyone else.
3. Ask a follow-up before changing the subject. Her chapter title, “Supporting, Not Shifting, the Conversation,” points the same way. If a friend mentions a new job, the next sentence should be about the job, not about yours.
4. Let a silence run. In the Celadon interview she says insights often arrive when you stop talking and leave room. Count to five before you fill a gap.
5. Close with one return question. Near the end of the night, each person asks someone else about something they said earlier. It proves the earlier part of the evening was heard, and it gives the quiet person a second chance to be asked.

If conversations at your table usually turn into three people taking turns while two watch, try the “rounds” format from the FAQ below.

What makes this hard to keep up?

The practices are simple, and that is the trouble. They work when everyone is at the table, early enough that attention is still available. Friend groups that meet on a regular day, at a set time, and arrive on time have a head start, which is one reason standing plans tend to outlast one-off invitations. The listening has to start from somewhere, and the “turning toward” moves described in Gottman’s bids for connection are a good small-scale rehearsal: answer a friend’s casual comment as though it matters.

If a follow-up question feels like prying, the research by Kardas, Kumar and Epley on how deep conversations with friends go found that people expect those talks to be more awkward than they turn out to be. Try the question on someone safe first.

How will you know it worked?

Skip scoring. Check afterward whether, the next day, you can say what each person at the table was worried about or excited about. If you can name them all, you listened. If you can only name your own, you were probably rehearsing replies. Murphy writes in her introduction that even she, a professional listener, can fall short.