DON’T PIN THE TAIL ON THE DONKEY
Most of us are familiar with the image of the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil monkeys with their hands covering their eyes, ears, and mouths. The image, called the three wise monkeys, can be traced to a seventeenth-century carving at the Toshogu shrine in Japan. The maxim probably existed much earlier, as a similar sentiment was included in a second-century collection of Confucian aphorisms: “Look not at what is contrary to propriety; listen not to what is contrary to propriety; speak not what is contrary to propriety; make no movement which is contrary to propriety.”1
The durability of the maxim attests to its timeless wisdom. Seeing, hearing, and saying (or typing) no evil—what we call playing dumb in this chapter—is more necessary than ever in the digital age, when we are doing so much more communicating, than it was when Confucius set down the advice nearly 2,000 years ago.
Seldom does a week pass without a politician, celebrity, athlete, or business leader making the news for saying something stupid that’s broadcast all over the land.
While we may outwardly chuckle—or wince—at the gaffes, many of us also secretly sympathize, because similar things have happened to us, though mercifully on a smaller scale. We’ve sent reactive messages and immediately realized our mistake. We’ve left imprudent voice-mail messages when we were angry that we’d like to erase. And at some time we’ve all said something so preposterous that we leave our conversational partners scratching their heads or looking down at their feet.
The digital age exposes those dumb statements mercilessly, while simultaneously making it harder—and sometimes impossible—to erase the reminders of our ill-chosen words.2 And the speed and expedience of digital communication encourage us to create more messages with less thought and preparation, practically guaranteeing that we will transmit more faulty messages that we want to take back. What used to be a rough draft, with all its errors and omissions, is now a final copy, because we don’t allot the time for revision and reflection.
Research, and our own experience, suggests that people often feel less inhibited when communicating in asynchronous and device-mediated ways and that those messages often contain more sensitive details and more forceful thoughts and opinions.3
As inhibition falls, the need to emulate the three wise monkeys rises. When you’re faced with a message that probably should never have been sent, the best way to react is to play dumb.
Playing dumb means that, for the benefit of your relationship, you quietly act like you don’t see or hear something. Playing dumb is a versatile and effective way to prevent relational damage. It’s a smart and humane communication strategy that benefits you, the person in front of you, and the underlying relationship.
Playing dumb benefits your conversational partner by allowing her to recover from ill-conceived words and messages. As we’ve discussed, people often self-correct if we give them the space to do so. When you don’t immediately respond, you provide that opportunity for a person to voluntarily come back with “That’s not quite what I meant” or “I can’t believe I just said that.”
Playing dumb benefits your underlying relationship by deescalating a situation and allowing hasty words to disappear without comment. You’ll stop conversational escalation before it starts.
And playing dumb benefits you by allowing you to ignore statements you don’t want to acknowledge, like when a colleague shares shocking but irrelevant gossip. Not every comment deserves recognition, and not every topic merits a discussion.
Do you have an important client who loves to share conspiracy theories? A boss whose politics are to the right of Attila the Hun or to the left of Wavy Gravy? A coworker who makes inappropriate comments about other people in your office? These are all excellent candidates for playing dumb.
Playing dumb can keep you out of conversational quicksand—and mud—and let words and topics you want to avoid die an early and merciful death.
Playing dumb sounds simple: just don’t react. And it yields compelling relational benefits. So why do we play dumb only a fraction of the times we should? Because it’s hard to override our instincts—and our desire—to respond. There’s a reason why the three wise monkeys were emblazoned on the Toshogu shrine and why Confucius thought it was important to render his timeless advice.
Playing dumb requires unusual intelligence.
Playing dumb is challenging for many reasons, but the most obvious is because we feel obligated to respond when spoken to or to reply when we receive a message. As conversations pick up a rhythm, or as our inbox stacks up, we feel increasing pressure to respond when it’s “our turn” (so much so that turn is the word used in communication research to describe when people speak in conversation).
Imagine that you’re talking face-to-face about a project with a coworker named Jack. The interaction has been productive, but at the next turn in the conversation, Jack says: “We sure haven’t got much help on this project from Jill. I don’t know how she keeps her job.” And then he stops. It’s your turn.
You don’t exactly think Jill is the employee of the month, but you aren’t interested in mudslinging either. Still, the momentum of the conversation propels you toward responding (“I agree,” or “She’s really a piece of work,” or “You’re right”).
Conversations have a trajectory that moves people along, and the force is tough to stop. Most of the time, this flow facilitates communication and can explain why you feel a reflexive urge to respond to Jack’s comment. If you can overcome that, silence is the most common and effective way to play dumb, but sometimes it’s easier to reply neutrally or ambiguously instead. You could say to Jack “I see,” “Okay,” or “I understand why you feel that way” in a response that doesn’t explicitly affirm his statement. Alternatively, you could redirect to the conversation’s main point after hearing a comment that should be ignored: “The project’s been going well up to this point, Jack, and I think we should focus on incorporating the client’s feedback next.”4
The important thing is to move the discussion away from the offending words. Silence, neutral responses, or redirection can often get a conversation back on track. It’s also possible that your silence, ambiguity, or redirection will clue in your conversational partner on the kinds of comments that stifle conversation. If this knowledge leads to better dialogue in the future, playing dumb will have delivered both short- and long-term benefits.
The second reason why we don’t play dumb as often as we should is a bit embarrassing: we don’t want to. We get a twisted satisfaction from holding people to their dumb words. A coworker says something about a client that’s so outlandish—and usually counter to what we believe—that we pounce on the statement. During Thanksgiving dinner Uncle Billy demonstrates an eye-watering insensitivity to people from other parts of the world, and you carve him up like the turkey. A colleague who’s having a bad day spouts off about “how things really work in business,” filling his polemic with half-truths, speculation, and kindergarten-level reasoning. Instead of letting him harmlessly have his say, we break out the proverbial red pen and start correcting his errors.
