How to Listen like a Psychologist

By Ryan Smith

When asked how good they are at interpersonal communication, most people think that they’re either good or about average. But in fact, if we could look at the whole of human communication from a psychologist’s perspective, it would soon become obvious that most people are abysmally bad at communicating with others.

In our daily lives, we are easily able to perform complex and evolutionarily unnatural feats like calculus, reading, and interacting with computers. Yet when it comes to something as basic as interacting with other members of our own species, most of us communicate on a very low level, and this leads to loneliness and estrangement in our everyday lives. ...