"They can't tell"

You might think that even if you do drift, no harm's done, because the other person doesn't notice. You nod and say "mm" in the right places and keep your eyes on them. From where they sit, you look like someone who's listening.

In the moment, you're largely right, and I'd rather tell you so than pretend otherwise. The studies by Collins and colleagues that I mentioned involved more than twelve hundred people in live conversations. Some listeners were told to listen attentively. Others were told to let their attention go elsewhere, or to divide it. Their conversation partners found it hard to tell the difference. Speakers consistently overestimated how attentive their listeners were, and often believed they were being listened to when they weren't. The researchers' explanation is that attentive and inattentive listeners behave almost identically on the surface, since both nod and smile and say "mm". They end by distinguishing between feeling heard and being heard. In a single conversation, a person can feel heard when they weren't.

So why do people stop telling you things? I think the answer lies in two places that a nod can't cover.

The first is the quality of your moment-to-moment responses, which has subtler effects than anyone is aware of. Janet Bavelas, Linda Coates and Trudy Johnson ran an experiment in which people told a stranger the story of a close call they'd had. Some of the listeners had been given a distracting mental task to do while listening. The researchers separated two kinds of listener response. Generic responses, such as nodding and "mhm", could go anywhere in any story. Specific responses, such as wincing at the frightening bit or gasping at the right moment, were tied to exactly what was being said. The distracted listeners made fewer responses overall, and far fewer of the specific kind. The striking result was what happened to the storytellers. They told their stories measurably less well. The effect was strongest at what should have been the dramatic ending, where narrators with distracted listeners tended to falter, trail off or explain the point awkwardly.

The storytellers didn't necessarily know why. They weren't thinking, "This person isn't listening." The story simply stopped working, and they ended it. I think Hannah's "Yeah. Maybe. Anyway" was the same thing. A speaker doesn't need to catch you drafting for the drafting to make them say less.

The second place is your reply. A nod can cover the fact that you weren't listening, but once you speak, what you say gives it away. If your reply picks up something from their first few sentences and takes no account of where they'd got to by the end, they register that. They don't analyse it, but they take it in. They said "everything's a bit much", and they got back a story about cheese in 1994. Nobody keeps a tally of this. But after some dozens of conversations, a person forms a settled sense of what it's like to tell you things. They learn that it doesn't quite work, that they come away feeling slightly unmet, and that the serious things go better with someone else.

That's why the falling-off is so puzzling from your side. There was never an incident. Nobody accused you of anything, and in each separate conversation you seemed attentive, to them as well as to yourself. Over the years, though, what people felt able to tell you got slightly smaller with each call.