Another reason we don’t play dumb is that we like closure. We don’t want to leave a conversational thread hanging in the air, because humans naturally sense that something is amiss when conversations are incomplete. We scramble to find endings. You’ve probably had the experience of wondering when you could stop responding to a text message, an e-mail, or a social media posting. When, exactly, does the conversation end? Do I have to say goodbye after Jill says good-bye, or is the conversation already over? After Jim says “You’re welcome” to my thank you, do I have to write him back, or is the conversation already over?
The same hunt for closure happens in synchronous (face-to-face and phone) conversations, but usually with more cues to help us. When is it time to move on at a cocktail party? How can we leave the boss’s office after the discussion is basically over but the boss is still talking?
We also don’t like playing dumb because, well, we don’t want people to think we’re actually dumb. If we don’t respond to an off-color joke from a colleague who just revealed himself to be (at least) 1 percent perverted, 1 percent bigoted, or 100 percent idiotic, will he think we didn’t get it? But ignoring words that are point-less—or worse—is anything but dim-witted.
Finally, playing dumb is hard because conversational silence can make everyone uncomfortable. Playing dumb requires an appreciation, or at least a tolerance, for pauses and silence that most of us don’t naturally have. Next time you’re talking with a friend, start adding pauses (count to four) in the conversation and see how that makes you feel. See how your friend reacts. Most likely, you’ll feel uncomfortable, and your friend might wonder if you put the wrong kind of mushrooms on your pizza.
You can engineer that discomfort to work in your favor. Making your conversational partner notice something unnatural—the silence—might make him think about what’s happening and self-correct or switch topics. A few seconds of silence, and a bit of conversational discomfort, can often restore sanity to a temporarily dysfunctional interaction.
Five rules will help you play dumb more effectively:
1. Hide any nonverbal signals that you are playing dumb. Put on your best poker face. Playing dumb is considerate when it’s done discreetly, but it’s embarrassing to the other person when it’s overt. So while you’re being silent, also keep your eyes from rolling at whatever ridiculous things you’ve just heard.
2. Understate your dumbness. Be inconspicuous. If you oversell your dumbness by acting like one of the Three Stooges, being totally clueless or befuddled, you’ll draw unwanted attention to your actions, or you may cause the other person to double down on her unproductive words. Dumbness works best when you subtly allow the other person to take advantage of the gap in the conversation to walk back from her ill-advised words.
3. Don’t add anything substantive if you have to talk. It’s easiest and best when your silence and intentional gaps provide enough room for someone to self-correct. But you can play dumb and still talk, as long as you don’t add anything substantive to the conversation. Use neutral continuers like um-hum, I see, okay, or I hear you. There’s a danger that the other person will hear your neutrality as a tacit approval of his statements, so use them selectively and exert your right to remain completely silent when you hear something so offensive that you don’t feel comfortable being neutral. If your conversational partner asks about your lack of reaction, you can say you have nothing to add, politely request a topic switch, or just start talking about something else.
4. Resist the urge to prove someone wrong. Unless something crucial hangs in the balance, if you hear someone misquote a statistic, mangle a story, or make a logical error, don’t whip out your smartphone and start searching the Internet to prove her wrong. And when someone lays a goofy conspiracy theory or profoundly loopy worldview on you, don’t treat it as your moral obligation to set him straight. Playing dumb means letting go of the need to be right about everything.
5. Don’t play dumb too often. There’s a line between playing dumb for relational harmony and playing dumb because you are in denial about a clear and present relational problem. If you find yourself playing dumb frequently, it may be a warning sign of a larger issue that you need to address. Fundamentally, playing dumb involves a trade-off: we sacrifice part of a conversation in the short term in order to preserve an underlying relationship. Don’t misuse the technique to avoid important relational issues. There are other communication tools to help you handle relationship problems.
You might find that it’s beneficial to play dumb more consistently with bosses, key clients, and important colleagues, where you have less leverage to alter their behavior. You might also choose to play dumb with older relatives (it’s usually impractical to pressure people to change toward the end of their life) who have a penchant for saying ill-advised things that drive you crazy but don’t really harm you. In these cases, your long-term strategy might be to listen and comment when necessary, without adding anything substantive, or to change the underlying conditions to limit the instances of problematic communication. If a key client tends to make off-color jokes after a couple of happy-hour cocktails, start inviting him to breakfast instead. Or if Aunt Sarah can’t resist criticizing your housekeeping every time she comes over, try to visit at her house, instead.
When playing dumb succeeds, it usually results in either a topic switch or a conversational exit. If playing dumb fails, try to exit the conversation or change topics by talking about something else or circling back to an earlier (and inoffensive) thread in the conversation. Alternatively, you can ask for permission to switch topics (“Can we talk about something else?”). People will often get the hint or simply acquiesce to your request.
Playing dumb illustrates the power of communication in its absence. We exert a profound influence on interactions with what we don’t say, type, or forward.
Playing dumb occasionally is a gift—a break—we give to our relationships. In today’s communication environment where speed routinely trumps deliberation and where restraint is often abandoned by the desire for self-expression, we need all the breaks we can get. Instead of pinning the tail on the donkey, play dumb and give him an opportunity to self-correct.
Playing dumb is one of the smartest, and most altruistic, moves in your communication toolkit.
Now it’s time to take a look at another communication tool, questioning, that you probably don’t think about very often. Unfortunately, it shows.