The Essential Reading (3)

The Curse of Knowledge:

Encountering with a new concept, so-called the curse of knowledge, which means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. As a result, the more you know, the worse you become at communicating that knowledge. This phenomenon comes from that human has the difficulty of getting a thought out of our own heads and into the heads of others. Paradoxically familiarity is one things that gets in the way of clarity.

What you don't know about your friends:

A pretty striking finding reported in The Boston Global: On the whole, we know significantly less about our friends, colleagues, and even spouses than we think we do. Such blind spots might simply be an unavoidable product of the way human beings forge personal bonds. Even in close relationships, there are holes in what we know about each other, and we fill them with our own assumptions.

In situations where there’s any ambiguity, people tend to simply project their feelings and thoughts onto others. The main hurdle is the way we talk to those we’re close to: we do that by focusing on areas of agreement and avoiding topics that might cause friction. Our natural tendency toward comradeship makes us, ironically, leery of learning too much about the people we’re befriending.

However it turns out a certain amount of blindness may help further to cement friendships in a close and strong relationship.

Listener's response can affect speaker's language use:

A positive listening style - smiling, nodding and maintaining an open bodily position - will encourage speaker to provide a more interpretative account, hence the speaker tend to use more abstractions and subjective impressions. By contrast, negative listeners (with frowning and unsmiling facial expression) will provoke in the speaker a more cautious and descriptive thinking style.