We've all done it, whether we want to or not. It probably happened several times yesterday and you didn't even realize it. At some point in your day (unless you were completely alone), you had an interaction with someone else. You may have thought you understood exactly what that person said or meant. Chances are, you were not entirely correct.
This article in the Atlantic helps explain why. Here is the opening:
In her new book No One Understands You and What To Do About It, Heidi Grant Halvorson tells readers a story about her friend, Tim. When Tim started a new job as a manager, one of his top priorities was communicating to his team that he valued each member’s input. So at team meetings, as each member spoke up about whatever project they were working on, Tim made sure he put on his “active-listening face” to signal that he cared about what each person was saying.
But after meeting with him a few times, Tim’s team got a very different message from the one he intended to send. “After a few weeks of meetings,” Halvorson explains, “one team member finally summoned up the courage to ask him the question that had been on everyone’s mind.” That question was: “Tim, are you angry with us right now?” When Tim explained that he wasn’t at all angry—that he was just putting on his “active-listening face”—his colleague gently explained that his active-listening face looked a lot like his angry face.
To Halvorson, a social psychologist at Columbia Business School who has extensively researched how people perceive one another, Tim’s story captures one of the primary problems of being a human being: Try though you might to come across in a certain way to others, people often perceive you in an altogether different way.
One person may think, for example, that by offering help to a colleague, she is coming across as generous. But her colleague may interpret her offer as a lack of faith in his abilities. Just as he misunderstands her, she misunderstands him: She offered him help because she thought he was overworked and stressed. He has, after all, been showing up early to work and going home late every day. But that’s not why he’s keeping strange hours; he just works best when the office is less crowded.
The article continues by discussing how often we are not understood even by those we think know us best!
Most of the time, Halvorson says, people don’t realize they are not coming across the way they think they are. “If I ask you,” Halvorson told me, “about how you see yourself—what traits you would say describe you—and I ask someone who knows you well to list your traits, the correlation between what you say and what your friend says will be somewhere between 0.2 and 0.5. There’s a big gap between how other people see us and how we see ourselves.”
This gap arises, as Halvorson explains in her book, from some quirks of human psychology. First, most people suffer from what psychologists call “the transparency illusion”—the belief that what they feel, desire, and intend is crystal clear to others, even though they have done very little to communicate clearly what is going on inside their minds.
Because the perceived assume they are transparent, they might not spend the time or effort to be as clear and forthcoming about their intentions or emotional states as they could be, giving the perceiver very little information with which to make an accurate judgment.
In summary, we aren't as clear with others as we think we are. Without full clarity, others will take mental shortcuts to fill in the gaps. Many of these shortcuts can be inaccurate or wildly wrong, but we are all so busy that we just don't have enough focus or energy to make the full commitment necessary to interpret the situation correctly!
There is an old adage that says that there can never be too much communication. Perhaps some of the reason why that is true is because there are so many mistakes made in the original communication that subsequent repetition helps iron out the errors!
Here is the link to the full article: Mixed Signals: Why People Misunderstand Each Other - The Atlantic
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