One of the most pernicious concepts widely circulated about listening is in the otherwise admirable book Blink. Malcolm Gladwell introduces the idea of what he calls ‘thin-slicing’ as a way of talking about how a very small sample can stand for a whole host of evidence under specific circumstances and conditions. Unfortunately, he equates the thin-slicing idea with the expert’s ability to instantly size up, for example, an ancient statue as real or fake because of a myriad clues unconsciously weighed, evaluated, and sorted.

Here is what Gladwell wrote:

In September of 1983, an art dealer by the name of Gianfranco Becchina approached the J. Paul Getty Museum in California. He had in his possession, he said, a marble statue dating from the sixth century b.c. It was what is known as a kouros — a sculpture of a nude male youth standing with his left leg forward and his arms at his side. There are only about two hundred kouroi in existence, and most have been recovered badly damaged . . . . But this one was almost perfectly preserved . . . . It was an extraordinary find. Becchina’s asking price was just under $10 million.  The Getty moved cautiously. It . . . began a thorough investigation. . . .A geologist from the University of California. . .spent two days examining the surface of the statue with a high-resolution stereomicroscope . . . . [He]concluded . . . the statue was old. It wasn’t some contemporary fake . . . .The kouros, however, had a problem. It didn’t look right. The first to point this out was an Italian art historian named Federico Zeri . . . . He found himself staring at the sculpture’s fingernails. In a way he couldn’t immediately articulate, they seemed wrong to him. Other experts weighed in, and the statue was finally judged a fake. The Getty was embarrassed, and the art world has a great story to tell.

What does this have to do with listening? The idea has lodged in the public mind that somehow we can all be expert thin-slicers based on a quick look, a brief listen, a glancing moment of attention. But Gladwell has confused our ability to make snap (because unconscious) nonverbal judgments about the intent of people and the danger quotient of situations we’re thrown in with an expert’s ability, when her learning is profound, to size up something quickly. The result has been that too many people now say, “Just let me thin-slice this.”

The only thing we’re doing there is getting a quick read on our impression of the other person’s intent. We are pretty good at it, but we can certainly be wrong, and it is most emphatically not the same as expertise in a field like art history.  They’re two completely different activities.

The former is almost entirely unconscious and instant, whereas the latter is primarily conscious but drawing on an unconscious sifting of the physical evidence brought to the conscious mind.  And it often is a slow process, where something niggles at the back of the mind for days before the expert is able to become fully aware of what is going on. That is what in fact happens to several of the experts in Gladwell’s fake masterpiece story.  They take weeks to figure out why the statue doesn’t seem real to them or to piece together their analysis, impressions, and unconscious deciphering.

My point is this: we can’t listen to other people by thin-slicing them. Listening takes time. When it is done right, it is primarily an emotional activity and only secondarily intellectual.

Emotions take time to express, be heard, be validated, and so on.  To listen well and deeply to another person, you must quiet your own two conversations, and let your verbal and your nonverbal channels attend to what’s being said to you. Listen with your whole body.