Regarding the “if people don’t laugh at your joke” thing, but applying more generally: I am frequently genuinely uncertain that I have been heard, where by “heard” I don’t mean the metaphorical “understood and respected and acknowledged”, just the part where I make sounds and these are registered in others’ ears. Partly this is my own audio issues throwing off my calibration, partly it’s how often people ask me to repeat things.
So when I get zero feedback of any kind for an utterance, my impulse is to repeat it, perhaps in different words, until someone reacts, but by then the reaction often seems to be annoyed. So this is obviously suboptimal, but I need to be able to distinguish between “I am inaudible/incomprehensible” and “my utterance has been deemed valueless”. (Ideally I’d be able to tell why my utterances have been deemed valueless but that’s a secondary issue.)
Seriously, I just completed a voice training class, and it’s really astonishing how bad I was at guessing my decibel level (although I was as likely to be too loud as too quiet). Some other people in the class were barely audible even when they claimed it felt like they were shouting.
Get a webcam or smartphone camera, record your normal volume range (from “mouse” to “shout”). If you’re hard to hear, get in the habit of taking a breath and using your diaphragm (to me this feels like tensing my stomach to get punched) when speaking. Overdo it for a while.
If you do this and still get ignored, then at least you can cross off the “Too Quiet” hypothesis and keep exploring.
Try instead to ‘ping’ the other person. Once you’ve communicated a concept, ask “does that make sense?” or something similar, and see what they say. (This also has a way of forcing people to pay closer attention to you, since passive listening may not be enough… I have this habit. Is it Dark Arts?)
(You’re not persuading someone to accept a proposition as true, so I don’t think it would fall under the definition of Dark Arts. I’d class it as ‘potential social skill’, similar to those above.)
(I may try too hard sometimes to not manipulate people. I think that it’s possible that I may use manipulative tactics without realizing it myself, so I worry about things like this. I might be persuading people that the proposition ‘what I am saying is something you value highly enough to pay close attention to me’ is true, for example.)
I’m not completely certain, but it seems likely that they’re just not paying attention. Do you have a good detector of other people’s attention? Do you know on a gut level how to grab their attention first, before you even begin to say anything, and then keep it focused on yourself as you’re talking? If someone is paying attention, they will feel “socially forced” to react to your words afterward, at least say “hmm” or shrug.
Even so, the approach should be the same: keep going, don’t break the flow.
If they really didn’t hear you and they are interested in the slightest about what you said, they’ll eventually ask you to repeat, if not on the spot then when their turn to speak comes.
If either is untrue, demanding confirmation from them is going to sound annoying.
Also, I’m reaching out a little here (I’m no social wizard), but I get the impression that, in a conversation, taking the job of making sure that the communication went through correctly places you on a slightly lower status.
I used to operate under a similar heuristic. Eventually I figured out that 90% of the time, if someone didn’t respond to me, it’s because they couldn’t think of anything to say or it wasn’t funny or interesting. Occasionally someone might miss something I said, the but the utility-hit of ALWAYS repeating myself (and being annoying 90% of the time) is not worth the benefit of occasionally repeating something useful.
Or put it this way: If you’re about to repeat something, first think about how important it is and the consequences of it not having been heard. Then divide that importance by 10. If the result is more significant than sounding annoying by repeating yourself, then go ahead.
Eventually I figured out that 90% of the time, if someone didn’t respond to me, it’s because they couldn’t think of anything to say or it wasn’t funny or interesting.
90% sounds a bit high. But even when not heard (or not comprehended) repeating a mediocre statement can appear mildly needy. If they want to hear they can, of course, prompt you themselves.
It’s useful to have this percentage as a guess at my own baseline, and I may fall back on your heuristic as a default. But what I really want is a way to find out before I have to repeat myself whether I’ve been heard. I refer back to earlier utterances in conversation; I adjust my models of others’ intentions based on what information I think they have to work with; sometimes it’s a question and the difference between “I didn’t hear you” and “I have no opinion” matters for my next action.
This is going to depend a lot on what you’re saying and why you want them to have heard it. If you’re actually communicating about a problem/project that you’re collaborating on, I think there’s more room to repeat yourself because the consequences of misinterpretation can be pretty major.
If instead you’re navigating a social arena (either for its own sake, or to gain status that you’ll need later) then I think it’s almost always going to be better to go with the uncertainty.
