In communications, familiarity breeds apathy.
—WILLIAM BERNBACH
Last year, I called an all-staff meeting to talk with my producers about what was working and what could be improved in the daily operations of our show. One young woman could barely wait for me to open the floor before blurting out: “You criticize us too much! When something goes wrong, you really make me feel horrible.”
I was totally taken aback by her response. In my mind, I’m extremely conscious of how much negative feedback I offer. In fact, I keep a notepad by my desk where I track my conversations with employees. My goal is to say at least two positive things to each person every day. How could I have made someone whose work I value feel so bad? I asked her to explain and she reminded me of an incident that had taken place a few weeks prior.
She had arranged for a professor to call in during a recent show so I could interview him about voter turnout. But once he was on the line, there was a lot of static. The sound was so bad that it dropped out completely a few times, and it was hard to understand what he was saying.
“What is wrong with his line?” I typed into the online chat window that we use to communicate with each other while we’re live on the air. “We checked it twice before we went on the air and it sounded good,” the producer responded. “But this is terrible,” I typed back. “I know,” she answered.
After the show was over, I went into the control room to ask more questions. “So, what happened?” I said. The producer answered, “I checked that line multiple times. It was fine.” “It sounded awful on the air,” I said. “I checked it just a couple of minutes before the show started and it was working,” she answered. “Well, there were several moments when I couldn’t even understand what he was saying,” I said. “I know,” she answered.
You’ll notice that not once in that entire exchange did I offer explicit criticism. In fact, the producer and I agreed that the interview had not gone well. So why did she come away from our conversation feeling demoralized? In a word: repetition. I uttered some version of “that was awful” multiple times. Since she was responsible for the segment, every new iteration felt like a slap. And since we (along with everyone else in the room) agreed on the problem, I was repeating something she already understood, and as a result I was deepening her embarrassment.
After that meeting, I started to take notice of how often I repeated negative feedback. I did it a lot, and it was affecting staff morale. The thing is, it would have never occurred to me that repetition alone could be heard as criticism had this producer not spoken up.
Repetition can be an effective tool in speeches and lectures. Think about how often you’ve heard a politician repeat the same words or phrases in various forms. These are called talking points and politicians use them because they’re as effective as a good advertising slogan: stories about “welfare queens” or “trickle-down economics” or the greed of the so-called 1 percent.
But repetition in this context can also backfire. Remember Marco Rubio’s performance during a GOP presidential debate in 2016? Some analysts wryly described it as a “glitch in the matrix” after Rubio repeated the exact same words four times. “Let’s dispel this notion that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Rubio said. “He knows exactly what he’s doing.”
We can all rib Rubio, but before you start feeling too smug, consider that most of us unknowingly repeat ourselves daily. Granted, we don’t often use the exact same words, but we repeat the message all the same.
I remember having a conversation with my son after he got into a fight. A schoolmate was yelling insults at him on the playground and snatching the ball from him whenever he could. Finally, my son lost patience and pushed him. “That was your mistake,” I told him. “He was wrong right up until you put your hands on him. Then you lost the high ground.”
Our conversation continued, as he explained that he had to go to the principal and write a note of apology to the other kid. “You just shouldn’t have pushed him,” I said. “If you’d held your temper, he would have been the one in trouble.” And then he said that he would have to spend a few lunch periods in detention and that the teacher wanted to talk with me. “That’s because you’re the one who decided to make it physical,” I said. Suddenly, he yelled back, “I know! I’ve heard it a million times now! I’m not stupid!”
I could have lectured him more about losing his temper and raising his voice to me, but I didn’t. Because he was right. I had repeated myself multiple times. (Back then he was still young enough to get frustrated by repetition. Now he just tunes me out.) I’m willing to bet there are many kids (and spouses) who don’t listen closely because they’re “tired of hearing it.” In this case, “it” is the same basic message rephrased over and over.
Repetition is the conversational equivalent of marching in place. It’s not interesting and it doesn’t move anything forward.
We sometimes assume that repeating information helps to drill it into someone’s head. After all, we’re taught from a young age to repeat the information we want to learn. We make flash cards to learn a foreign language. We repeat important dates in our heads: The Louisiana Purchase was signed in 1803. The Louisiana Purchase was signed in 1803. When we have a big test coming up, we cram until the wee hours of the morning, drilling names and dates and equations until our heads swim.
These types of repetition help you to retain new learning for one key reason: you’re the one repeating the information. Research shows that when we repeat something multiple times, it ups our chances of remembering it.1 The benefit increases if we repeat that information to another person, but the benefit isn’t shared with the person listening. So, if you’re in a meeting and you repeat a deadline to your team four times, you’ll probably remember it well but your team members are no more likely to retain it than if you’d mentioned it only once.
There are also limitations to how much repetition benefits memory. In 2014, two neurobiologists at the University of California, Irvine, published a provocative study that gauged the effectiveness of repetition in learning. Study participants were shown pictures of objects such as sunglasses and coffee mugs. They saw each picture no less than three times. Then, researchers showed the participants more pictures and asked them to identify only the exact items that were in the original group. But this time, the researchers inserted “lures,” objects that were similar to the original objects but not actually included in the first list, such as an old-fashioned phone instead of a modern one. As it turns out, people had a hard time identifying the lures. They were confident that those comparable objects had been on the original list, even though they hadn’t been.2
The researchers call this getting the gist instead of remembering fine details. A good example is recognizing a familiar street corner. The study suggests that if you were to visit that corner many times, you might be less able to distinguish it from an intersection that looks similar. That’s useful unless you’re trying to give your spouse directions. She might ask if there’s a drugstore at a particular intersection and your memory may not be accurate.
