Just 55 Percent
Why should anyone think that making instruction less explicit would increase understanding?
Again from David Brooks's How to Know a Person:
How good are you at reading other people?
I probably don't know you personally, but I can make the following statement with a high degree of confidence: You're not as good as you think you are. We all go through our days awash in social ignorance. William Ickes, a leading scholar on how accurate people are at perceiving what other people are thinking, finds that strangers who are in the midst of their first conversation read each other accurately only about 20 percent of the time and close friends and family members do so only 35 percent of the time. Ickes rates his research subjects on a scale of "empathic accuracy" from 0 to 100 percent and finds great variation from person to person. Some people get a zero rating. When they are in conversation with someone they've just met, they have no clue what the other person is actually thinking. But other people are pretty good at reading others and score around 55 percent. (The problem is that people who are terrible at reading others think they are just as good as those who are pretty accurate.)
It is important to note that, in Ickes's studies, the medium of information exchange is conversation, and the conversants are really trying to be explicit and clear to each other. (See Daniel Dor's work on linguistic conversation as serving the [sole] purpose of "instructing the imagination".) Yet, even given this, the noisiness of the linguistic channel—at least as it relates to empathic understanding—is significant. It is sobering to know that "pretty good" in an explicit instructional context can maybe get you to 55% (empathic) understanding of another person (if you're good at it).
Why should anyone think, then, that making the communication less explicit would increase this percent? If your close friends and family can read you right only about 35% of the time when you're not trying to hide or withhold anything, who in their right mind would think that percent would go up when you try to withhold information from an entire classroom full of mostly strangers?
Let's try this prompt in GPT-4 and see what we get:
Let's think about all this in the context of Daniel's Dor's work on language as a technology that "instructs imagination". In other words, ALL linguistic communication is instructional--conversants reciprocally "instruct" each other about their own private-experiential worlds using the technology of language. If the linguistic channel is noisy even when we try to "instruct" each other explicitly, what does this tell us about the weaknesses of implicit inquiry instruction?
When instruction or communication is implicit, it relies heavily on the listener's ability to pick up on subtle cues and unstated implications. Given the noisiness of language, this leaves significant room for misinterpretation and misunderstanding.
Implicit instruction necessitates a higher reliance on nonverbal cues and contextual understanding. However, as Ickes's research shows, individuals vary in their ability to accurately interpret these cues. This variability can lead to different interpretations of the same implicit message.
Implicit instruction requires more cognitive effort from the receiver. They must not only process the explicit content of the message but also infer the unstated parts. This process can be error-prone, especially if the receiver lacks sufficient context or has different experiential backgrounds.
In the absence of explicit instruction, individuals are more likely to project their own experiences, expectations, and biases onto the communication. This can lead to a misalignment between the speaker's intended instruction and the listener's interpretation.
The effectiveness of implicit instruction is highly dependent on the shared knowledge and experiences between the conversants. Without a common ground, the chances of misinterpretation increase.
