Bucket errors are one (out of many) possible reasons that an elephant might not listen to what's being said. Briefly, people learn to associate a bundle of concepts with what certain words, that might not match the intended meaning of the words. They might put together the concepts of "time to eat" and "stop having fun" such that, even if you have their favourite food, they'll have to parse the sentence negatively. Navigating bucket errors is quite tricky, both when it occurs to others and to yourself. But you can still mine their reactions for information. Does the child react negatively only when I tell them it's time to eat? Can I entice them with the smell of the food, the sight of me eating their favourite dishes etc.?
Another possible reason an elephant might not listen to what's being said is that they incorrectly seperate words/concepts. For instance, in the case of your students, their value shards aren't latching onto the right triggers. The shard "this is a waste of time" doesn't fire when their brains interpret words, it fires instead when they are doing something repeatedly and failing, or have noticed some things in the past that seem to save time when it previously took a long while, or when you tell them after just having struggled to complete a task that their is a much faster way to do things by designing their algorithms beforehand. Or their "will get good grades" shard may only fire in contexts where you explicitly tell them that X will contribute to their grades, or be on their exam or so on, because that's historically how information about how get good grades appeared in the past. Telling them that "this is a good habit" often hasn't resulted in clear improvements to their lives, so they ignore utterances of that sort. Thinking about things that would have historically resulted in reinforcement events for/against the behaviour you want is a good way to generate hypothesis about this kind of stuff.
The elephant doesn't learn from deliberate thought, nor present its operations, nearly as easily as we'd like.
People learning CPR sometimes display this kind of feature.
In the first aid qualification I teach you can fail the CPR assessment for failing to check if the casualty is breathing, or for failing to call for an ambulance. Both automatic fails.
I am sure that it will come as no surprise to you that this feels unfair to some of the candidates. They devote so much mental energy to remembering it is 30-to-2, but an extra 5 breaths at the beginning for a child. One handed compressions because the casualty is small, 1/3rd of the depth of the chest. 120 beats per minute. Tilt the chin back to give breaths. They can do all that, but they failed the exam in the first 20 seconds when they didn't mime a phone call to the ambulance. They could actually have messed up 2/3rds of that other stuff and gotten away with it. I have told them all the marking scheme. I reminded them 3 minutes before the exam "Their are three ways of automatically failing this exam. Failing to check for dangers, or breathing and failing to ring an ambulance". But no, the big beautiful lump of plastic is just so exciting, time to do compressions on it.
In this case, and the code-comments case, I think part of it is that the human mind focuses on the novel or active part of the experience. Comments don't "do" anything. Taking an imaginary phone out of your pocket and saying "999 ambulance" doesn't "do" anything. Actual code does stuff. Pressing on the manikin's chest makes it squeeze down.
I suspect one source of the challenge is that we anticipate what others are going to say. I think it is probably true to say that about 99% of the time we can correctly complete any simple statement someone is saying to us. However, the over all message is more than just a statement. (I think perhaps not quite right here but maybe) How complex a communication, in terms of needed statements, before the expected level of "hearing" has dropped to miscommunications? (Perhaps a case of missing the forest for the trees?)
Focus is perhaps another, we anticipate and then before the speaker has completed their thought we've already started the response in our head -- there by not actually hearing the full claim and misunderstanding.
I also think culture and communication style may come into play. Some build up slowly so those who want the bottom line first will be frustrated and, perhaps, confused because they are being asked to do a lot more work to hear than they are used to. I think this might s symmetrical so giving the bottom line first and then putting the argument together may be hard to follow for those the like the slow, build to the end approach of communicating.
Last might be recognizing the relevance. For both the worried about offending and the terrible two year old something that is being said isn't adding up to the claim -- be it I'm offering you something you want (pizza) or I'm not offended. In the offense case it may be that the speaker (and those he interacts with) would never actually acknowledge offense, and in fact might deny it even if they then set out saying some things that they view as having to flow from such a sentiment (not sure what was in the blah blah blah exchange)
I am pretty sure most of the above are failing I have had in communication at times -- and in some cases (like anticipating and not having the patient to actually listen until the end) might be called chronic bad habits that I try working to improve.
