Conversation Involves Listening

by Chuck Schultz

People waste a lot of time contemplating who is more intelligent than whom.  They assume that people carry an IQ around in their heads.  But IQs don’t exist in heads.

An IQ is a score on a test.  What test?  Well there are a lot of tests designed to measure IQs.  And they actually measure a wide variety of things.  Commonly they measure knowledge of the meanings of English words.  Sometimes they measure analogies or mathematical problem solving.  “Non verbal” IQ tests may measure the ability to see similarities among figures. Sometimes they measure the ability to remember what you heard a few seconds ago, such as a string of digits.  Or your ability to repeat them in reverse order.

So the IQ reported is the score on a test.  If you take a different test you get a different IQ score.  In fact, if you take the same test over again you will likely get a different IQ score. Someone who gets a high score on one test is likely to do more or less well on one of the many different tests.  And people who behave intelligently in many different ways may do poorly on these tests.

It happens that I score well on some of these tests, but I can’t tell the key of C from the key of F.  When my computer doesn’t do what I expect, I have much difficulty figuring out why.  I don’t always pick up the nuances in people’s conversation.  Although I might do well on an IQ test, people with lower scores can do all sorts of things more intelligently than I can.

The most important part of conversation is listening. Often people have a hard time putting things into words, or come from a different worldview.

People who presume to be smarter than others are largely fooling themselves.  Sometimes they fool other people too.   If a person says something that seems to you to be dumb, perhaps you just don’t understand.  When a person says something that doesn’t make sense, the listener should assume the person may be saying something worthwhile if you could only interpret it.

If someone says something that sounds crazy, like the earth moves around the sun instead of the other way around, don’t assume they don’t know what they are talking about. A few years later somebody will tell you it’s all relative. When we believe a person isn’t too smart, too often we assume we cannot learn anything from her or him.  In that we are almost always wrong.

Any given person is smarter than I in some things and not so smart in others.  I often think: what is that narrow-minded person thinking?   If I could really learn to listen, I’d have a chance at a conversation.