Selective Hearing

Who is responsible for understanding a message when it is being delivered, the communicator or the listener?

Obviously there is an onus on the communicator to be as clear as possible when delivering a message regardless of the medium. However when someone complains that there is a lack of communication does that necessarily mean that the one communicating has missed the mark, as is so often the accusation? I would suggest that in many if not most cases, where there is a proposed communication problem, the fault might be more with the hearer than the communicator.

People tend to hear what they are predetermined to hear, read into what they are predisposed to understand and see that which they have pre-programmed themselves to believe. In fact I would suggest that in many cases the communication problem exists because people don’t even listen to or look for messages being delivered and instead focus on what isn’t being said or read between the lines when they should be paying attention to the actual message.

Perhaps you have played the game telephone or rumour with a large group of people. The game begins with a simple message communicated from one person to another on down the line through many people until the last person tells the group the message that he or she has heard, which is often a distorted version of the original message. That is all in fun but what happens in real life is typically not.

On a number of occasions, usually long after the fact, I have discovered that something I said was reformulated in the mind of the hearer or hearers to mean something that was never in fact said or meant. Without any attempt at clarification, the reformulated message was then passed on to other people disconnected from the situation, who in turn reinterpreted and passed it on to others. In the end the actual message meaning and intent was long lost in the transmission and bore little if any resemblance to truth and yet was attributed to me, the communicator of the original message.

Some people and much of the media in our day would call that journalistic liberty but the Bible has a different name for it that is far less flattering and may be a good subject for another blog, but the point of this thought has to do with selective hearing. I believe that one of the primary problems of effective communication in our day isn’t the fault of the communicator but the listener. What is being said isn’t being heard because many people have already predetermined what they will and will not receive and believe. The mantra seems to be, “I know what I believe, don’t confuse me with the truth.”

I would suggest that for good measure, if you hear read or see something that doesn’t sit right with you that you put in the extra effort to further clarify what has in fact been communicated.