Excerpts from an interview (https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/what-makes-relationships-thrive/)
Harry Reis: Understanding is one of the most important things that we want in our close relationships. This is actually true beyond the realm of close relationships, but especially in our most intimate relationships, our marriages, our friendships, our connections with our siblings and the rest of our family. One of the most powerful things that we want is for there to be real understanding in those relationships. That the people on the other side know who we are and are caring and validating and accepting of that person.
Things like love and trust and caring simply don't work if there isn't understanding. If your understanding of me is different than how I understand myself, then when you tell me how much you love me, you're telling me that you love somebody different than me.
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Harry Reis: It's a very common feeling for adolescents and for that matter, adults, to feel like their parents don't understand them. And sometimes that comes from the fact that we grow. We change. Often we move away from our families and become things that our families don't necessarily have an appreciation of.
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Harry Reis: People feeling misunderstood is something that is growing by leaps and bounds in the world we live in now. With all these stresses and tensions that we have, there's more and more of a need to get connected with other people and part of that connection involves the sense of really understanding where people are coming from. In the old world, most of the people that you dealt with were people from your community. People who had lives that were relatively similar to yours, who lived with the same context as you lived with, and it was easy enough to understand them because everything that they were facing was the same as what you were facing. But now we are so much more mobile and we're so much more connected, we're coming across people who have different backgrounds, different goals, different priorities. Indeed, they may be living on opposite sides of the planet. And so the context is so much different and it's so much harder to establish that core base of understanding.
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Shankar Vedantam: Why do you think it is that being understood is so important to human beings, Harry? What is happening at a psychological level that makes this so important?
Harry Reis: Well, I think that's a very interesting question, Shankar. I think one of the reasons for that is that when you feel understood, it's much easier to connect with another person. It means you don't need to explain yourself repeatedly. It gives you a greater sense of coherence that the world is predictable and sensible and that you can move in it freely without having to worry about how you're coming across. Am I being likable? Am I being smart? Am I being effective in that situation?
Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering if part of this also is that if I feel like you like me for who I am, I feel a greater liberty to actually be myself, to be authentic.
Harry Reis: Well, I feel a greater liberty to be authentic, but I also don't need to worry about rejection. We're primed by evolution to be very concerned about being accepted by our group and we all have a very strong need to belong. And if I'm understood, then I don't have to worry about my true self coming out and getting kicked out by the group, whereas if I feel like the group really doesn't know me, then I'm constantly having to monitor and protect my status.
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Harry Reis: Well, we often assume that other people can see what we're feeling even when we don't actually express those feelings. So often I might be angry, but not do a terribly good job of explaining that and I would assume that everyone knows that I'm angry without necessarily that coming across.
Shankar Vedantam: And of course, that's exactly what happened in the study. The volunteers in fact thought that their feelings of disgust would be obvious to other people, but they were not. And Tom Gilovich and his colleagues talked about the illusion of transparency. That we believe that what we feel on the inside is transparent to those on the outside.
Harry Reis: Right. And of course, there are big differences in this. Some of us are better at being transparent than others, but one of the biggest misconceptions people have about marriage, especially before they go into marriage, is that their partner will always know what they're thinking and feeling. And this is a very, very destructive expectation.
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Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering if gender dynamics play a role here as well. It seems to me at least from anecdotal experience that women are more forthcoming than men are, in sort of revealing elements of themselves and wanting to be understood and seeking to understand. Is that a stereotype or do you think there's some truth in it?
Harry Reis: Well, what there is truth in I think is the idea that women are better at doing the understanding. Women are better at paying attention to what the other person's saying and expressing that in a way that comes across to the other person. Women also do tend to be somewhat more emotionally open. We've done a lot of research on that gender difference, and what's interesting about it is that women tend to be relatively more open regardless of the gender of the person that they're talking to. But men tend to be open primarily with women. In other words, men when they're interacting with other men are less likely to be emotionally open. And that often interferes with men developing close friendships, particularly later in life.
Shankar Vedantam: You have an interesting story about something you overheard at the gym where a couple of men were having a heart to heart, or at least one of them was having a heart to heart.
Harry Reis: Yes. I was at my gym and there were two young men standing there. And one of them said how are you doing to the other and the other said, "Oh, it's just terrible. My wife left me, I lost my job, and I had an auto accident." And the other man said, "Wow, it's really important to get your feelings out. Why don't you tell me about it?" And my ears perked up. I thought, "Wow, this is exactly what we're talking about." And then he said, "And I've got a minute. So go ahead."
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Shankar Vedantam: I think what you're hinting at at least is that sometimes the pain we feel in disagreements might be less about the disagreement and it might be more about how we feel the other person has heard us or listened to us or taken us seriously.
Harry Reis: Absolutely. Conflicts, even when they don't get resolved, are less harmful to relationships when people feel like they've been heard and understood. One of the misconceptions that people have is that if you express understanding for what the other person's saying, that you're somehow agreeing with their point of view, and that needn't be the case. Understanding simply means making it clear that you get the message that they communicated and that you respect it as a reasonable point of view. That doesn't mean that you have to agree with it.