The effectiveness of repetition can also wane. The first reading of something gives us a great deal of information. But, as psychologists Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel explain, “When you do the second reading, you read with a sense of ‘I know this, I know this.’ So basically, you’re not processing it deeply, or picking more out of it. Often, the re-reading is cursory—and it’s insidious because this gives you the illusion that you know the material very well, when in fact, there are gaps.”3 I’ll bet we can all remember listening to someone repeat something to us while, in our heads, we thought, “I know, I know, I know.” The first hearing may have been helpful, but the second and third . . . not so much. In fact, research seems to imply that repeating important information will make people more likely to tune out rather than help them remember.
Repetition can make us feel like we know the material well. But because our attention wanders after the first reading (or our iteration of it in conversation), our memory of that material becomes less and less precise. It’s an important point to consider in the context of conversations, because we frequently repeat ourselves when we’re talking to others. And often, when someone hears the same thing for a second and third time, they think, “I already know this,” and they stop listening.
It is ironic, in a way, that repetition prompts people to stop listening, because most of us tend to repeat ourselves when we fear we haven’t been heard. You tell your coworker to have a report ready by four p.m., but you see no acknowledgment that they heard you. So, you rephrase it: “If it’s not ready by four p.m., I won’t have time to send it to the corporate office.” But again, he or she fails to respond in a way that reassures you. So, you rephrase yet again.
The thing is, just because someone doesn’t say, “Yes, I hear and understand what you’re saying,” it doesn’t mean that he or she didn’t hear and understand you. People don’t always confirm that they’ve heard important information. The vast majority of the time, there’s no need to restate what you’ve said.
This scenario plays itself out in many settings in our lives. You can find dozens of ways to tell your kid to walk the dogs or tell your spouse to fix a leaky faucet. They may continue to stare at a video screen or football game and not give you the acknowledgment you expect. So you find another way to say it. But perhaps part of the reason they’re tuning you out is because they’ve become accustomed to you telling them the same thing over and over again.
Try to become aware of how often you repeat yourself, and think about what might be prompting you to do it. Do you feel like you’re not getting the acknowledgment you need from the other person? Has he or she failed to follow through on things in the past? Are there too many distractions present when you’re trying to have a conversation (i.e., saying something important while your kid is playing a video game may not be a good idea)? Are you prone to ramble in your conversations?
Over the next few weeks, get into the habit of pausing for a couple of seconds before you respond to someone. Before you repeat yourself, take a moment to find something new to say. You can even ask your friends to tell you when you’re repeating something. I had my son say “echo” every time I started repeating things, and after hearing it a few dozen times, I began to break the habit.
A couple of years ago, I made a New Year’s resolution not to repeat the same information more than twice per conversation. I thought it would be easy. My resolution lasted for about two weeks.
It’s like when you go on a diet and start keeping a food journal. At first you can’t imagine how writing down everything you eat could help because you think you have a pretty good handle on what you consume. But when you tally every cookie, every handful of M&M’s, every soda, you realize that you weren’t actually aware of what was going into your mouth.
The same is true of repetition. Once I started keeping track of it, I realized I wasn’t actually aware of what was coming out of my mouth.
Repeating yourself can be a symptom of conversational narcissism. It can be the result of wanting to keep a conversation going but having nothing new to add. This is quite common in the workplace—we’ve all been in those meetings with someone who doesn’t want to stop talking but has nothing else to say. So, they repeat themselves. These meetings are neither enjoyable nor especially productive. Why would you want to reproduce that effect in your personal life?
CRAMMING 101
Many of us can remember pulling all-nighters in which we used flash cards or other repetitive study aids to cram for an upcoming test, all the while sucking down coffee. We may have thought that was a winning strategy, but new research shows that repeatedly drilling names or numbers doesn’t help you remember them. If you want to make something stick, spaced repetition is the way to go.
Spaced repetition is a clever variation on cramming that allows time to pass in between a repeat of information. I know some high-powered executives who swear by it, as well as medical students and even people with mild dementia. There’s a popular program called SuperMemo that allows you to use spaced repetition to memorize vocabulary, poetry, and nearly any other information you input.4
Here’s how I use it. I’m terrible at remembering names. So, when I learn someone’s name for the first time, I repeat it immediately. Then I let some time pass, a minute or so, and I say it again. If I’m able to use their name in conversation four or five times, while allowing a little time to pass in between each iteration, I have a much better chance at really learning their name. (But not a great chance, because I have a mental block when it comes to people’s names. That’s just a warning, in case we ever meet.)
The same principle can also be applied to the workplace. Let’s say there are three important points you need to convey to your coworkers. You state them at the start of the meeting (“Here’s what we’re going to cover”), then you explain each point, and at the end, you repeat them one more time (“To recap, here’s the important information”). Your colleagues are more likely to remember what you’ve said if you give structure and space to your repetition.
Repetition is often boring, unnecessary, and counterproductive. It seems to be most effective as a memory aid for the speaker and not the listener, and that’s why it’s often a conversation killer. The only way to make sure you’re not teaching people to tune you out is to pay attention to what you’re saying. Listen to yourself first. You may be surprised by what you hear and hear and hear.