People on Autopilot

Most everyday behaviour is automatic.

People repeat familiar phrases, ask questions without being ready to hear the answer, and defend an opinion that formed before the arguments did. This does not make them machines and does not mean they lack intelligence. Conscious thinking is simply expensive and does not run all the time.

Intelligence, likewise, cannot be neatly divided into “above” and “below average” to produce a guide for talking to people. Abilities are multidimensional. Someone may read difficult text badly and understand machinery, people or space very well.

The main practical consequence is simpler: a message has to take account of its addressee.

You cannot assume a person understood merely because you said it. What helps:

• clear language;
• concrete examples;
• checking understanding;
• written confirmation;
• asking them to restate the decision;
• splitting a difficult conversation into parts.

An opinion does not deserve contempt just because it is called an opinion. There are areas where preference and judgement are unavoidable. But a claim about a fact requires grounds.

The phrase “that’s what I think” can be the start of a conversation rather than its end. The next question is:

What is that based on?

Arguing is not always pointless either. An argument helps test the reasoning, bring out definitions and show listeners an alternative. It becomes barren when the participants are defending status rather than examining the question.

You do not have to convince everyone. Sometimes it is enough to state your position, check the facts and leave with the rest of your evening intact.

You can test this at any meeting where everything is “clear to everyone”. Just ask one participant to say in his own words what he is doing before Friday. Half the time it turns out the task was understood more broadly, more narrowly or quite differently, and the person was not pretending: he really did think he had understood. Listening is built for economy — meaning is filled in from expectations rather than from what was said, and the divergence surfaces in the result.

Hence an unpleasant conclusion for the speaker. Responsibility for understanding is distributed unevenly: the listener failed to understand, but the consequences go to whoever needs the result. So the question “did I explain that clearly?” is more practical than “is everything clear to you?” — the answer to the second is yes, essentially always.