The closer you are to someone, his partner in life for example, the less you listen to him, this is the observation made by an article in the New York Times , quoted by Slate.fr.
We therefore learn that our attention span is inversely proportional to the years spent side by side. We would therefore tend to no longer hear the person who lives with us, to no longer really pay attention to what he or she is saying.
But not only ! We would also have the annoying habit of judging what the other is going to tell us. A study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology has even shown that we overestimate our ability to be understood by our partner or by our close friends.
Spouses do not communicate effectively
To achieve this eloquent result, the scientists asked several couples sitting back to back to interpret ambiguous sentences from each other, then to repeat the same exercise with one or a stranger. And the verdict is final: the spouses do not transmit the messages effectively. And some strangers manage to understand more precisely the thought of one of the members of the couple. The same result was observed between close friends.
A phenomenon which is explained in particular by the fact that, when we talk to a loved one, we are no longer bothered with details, we assume that the other is aware of the context, of all the parameters and that we will therefore understood half a word. It might be time to question the way we communicate!