our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed People might be taking the advice of "be a good listener" a little too far. Mind and BehaviorEmotional IntelligenceSocial PsychologyCommunication SkillsCuriosity A while back, I was at a party in London where a friend introduced me to an actress who had just been in a big theater production. I was excited to talk with her.
Throughout our conversation, she asked brilliant questions, and I enjoyed answering them. She was great at making people feel seen and important. But whenever I asked her something back, with real curiosity about her life, she gave a brief, polite answer and turned the spotlight back on me: “But enough about me, tell me more about you.” You’re probably expecting me to say this made me like her even more.
As the conversation went on, though, I started to feel uneasy. She listened well, yet I felt like I was giving a monologue to a great interviewer. By the end, she knew a lot about me, and I knew barely anything about her.
On the way home, I kept replaying the conversation, and I realized I might have been doing the exact same thing to other people. I had always been someone who listened more, talked less, and asked a lot of questions. My conversations often felt slightly unbalanced, but I thought I was doing the right thing.
I had grown up reading books like _How to Win Friends and Influence People_, and the main advice in all of them was to listen more than you speak and make the other person feel important. > Somewhere along the way, “be a good listener” turned into “don't say too much.” Think about it: If your goal was to get someone to like you, how much of the conversation would you spend speaking? When researchers asked people this question, most said less than half the time, around 41% to 45%. When the goal changed to seeming interesting, the answers flipped to more than half.
Most of us seem to believe we’re facing a trade-off: You can be liked, or you can be interesting. It’s the logic behind the popular advice, “It is better to be interested than interesting.” Somewhere along the way, “be a good listener” turned into “don’t say too much.” In a 2022 study, Quinn Hirschi and her colleagues put the trade-off to the test by randomly assigning people to talk for anywhere from 30% to 70% of a conversation with a stranger. Contrary to what people had predicted, the researchers reported that the more participants spoke, the more their conversation partners liked them.
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