Can listening training empower service employees? The mediating roles of anxiety and perspective-taking

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.

This research tests a novel source of resistance to social influence—the automatic repetition of habit. In three experiments, participants with strong habits failed to align their behavior with others. Specifically, participants with strong habits to drink water in a dining hall or snack while working did not mimic others’ drinking or eating, whereas those with weak habits conformed. Similarly, participants with strong habits did not shift expectations that they would act in line with descriptive norms, whereas those with weak habits reported more normative behavioral expectations. This habit resistance was not due to a failure to perceive influence: Both strong and weak habit participants’ recalled others’ behavior accurately, and it was readily accessible. Furthermore, strong habit participants shifted their normative beliefs but not behavior in line with descriptive norms. Thus, habits create behavioral resistance despite people’s recognition and acceptance of social influence.