30 Times People Overheard Bizarre And Funny Conversations In Chicago And Just Had To Share

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If you’ve ever walked around this large city talking about your private affairs, there’s a big chance someone got curious enough to stop and listen. But where does this urge of peeking into other people’s lives come from? Well, it seems that observing others is not only compelling and entertaining, but also primal.

John Locke, a professor of language science and author of Eavesdropping: An Intimate History, spoke to Quartz about how this habit of listening to others was first characterized, and how we can actually benefit from our nosiness. He gave a compelling argument defending this human behavior and started with mentioning that it evolved over time.

“Monkeys generally are very watchful and not just by eye, but by ear,” the professor explained. “We can assume that the very earliest humans, or proto-humans, were like that as well. … We have regions in the brain, mechanisms in the brain that are designed to draw inferences from partial information that we see and hear and smell.” Being extremely aware of what’s going on helped humans stay vigilant and protect the things they possess.

It’s interesting that when someone is talking quietly, it grabs people’s attention. However, when they are being loud, others start to feel annoyed and wish they could cover their ears. The reason behind it is that noisy social behavior violates one basic law of nature: “We don’t like donations. We don’t like it when people present us with information about themselves that we’re not seeking.”

“[People] want to know what you’re truly like inside, not what others want them to think,” Locke said. “We love it when we get something that’s truly genuinely true about others and so we still prefer taking it, or if not taking it, extracting clues on our own.”

There certainly are some psychological effects eavesdropping has on humans, because every single one of us has surrendered to our nosiness at one point or another. “It’s pretty clear that one of the things that stands as a threat to us, even in modern society, is the presence of a stranger. We simply don’t know what they’re like or what their intentions might be.”

It’s hard to tell what a person truly is like just from their appearance. Still, our eyes, ears and nose help us in sniffing out if they're a friend, or a foe. It’s only natural that we would have some kind of instrument in our brain that would help us in determining if the stranger poses us any danger.

“We’re quite good at reading those displays, or those sensitive cues, that people give off. There are mechanisms in the brain that are specialized for that purpose,” the professor explained.

According to Locke, there are no real negative consequences of eavesdropping. When we’re out in public, we need to know how to behave, so naturally, we turn to other people. We look around, see how they are dressed, how they talk, and observe their behavior in general, “and there’s nothing eavesdrop-y about that”.