If you’re worried that people DON’T think your statements are valuable, then it’s probably better to focus on that. And in that case, it may be worth the status hit to ask point blank a few times:
“Hey, did you hear what I just said”
“yeah?”
“Why didn’t you respond?”
″...because I (didn’t care/wasn’t funny/etc”
“why didn’t you care?”
“Uh, because X, I guess”
This is NOT a good general practice. But it may be a necessary cost to figuring out how to communicate better. Save it for people you at least reasonably trust (but who are close enough to the average social person to have advice that is generalizable).
Data point: If you did this with me, then you’d need to be pretty careful not to sound defensive. I tend to shrug, grin, and make a fairly non-specific response because usually when people ask that question, I’m just trying to get them off my back. If you wanted to me to try and give you a thoughtful answer, you’d want to convey curiosity, even prefacing the question with ’I’m curious...”
Yeah, my actual script there wouldn’t work very well. I didn’t bother trying to do a better one because it’d be incredibly context-dependent, and any “good” specifics I gave wouldn’t really work anyway.
I was assuming this was in the context of a conversation, where even if sound fails they will be looking at you and it will be obvious that you were talking.
If you’re trying to talk to someone who’s not looking at you, that’s different.
Perhaps importantly, I’m often talking to people who I’m not looking at, so I don’t time my utterances for when they’d be looking at my mouth and would notice me talking. This seems pretty easy to learn to fix, so I’ll try that.
On many occasions I get a similar reaction, most often at work. At the appropriate place in a conversation for interjection, I will start to speak. In the middle of the first syllable, I will be interrupted and the participants in the conversation will continue as if I was not about to speak.
Perhaps I am unheard.
Perhaps I am considered of lower status amongst the peer group represented.
Perhaps the participants predict my comment will be off topic.
Perhaps there is a physiological cause. Specifically, auditory processing delay. {The time span it takes your conscious mind to become aware of a noise.}
Auditory processing delay is the one I find most interesting as I have accepted the outlier social role, perhaps too well.
The role of auditory processing delay in speech, I suspect, is the initial cause of the interruption. For some time, I have been cognizant that I often reflexively react to sound before I “hear” it. Otherwise, why would I have tensed muscles when the unexpected noise occurs. The delay seems perceptible, perhaps .1 to .5 seconds by my estimation. This large a delay in a conversation may be atypical.
This paper suggests a number of symptoms of high auditory delay and traits associated with it. These also suggest that I may the one experiencing an above average auditory processing delay.
Note that sometimes people don’t reply when they have heard someone not because they think the comment is valueless but simply because they don’t have any immediate, obviously relevant reply to make.
I’ve had a similar problem talking on the phone with friends. Many of my friends prefer to remain completely quiet unless they actually have something to say. I prefer an occasional “yeah, uh huh” just to make sure that the person is still listening or that the call hasn’t been dropped.” After talking for a few minutes without an audible response, I sometimes say “hey, would you mind grunting on occasion so I know the call hasn’t been dropped?”
I don’t know if it’s socially optimal but it seems to work. (I only do this with friends who reasonably “get” me. I probably wouldn’t recommend it with people you’re not that close with)
Jokes are overrated. Stories in general are overrated. Approximtely no-one cares about my fascinating stories. I keep pointing this out to myself in the hope it will sink in.
This is hideous advice. If you can’t make your stories fascinating to other people, you should indeed stop. But signalling is important in many, many contexts, and if you confine yourself to just doing stuff, and never talking about it, you will be at a very large disadvantage to better self-publicists unless you are operating at a very, very high level.
You may want to try to write one down as you say it, getting the structure of your speech onto the paper, and then look for annoying patterns. A couple of the patterns that I’ve found the most annoying are multiple digressions and narcissism.
Multiple digressions can be easy to make as you realize that there is a part of your story that depends on information the other person won’t have, and so you digress for a moment to fill them in, and then realize that that too requires more information, and so forth. Imagine the other person in the conversation as a stack machine with a very small stack limit and a very low memory size, where too many digressions will overwrite either the point you were trying to make or even what the conversation was about at all. The best thing to do in this case is eliminate unnecessary information in the story to simplify it.
An example would be something like: “I had a roommate Steve, that oh wait, did I ever tell you about Steve? Well, (digression of length). Wait, what was I going to say?” The proper way to fix this would be something like: “I had a roommate that used to do , and used to happen every time.”
Narcissism is harder to deal with. All of your stories are of course ones that you are in, but focusing solely on yourself when telling them can turn people off. My advice is to avoid stories like this unless they are very on-topic, and even then try to emphasize what was happening around you more than your actions.
