what would you hear if you eavesdropped ?
Answers
Explanation:
you’ve taken mass transit, stood in a crowded cafe, or just been around strangers before, the chances are high that you’ve eavesdropped. If you say you haven’t, you’re lying. Eavesdropping, or the act of listening in on the conversations of those around us, is often stigmatized as something only “nosy” or “intrusive” people do. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Personally, I’m prone to straining my ears in order to hear a conversation several yards away. However, more often than not, eavesdropping isn’t an intentional choice or character flaw, but a habit that we’re wired for. For example, a paper in the journal Psychological Science showed that we find conversations like phone calls, where we hear only one side of the dialogue, more distracting than conversations between two people. This paper also concluded that less-predictable speech is more distracting for a listener. This may explain why we find the conversations of complete strangers, whose speech we can’t easily predict, so fascinating.
The origins of eavesdropping aren’t fully known. However, a study by the Society for Research in Child Development showed that children as young as age three are capable of listening in on the questions asked by their peers. They then strengthen this skill between ages three and five. Preschoolers are able to learn from the questions and instructions that they overhear from their peers, even when they’re engaged in other activities. Thus, a large part of our development and early education is made possible by our ability to listen in on other people’s conversations.
John Locke, a professor of language science, presents a strong case in defense of humans’ habit in his book Eavesdropping: An Intimate History. He recently spoke with Quartz to discuss how eavesdropping came about, how it was first stigmatized, and how we benefit from our nosiness.
Quartz: What are your findings concerning the evolution of eavesdropping?
Locke: It did evolve over time, but there was something there to start with. Monkeys generally are very watchful and not just by eye, but by ear. They recognize on some level that they need to know things that others are unlikely to want them to know. We can assume that the very earliest humans, or proto-humans, were like that as well. Even before there was any kind of housed living, before people lived behind walls, before there was much in the way of privacy, there were still lots of cases during a day in which people would recognize that the individuals around them were thinking things that they probably needed to know but were unlikely to know. And so, they were going to have to observe really carefully and try to determine what other people’s intentions were.
We’re natural sleuths.
In a sense they were eavesdropping upon the individuals inside the people they saw, the individuals who had intentions and motives that they weren’t likely to disclose. They would’ve had that, and we still have that today, that sort of primal thing. We have regions in the brain, mechanisms in the brain that are designed to draw inferences from partial information that we see and hear and smell. We are pretty good sleuths. We’re natural sleuths.
Why do we need this habit?
We live in extremely complicated social arrangements in which there are lots of people who are competing with us for the things that we want and they want. We have to be somewhat geared up to do eavesdropping. When people no longer needed to forge and follow the wild game, when they could actually have settlements—that’s when they began to build more permanent dwellings. And these were ones that were intriguing because the people on the inside thought that they were alone, but their homes were so flimsy that they weren’t truly alone. So you had this extraordinarily charged