PRECONCEIVED LISTENING: YOU HEARD THE WORDS, BUT YOU MISSED THE POINT

PRECONCEIVED LISTENING: YOU HEARD THE WORDS, BUT YOU MISSED THE POINT

There is a difference between listening to understand what someone is saying and listening while your brain is busy sorting everything they say into opinions you already have. A lot of people are not actually listening to conversations anymore. They are listening for the sentence they agree with, the sentence they disagree with, the word that irritates them, or the tiny detail they can grab onto while the entire point walks right past them waving. I call this preconceived listening.

Psychology already has several concepts that overlap with what I mean, although I actually like “preconceived listening” because it describes the behavior in plain English. Confirmation bias is the tendency to favor information that supports beliefs we already hold while overlooking or dismissing information that challenges them. Selective interpretation also comes into play when we filter information through beliefs and expectations we already have. Preconceived listening is not an established psychological term, but the process I am describing certainly is. I use it to describe what happens when someone enters a conversation with the conclusion already built, then interprets whatever is said through that conclusion instead of allowing the full message to arrive first.

Having an opinion is easy. Having an accurate opinion takes a little more work. It requires enough curiosity to consider information you did not already know, enough patience to hear the whole point, and enough flexibility to accept that several explanations or solutions might exist at the same time. There are many roads that lead to Rome, and the best road is STILL dependent upon the traveler and their preferences. One person wants the scenic route. Somebody else wants the interstate. Somebody else is apparently driving through Nebraska because they refused to ask for directions. They can all eventually arrive in Rome.

I saw a perfect example of preconceived listening when I came across a video about a man who proudly announced that he does not wash his hands after urinating. Credit to @dexexplains for stitching the original video and bringing attention to a much larger point about hygiene, personal responsibility, and how our choices affect the people around us. In his stitch, he brought up President James Garfield as an example of what humans once learned the hard way about germs and our ability to transfer bacteria to other people. The Garfield example is historically legitimate, although the precise story is a little more complicated than “dirty hands killed him.” Garfield was shot in 1881 and survived the initial shooting. Doctors repeatedly probed his wound with unwashed fingers and inadequately sterilized instruments while trying to locate the bullet. Infection followed, and Garfield died after weeks of illness.

Then I went into the comments, and Lord, the entire point had apparently packed its little suitcase and left the building. One person responded, “I understand what you’re saying but I don’t think that guy is anywhere near being a doctor. And it’s not 1880 anymore.” Nobody was suggesting this man was going to pee, skip the sink, walk into an operating room, and perform abdominal surgery before lunch. The comparison was about something much simpler: your hygiene does not affect only you once you interact with other human beings.

When you leave the bathroom without washing your hands, those hands touch doorknobs, counters, elevator buttons, shopping carts, phones, keyboards, restaurant surfaces, gas pumps, handrails, and possibly another person’s hand. Whatever you carried out of that bathroom now gets an opportunity to travel. You do not have to be a surgeon for your hands to transport microorganisms. Germs do not stop you at the bathroom door and ask for your medical credentials.

This is where preconceived listening becomes bigger than one man’s bathroom habits. When somebody immediately responds, “Well, he isn’t a doctor,” their brain has reduced the example to its literal details instead of identifying the principle behind it. Garfield was not brought into the conversation because the situations were identical. His story was an example of something humans eventually had to learn: hands can transfer microorganisms, and what one person carries can affect another person.

The same listening problem happens everywhere. Someone gives an example and people argue with the example instead of examining the idea it was used to illustrate. Someone explains one possible outcome and somebody responds as though they claimed it was the only outcome. Someone introduces information that complicates an existing belief and, instead of examining the information, people search for the quickest reason they can dismiss it. We end up debating side streets while the original conversation is five miles down the highway.

Preconceived listening also makes personal responsibility ridiculously easy to avoid. If every uncomfortable piece of information can be dismissed by finding one technical difference, we never have to examine our own behavior. We can always find ourselves an escape hatch. “That situation was different.” “That doesn’t apply to me.” “Nobody ever got sick when I did it.” “I’ve always done it this way.” Wonderful. Bacteria remain deeply unimpressed by your personal testimony.

We have also turned self-awareness into something that sometimes sounds far more mystical than it needs to be. Self-awareness can involve understanding your thoughts, emotions, patterns, and behavior, but it also includes recognizing that you exist in an environment with other people and your behavior affects that environment. You are not the only character loaded into the game. It includes how you communicate, what you leave behind, how you treat shared spaces, and recognizing when your convenience becomes somebody else’s problem. Yes, apparently, it also includes washing your damn hands after you pee.

There is another piece to this that I think we desperately need to relearn: possibility does not threaten opinion. You can believe something and still consider another explanation. You can have a preference and understand why somebody chooses differently. You can hear new information without immediately deciding whether it belongs on Team Me or Team Them. You can even discover that part of what you believed was incomplete without having an identity crisis before breakfast.

An opinion should be the result of thinking, not the starting requirement for it. Gather information before deciding what it means. Consider more than one possible outcome. Ask yourself what somebody is actually trying to communicate before responding to the easiest sentence to attack. Sometimes the example is not the argument; it is simply the vehicle carrying the argument, and you have to let the whole vehicle arrive before you start unloading it.

We do not need everybody thinking alike because, good grief, that would be boring. We need people capable of hearing an idea without immediately forcing it through whatever conclusion they arrived with. We need enough mental room to say, “I hadn’t considered that possibility,” investigate it, and then decide what we think. You do not have to take the same road as everybody else, and you do not even have to like their route. Just make sure you understand where they were trying to go before announcing they took the wrong turn.

And while you’re figuring all of that out, wash your damn hands. Seriously, you just peed.

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