So when I get zero feedback of any kind for an utterance, my impulse is to repeat it, perhaps in different words, until someone reacts, but by then the reaction often seems to be annoyed. So this is obviously suboptimal, but I need to be able to distinguish between “I am inaudible/incomprehensible” and “my utterance has been deemed valueless”. (Ideally I’d be able to tell why my utterances have been deemed valueless but that’s a secondary issue.)
Fortunately it is a no-lose situation. The people who are going to be annoyed by the repetition are those that heard you the first time and deemed your words valueless. And those people sound like assholes with poor judgement so who cares what they think?
Obviously having a lack of social power in a context changes the optimal signalling strategy. All sorts of self sabotage can become necessary by way of a tithe. This especially applies if you are not able (or willing) to navigate the social world in such a way as to work with bosses who respect you.
When it comes to dealing with equals—strangers, potential friends the attitude that must be overcome is that of holding yourself back for fear of annoying someone who doesn’t even like you anyway and who you don’t need to impress. Optimise your interaction for those that you most care about and err on the side of assuming that they care what you have to say.
The default state of most people is to be too hesitant, too willing to walk on eggshells. One of the greatest benefits to trying things that have potential benefit but also potential to be annoying is that it is the best way to find out. Doubts don’t help you, experience does. And annoying someone slightly doesn’t usually have the dire long term consequences our instincts warn us of.
I use the attitude you’re talking about, call it forthrightness, as a filter to find people that I might want to be friends with. Anyone that stays in my personal sphere is someone I do not have to worry about offending when I want to relax. It has led me to be rather abrasive, I suspect, but also comfortable.
To be clear, I’m talking about opinions and preferences here, not body language or the social norms that regulate groups. I think of someone that pretends to have an opinion/preference that they don’t have naturally as wearing a mask of sorts. I don’t like masks.
This is why I don’t like the manipulative tactics of pick-up artistry. There is a distinct difference between someone trying to become more able socially, and someone that tries to mirror your beliefs, preferences, and opinions in order to manipulate you. Learning to express yourself doesn’t repel me the way masks and PUA do.
Regarding the “if people don’t laugh at your joke” thing, but applying more generally: I am frequently genuinely uncertain that I have been heard, where by “heard” I don’t mean the metaphorical “understood and respected and acknowledged”, just the part where I make sounds and these are registered in others’ ears. Partly this is my own audio issues throwing off my calibration, partly it’s how often people ask me to repeat things.
So when I get zero feedback of any kind for an utterance, my impulse is to repeat it, perhaps in different words, until someone reacts, but by then the reaction often seems to be annoyed. So this is obviously suboptimal, but I need to be able to distinguish between “I am inaudible/incomprehensible” and “my utterance has been deemed valueless”. (Ideally I’d be able to tell why my utterances have been deemed valueless but that’s a secondary issue.)
How loud are you?
Seriously, I just completed a voice training class, and it’s really astonishing how bad I was at guessing my decibel level (although I was as likely to be too loud as too quiet). Some other people in the class were barely audible even when they claimed it felt like they were shouting.
Get a webcam or smartphone camera, record your normal volume range (from “mouse” to “shout”). If you’re hard to hear, get in the habit of taking a breath and using your diaphragm (to me this feels like tensing my stomach to get punched) when speaking. Overdo it for a while.
If you do this and still get ignored, then at least you can cross off the “Too Quiet” hypothesis and keep exploring.
I was told to be quieter a lot when I was a kid. I think I am quieter now. I am still seldom told to speak up.
Try instead to ‘ping’ the other person. Once you’ve communicated a concept, ask “does that make sense?” or something similar, and see what they say. (This also has a way of forcing people to pay closer attention to you, since passive listening may not be enough… I have this habit. Is it Dark Arts?)
People ignore me when I do things like that, too.
That sounds like rudeness.
(You’re not persuading someone to accept a proposition as true, so I don’t think it would fall under the definition of Dark Arts. I’d class it as ‘potential social skill’, similar to those above.)
(I may try too hard sometimes to not manipulate people. I think that it’s possible that I may use manipulative tactics without realizing it myself, so I worry about things like this. I might be persuading people that the proposition ‘what I am saying is something you value highly enough to pay close attention to me’ is true, for example.)