Not sure if this is helpful, but I feel like something like this happens within me when I try to change the current thing I'm doing (get ready for work, go to bed, what have you). My elephant really doesn't like changing gears, and it can be quite difficult to follow through.
The elephant's response is mostly a strong wave of negative emotions. The emotions are similar to ones where you might be told about a new pile of work you have to do, not the ones you might have when encountering something repulsive. Something like "ughhhhh", not "ewwww". Parsing out the words is something I have to do intentionally and often skip over, plus, the words I ascribe to the emotion might be a post-facto fiction that doesn't really map to what the elephant meant.
Your example of the students who don't listen to you on commenting before coding sounds quite similar to what my elephant says. It feels (again, there's a chance I'm just making this up) like disbelief. The students hear you saying "try tactic X to make things simpler", and it's a tactic I've tried on myself many times, but the elephant doesn't believe me.
I have heard the elephant described similarly to a baby - inscrutable and seemingly on their own schedule, hard to figure out. Most critically, babies and Haidt's elephant don't communicate in words and logic and don't listen to your thoughts. I think they listen to experiences - evidence, in the Bayesian sense. If I want to convince my elephant of something, I need to try it and show the elephant (how to get the elephant to try something before it has the evidence for it is an exercise left for the reader).
There are limits here - for me, my ADHD means that my elephant will always be pretty stuck in his ways, and he'll forget evidence in my favor quite quickly. For others, for the crowd of programming students or the kid who hates hearing it's dinner time, your leverage is sadly limited. If a person doesn't want to cooperate with you, there's not a whole lot you can do (but I do think Algon has some great ideas).
First, some examples.
In my beginning programming classes, I tell students (and show them): write comments first, before coding. Some won't. I tell them: write the algorithm first. I prove this will save them time. There's a whole chapter on why and how to do this. Many won't. (Except twice, they really got it. IDK why.) As time goes by -- I hope! -- they learn that this is the way to go. How can I help them hear at the start?
I was with my 6-ish nephew, and he wanted to show me a computer game. Computer wouldn't start. He called in his mom for help. She said, Sure, I'll try, but I think you should know your uncle knows everything I do about computers and more. I could see on his face: he was waiting for her to stop talking nonsense and fix the damn thing. Why couldn't he hear her?
I was at an informal lecture; the presenter used the story of Cain and Abel to comment on a supposed conflict between ranchers and farmers in ancient times. I went to speak to him. He said, "I'm sorry if you were offended." I said, "No, it was great! I really liked [blah blah]." He said, "OK. I'm sorry if you were offended." I said, "I wasn't offended at all. [More details]." He said, "OK. I have to go. I'm sorry you were offended." Why couldn't he hear?
And then there's the kid with the terrible twos. "It's time to eat. We have pizza, your favorite!" Response: "NO!" (Didn't he hear you say "pizza"?)
Haidt (The Righteous Mind) and probably others think it's the elephant, the part of the brain that's emotion and intuition and gut, that's charging on, heedless of the babblings of the rider, the intellectual part we think it in charge but actually functions to justify what the elephant already decided to do. OK. But it sure would be helpful if we could get to that elephant before it's made up its stubborn mind. Haidt suggests: convince the elephant, not the rider (however that would work). I'll add: if it's me, I can decide not to care so much, so the elephant will be more cooperative.
In the case of the beginning programmers, I already use self-interest (think of the time you'll save!) and availability bias (every program they see starts with commenting). It worked better this semester. All I can think I did different was show them the grading scheme for a program, that 60% of it was commenting and algorithm. :) Maybe that was it; IDK.
This being LessWrong, of course we should consider how we have trouble hearing. This may be a challenge. If I didn't hear it, I'll have a hard time reporting that here. :)
What examples do you have? Why can't you/the other person hear? What can be done?