A Possible Dark Side of Listening? Teachers Listening to Pupils Can Increase Burnout

Conversations with people who hold opposite partisan attitudes can elicit defensiveness, reinforce extreme attitudes, and undermine relationships with those with opposing views. However, this might not be the case when speakers experience high-quality (attentive, 2 understanding, and non-judgmental) listening from their conversation partners. We hypothesized that high-quality listening will increase speakers’ positive views toward, and their willingness to further interact with, others who hold politically opposed attitudes, and that these effects will be mediated by greater state openness. We conducted three experiments using different modalities to manipulate listening. In Study 1 (N = 379), participants recalled a conversation with an opposing political party member, with listening quality described as high-quality, low-quality, or control. Study 2 (N = 269) used imagined interactions, with participants reading vignettes describing either high-quality listening or a control condition. In Study 3 (preregistered; N = 741), participants watched a video of a listener modeling high-quality or moderate-quality listening and imagined themselves engaging in a similar interaction. Across studies, we found that high-quality listening consistently increased speakers’ state openness to politically opposed others, but did not change political attitudes. We found inconsistent evidence for speakers’ increased willingness to engage in future interactions (meta-analytic effect: 𝑑 = 0.20, p = .015). However, the indirect effect of listening on positive attitudes and willingness for future interactions through increased openness was consistently significant.

High-quality listening is a multifaceted social behaviour, and theories and research concerning it are mixed in terms of listening definitions and recommendations. The current study canvassed lay practitioners’ understanding of optimal listening qualities and training, drawing on a wide range of listening training materials (N = 207) sourced from the World-Wide-Web. Thematic analysis results were critically examined to systematically position praxis against our current understanding of listening theories. Findings are presented as a “dialectical listening theory” which posits that at its core, listeners’ behaviours often exist in direct tension with their mindset or intuition. Furthermore, we posit that this tension is amplified when individuals are faced with conversations that conflict with their perspectives or values. Finally, we argue that listeners may need to oscillate between dual-process states of unconscious (intuitive) and conscious (intentional) listening. We conclude that high-quality listening involves direct recognition and strategic management of tensions throughout the listening process.