I’m not completely certain, but it seems likely that they’re just not paying attention. Do you have a good detector of other people’s attention? Do you know on a gut level how to grab their attention first, before you even begin to say anything, and then keep it focused on yourself as you’re talking? If someone is paying attention, they will feel “socially forced” to react to your words afterward, at least say “hmm” or shrug.
Even so, the approach should be the same: keep going, don’t break the flow.
If they really didn’t hear you and they are interested in the slightest about what you said, they’ll eventually ask you to repeat, if not on the spot then when their turn to speak comes.
If either is untrue, demanding confirmation from them is going to sound annoying.
Also, I’m reaching out a little here (I’m no social wizard), but I get the impression that, in a conversation, taking the job of making sure that the communication went through correctly places you on a slightly lower status.
If they didn’t hear me, how are they going to know there’s anything to repeat?
I used to operate under a similar heuristic. Eventually I figured out that 90% of the time, if someone didn’t respond to me, it’s because they couldn’t think of anything to say or it wasn’t funny or interesting. Occasionally someone might miss something I said, the but the utility-hit of ALWAYS repeating myself (and being annoying 90% of the time) is not worth the benefit of occasionally repeating something useful.
Or put it this way: If you’re about to repeat something, first think about how important it is and the consequences of it not having been heard. Then divide that importance by 10. If the result is more significant than sounding annoying by repeating yourself, then go ahead.
90% sounds a bit high. But even when not heard (or not comprehended) repeating a mediocre statement can appear mildly needy. If they want to hear they can, of course, prompt you themselves.
It’s useful to have this percentage as a guess at my own baseline, and I may fall back on your heuristic as a default. But what I really want is a way to find out before I have to repeat myself whether I’ve been heard. I refer back to earlier utterances in conversation; I adjust my models of others’ intentions based on what information I think they have to work with; sometimes it’s a question and the difference between “I didn’t hear you” and “I have no opinion” matters for my next action.
This is going to depend a lot on what you’re saying and why you want them to have heard it. If you’re actually communicating about a problem/project that you’re collaborating on, I think there’s more room to repeat yourself because the consequences of misinterpretation can be pretty major.
If instead you’re navigating a social arena (either for its own sake, or to gain status that you’ll need later) then I think it’s almost always going to be better to go with the uncertainty.
If you’re worried that people DON’T think your statements are valuable, then it’s probably better to focus on that. And in that case, it may be worth the status hit to ask point blank a few times:
“Hey, did you hear what I just said”
“yeah?”
“Why didn’t you respond?”
″...because I (didn’t care/wasn’t funny/etc”
“why didn’t you care?”
“Uh, because X, I guess”
This is NOT a good general practice. But it may be a necessary cost to figuring out how to communicate better. Save it for people you at least reasonably trust (but who are close enough to the average social person to have advice that is generalizable).
Data point: If you did this with me, then you’d need to be pretty careful not to sound defensive. I tend to shrug, grin, and make a fairly non-specific response because usually when people ask that question, I’m just trying to get them off my back. If you wanted to me to try and give you a thoughtful answer, you’d want to convey curiosity, even prefacing the question with ’I’m curious...”
Yeah, my actual script there wouldn’t work very well. I didn’t bother trying to do a better one because it’d be incredibly context-dependent, and any “good” specifics I gave wouldn’t really work anyway.
I should point out that the 90% number was mostly made up (it’s somewhere between 65% and 95%, I haven’t done a formal study.)
I was assuming this was in the context of a conversation, where even if sound fails they will be looking at you and it will be obvious that you were talking.
If you’re trying to talk to someone who’s not looking at you, that’s different.
Perhaps importantly, I’m often talking to people who I’m not looking at, so I don’t time my utterances for when they’d be looking at my mouth and would notice me talking. This seems pretty easy to learn to fix, so I’ll try that.
On many occasions I get a similar reaction, most often at work. At the appropriate place in a conversation for interjection, I will start to speak. In the middle of the first syllable, I will be interrupted and the participants in the conversation will continue as if I was not about to speak.
Perhaps I am unheard.
Perhaps I am considered of lower status amongst the peer group represented.
Perhaps the participants predict my comment will be off topic.
Perhaps there is a physiological cause. Specifically, auditory processing delay. {The time span it takes your conscious mind to become aware of a noise.}
Auditory processing delay is the one I find most interesting as I have accepted the outlier social role, perhaps too well.
The role of auditory processing delay in speech, I suspect, is the initial cause of the interruption. For some time, I have been cognizant that I often reflexively react to sound before I “hear” it. Otherwise, why would I have tensed muscles when the unexpected noise occurs. The delay seems perceptible, perhaps .1 to .5 seconds by my estimation. This large a delay in a conversation may be atypical.
