Quiz

You Listening? How Hard Is It to Know When People Only Pretend to Pay Attention?

Also: Medical device innovation after a trove of product failures is revealed; the value of salary negotiations; and gauging wildfire risk from the electric grid

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1 of 5
A woman and a man having a meeting.

We speak and hope to be heard. But sometimes people only pretend to listen. In a conversational experiment, when supposed listeners admitted to a wandering mind, how often did the person speaking to them realize they weren’t being heard?
You can tell: 90% guessed a companion was only feigning listening.
It’s actually difficult to tell: About half guessed correctly.
Humans are terrible at this: 80% thought the nonlistener was engaged.

Read on: A burgeoning area of study is establishing that speakers who feel heard often are not; that when the spoken-to feign attentiveness, it’s highly effective at misleading a speaker; and that a more active listening mode — volleying back a bit of what you’ve heard, explicitly stating a desire to engage, especially on topics of a sensitive nature — is the path to a more effective sort of conversing.

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2 of 5

For two decades, the Food and Drug Administration allowed makers of certain medical devices to report adverse events — from minor to fatal product problems — into a secret database. Then, after some investigative journalism, the FDA released the entire trove, some 6 million reports. How did it affect medical device development going forward?
New products had stronger safety features and achieved greater technological advances.
New products had stronger safety features but more minimal technological advances.
Safety was unaffected and technological advances were smaller.

Read on: The newfound transparency reordered parts of the device industry. New players entered and, taking advantage of formerly unknown risks and opportunities, developed products that advanced further.

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3 of 5
Mature businesswoman taking an interview of man over the wooden desk in office

Most people who receive a job offer with a stated salary do not counter, or ask for more. In a study of 3,858 highly paid tech job seekers — average age, 31; seven years’ experience; current pay about $220,000 — 82% got job offers. Of those who countered:
They averaged $5,000 above the initial offer, a token bump by the employer.
They averaged $27,000, better than 12% above the initial offer.
They averaged $54,000, better than 24% above the initial offer.

Read on: Is there a risk of having the offer rescinded if one counters? Yes. About 40% of offers in the study were made verbally, “allowing employers to withhold written offers without formally retracting them” if they choose, the researchers note. But job seekers generally overestimate that risk and underestimate the potential gain of negotiating.

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4 of 5

People like others to know about their achievements, valuing the public perception of success at times above actually attaining it. In a study that used a workaround to avoid people worrying about bragging, which of these three areas — income, grades, driving a safe car — did people strongly want us to know about?
Grades and cars, not income.
Just cars, not grades and income.
Grades and income, cars not so much.

Read on: Study subjects were willing to take a B instead of an A, a full grade lower, so long as other people thought they got an A, not a B. And others knowing about your superior income felt five times as good as only you knowing about it.

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5 of 5
An aerial photo of a burned neighborhood in Paradise, California, on November 15, 2018, after one of the deadliest wildfires in recent California history.

California’s 35,000 miles of electric grid pose significant wildfire risk. It’s impractical to inspect every section of the grid. One of the state’s utilities ranks its sections by risk and inspects all the highest-risk ones. A study suggests a sampling method, taking advantage of like circumstances between portions of the grid, to capture a more complete picture of risk. The utility’s method achieves a result 14% from optimal. The sampling study:
Did no better.
Achieved results less than 1% from optimal.
Was 19% from optimal, failing to improve on the utility’s method.

Read on: Both methods were applied to 20% of the grid in question. Weather and other shared circumstances mean one section can stand in for others nearby, allowing inspectors to roam more widely and capture more data on fire risk.