Making Great Conversationalists: Chapter 12 - Part One

Life continues well here in Michigan.  My Spawn-baby is almost two now!  The sudden onset of winter always reminds me of the days and weeks after he was born.  Man, those first few weeks were rough - but I have so many amazing memories, too.  Seeing his eyes unseal and open for the first time.  His left eye took 10 days longer to unseal than the right.  Holding him for the first time when he was 8 days old and feeling the Spawn-shaped hole in the middle of my heart fill in again.  Learning that he preferred to lay on my chest in a Superman position and drum his tiny fingers on my collar bones during skin-to-skin.  He was so tiny - when he'd grab my index finger his entire hand barely reached from one side to the other.  Seeing him move his eyes without moving his head at 30 weeks and realizing that he couldn't move his eyes in their socket before that.  Spawn was out of an isolette by 31 weeks gestation which we were told was surreal.  Turns out he's a little polar bear like I am.

 Right now, I'm listening him thump his crib upstairs - God only knows how he's doing it now - between giggles 90 minutes after we put him down to sleep.  He laughs a lot at night; we joke that his preferred stuffed animal Kitty-Kitty tells him jokes after sundown.  We find him cuddled up in the cutest ways with Kitty-Kitty.  My favorite is when he's sleeping in a face-down Superman position with Kitty-Kitty under his head or chest.  My husband calls that a visible explanation as to why we obeyed safe sleep guidelines rigorously when he was an infant.

The world is a mysterious place.  I'm happily raising my dear son while substitute teaching.  Sarah Maxwell, who is about six months younger than I am, is about to publish her 12th novel-length children's book.  I know my dreams have come true.  I hope she's living the life she dreams of, too.

We've made it to the last chapter in Teri and Steven Maxwell's self-help book "Making Great Conversationalists."  Near as I can tell, this chapter is about how good conversations can...convert people or at least build your personal business.  Maybe both.  It's not the most coherent theme - and with the Maxwells that's a low bar to miss.

The introduction was completely forgettable - but one section made me laugh:

We did a survey asking Christian families questions about conversation skills to try to determine exactly what people felt was important in a conversation and what made someone a great conversationalist. In that survey, one of the things we asked the respondents to do was to rate their conversation skills from 1 to 10, with 1 being the worst and 10 being the best. The average was 7.5. That really surprised us, considering the difficulty we have in getting people to talk to us when we are at conferences. (pgs. 187-188)

My Master's degree research includes both a closed-ended survey with  opened-ended questions and a semi-structured interview with participants.  I'm relatively new at collecting information by surveys - but I can confidently say that the Maxwells are bonkers. 

There's nothing wrong with choosing the participants in a survey from a defined group of people - but it's best if every member of the group has a chance to participate.  Now, I guess it's ok if the Maxwells reached out to every person they knew through their conferences and/or ATI-based events - but if they skipped some people for any reason, the validity get shaky pretty fast. 

The Maxwells have never published this survey so we can't discuss the good and bad points of the survey design itself - but the fact that the Maxwells used an average on an ordinal data set that's probably very small and very nonparametric is not a good sign.  I really want to know the range and modes on that data set as well; I'm betting the data is highly skewed towards "I'm a good conversationalist" with very few people giving themselves low marks.   There are lots of ways the Maxwells could have corrected for that effect - but all of them do require spending a solid chunk of time reading books on survey design and statistical analysis before making the survey in the first place.

Maxwells' shock that the average was 7.5 tells me that the family didn't attempt to run the survey on a few sample people outside of their family before moving to a broader group.  Personally, I feel like that average is lower than I would have expected - but false modesty is more strongly rewarded in CP/QF land than it is in the rest of the US.   Plus....I doubt the Maxwells have been shy about their feelings about how crappy everyone else is at conversations.

In open-ended interviews, I am fascinated by the way people deal with cognitive dissonance.  As part of the interview, I present people with a series of facts that will shake a common understanding of how science works.  Some people discard their previous understanding.  Some people modify their previous understanding.  Some people double-down on the previous understanding by rejecting the facts. 

So far, no one I've interviewed has doubled-down as hard as the Maxwells did when confronted with the results of their surveys. 

Before the survey was dreamt up, the Maxwells found that people are not interested in talking to them at conferences.  The Maxwells told each other repeatedly what great conversationalists they are and decided to teach all the other weak conversationalists by writing a book.  They write a survey and tally the results.  Imagine the horror and confusion when the Maxwells realize that the people they meet at conferences self-assess their conversational skills as pretty good.   What does this mean?  Could this mean that the Maxwells are not seen charismatic in the CP/QF society?  Does this mean that the problem lies with the Maxwells rather than everyone else in their lives?  What does it mean if the Maxwell Family has a fundamental flaw visible to everyone else they know? 

Boom! 

The Maxwell clan was presented with a fact that undermined what they believed about themselves - or in fancier terms - experienced cognitive dissonance.  They could have accepted the new belief by saying, "Huh.  Other people think they converse well.  Maybe there's a different reason people avoid talking to us at conferences."   They could have adapted their previous belief to something like "People think they converse well - but maybe in higher-stress environments like conferences they don't converse as well as they do in other settings. That's why we are so isolated at conferences" or even "People think they converse well - but they'd rank themselves lower if they realized how much they are missing out on by not conversing like the Maxwells do". (Notice that the adaption doesn't necessarily have to be true or grounded strongly in fact - the adaptation just needs to make both the model and the facts seem plausible enough for the person undergoing cognitive dissonance.)  The Maxwells decided, however, to discard the survey results in order to preserve their personal model of the world where not only do the Maxwells converse better than everyone else, but everyone else is waiting for the Maxwells to teach them how to converse better.

Really, the saddest bit is the fact that the Maxwells keep telling us that no one wants to talk to them at conferences.   I've never had that problem before as a conference attendee and certainly not as a presenter at a conference!   And the Maxwells have no plans to change anything about their lives - and that is the most depressing thing of all.