This paper suggests a number of symptoms of high auditory delay and traits associated with it. These also suggest that I may the one experiencing an above average auditory processing delay.
Note that sometimes people don’t reply when they have heard someone not because they think the comment is valueless but simply because they don’t have any immediate, obviously relevant reply to make.
I would hope that people who don’t reply for this reason would at least look at me and purse their lips or go “hm” or shrug or something.
I’ve had a similar problem talking on the phone with friends. Many of my friends prefer to remain completely quiet unless they actually have something to say. I prefer an occasional “yeah, uh huh” just to make sure that the person is still listening or that the call hasn’t been dropped.” After talking for a few minutes without an audible response, I sometimes say “hey, would you mind grunting on occasion so I know the call hasn’t been dropped?”
I don’t know if it’s socially optimal but it seems to work. (I only do this with friends who reasonably “get” me. I probably wouldn’t recommend it with people you’re not that close with)
Jokes are overrated. Stories in general are overrated. Approximtely no-one cares about my fascinating stories. I keep pointing this out to myself in the hope it will sink in.
This is hideous advice. If you can’t make your stories fascinating to other people, you should indeed stop. But signalling is important in many, many contexts, and if you confine yourself to just doing stuff, and never talking about it, you will be at a very large disadvantage to better self-publicists unless you are operating at a very, very high level.
.
You may want to try to write one down as you say it, getting the structure of your speech onto the paper, and then look for annoying patterns. A couple of the patterns that I’ve found the most annoying are multiple digressions and narcissism.
Multiple digressions can be easy to make as you realize that there is a part of your story that depends on information the other person won’t have, and so you digress for a moment to fill them in, and then realize that that too requires more information, and so forth. Imagine the other person in the conversation as a stack machine with a very small stack limit and a very low memory size, where too many digressions will overwrite either the point you were trying to make or even what the conversation was about at all. The best thing to do in this case is eliminate unnecessary information in the story to simplify it.
An example would be something like: “I had a roommate Steve, that oh wait, did I ever tell you about Steve? Well, (digression of length). Wait, what was I going to say?” The proper way to fix this would be something like: “I had a roommate that used to do , and used to happen every time.”
Narcissism is harder to deal with. All of your stories are of course ones that you are in, but focusing solely on yourself when telling them can turn people off. My advice is to avoid stories like this unless they are very on-topic, and even then try to emphasize what was happening around you more than your actions.
I smell an inferential distance problem here. This advice seems to be non-generalizable enough as-is that you may want to explain a bit more.
Fortunately it is a no-lose situation. The people who are going to be annoyed by the repetition are those that heard you the first time and deemed your words valueless. And those people sound like assholes with poor judgement so who cares what they think?
You do, that’s who. If that person is your boss or a colleague you must work with, you must overcome that attitude or fail.
Obviously having a lack of social power in a context changes the optimal signalling strategy. All sorts of self sabotage can become necessary by way of a tithe. This especially applies if you are not able (or willing) to navigate the social world in such a way as to work with bosses who respect you.
When it comes to dealing with equals—strangers, potential friends the attitude that must be overcome is that of holding yourself back for fear of annoying someone who doesn’t even like you anyway and who you don’t need to impress. Optimise your interaction for those that you most care about and err on the side of assuming that they care what you have to say.
The default state of most people is to be too hesitant, too willing to walk on eggshells. One of the greatest benefits to trying things that have potential benefit but also potential to be annoying is that it is the best way to find out. Doubts don’t help you, experience does. And annoying someone slightly doesn’t usually have the dire long term consequences our instincts warn us of.
I use the attitude you’re talking about, call it forthrightness, as a filter to find people that I might want to be friends with. Anyone that stays in my personal sphere is someone I do not have to worry about offending when I want to relax. It has led me to be rather abrasive, I suspect, but also comfortable.
To be clear, I’m talking about opinions and preferences here, not body language or the social norms that regulate groups. I think of someone that pretends to have an opinion/preference that they don’t have naturally as wearing a mask of sorts. I don’t like masks.
This is why I don’t like the manipulative tactics of pick-up artistry. There is a distinct difference between someone trying to become more able socially, and someone that tries to mirror your beliefs, preferences, and opinions in order to manipulate you. Learning to express yourself doesn’t repel me the way masks and PUA do.