Perceived Responsiveness Increases Tolerance of Attitude Ambivalence and Enhances Intentions to Behave in an Open-Minded Manner

In an era when humility and connection are vital for peace and sustainability, many leaders in business and government fall short by prioritizing their self-interest over ethics. Business schools, as key institutions shaping future leaders, may inadvertently reinforce this imbalance. To shift this lean toward self-interest, we propose a listening-focused pedagogy to cultivate humility and character in business school students. High-quality listening fosters interpersonal connection and promotes complex reasoning. Complex reasoning about oneself and others is a cornerstone of humility, which is central to morality and business ethics. We hypothesized that acquiring listening skills would enhance both high-quality listening and humility. To test this, we conducted a longitudinal quasi-experiment over four academic years (2018–2021) with data from 260 MBA students. Our findings show that the listening-focused course significantly increased students' listening skills and humility compared to control courses. These results demonstrate the course’s potential to have a meaningful influence on the character development of business students. We conclude by discussing theoretical and practical implications for business ethics education, offering our materials to support replication and the broader application of this pedagogy

Extensive research has documented people’s desire for social partners who are responsive to their needs and preferences, and that when they perceive that others have been responsive, they and their relationships typically thrive. For these reasons, perceived partner responsiveness is well-positioned as a core organizing theme for the study of sociability in general, and close relationships in particular. Research has less often addressed the downstream consequences of perceived partner responsiveness for cognitive and affective processes. This gap in research is important because relationships provide a central focus and theme for many, if not most, of the behaviors studied by social psychologists. This chapter begins with an overview of the construct of perceived partner responsiveness and its centrality to relationships. We then review programs of research demonstrating how perceived partner responsiveness influences three core social-psychological processes: self-enhancing social cognitions, attitude structure, and emotion regulation. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of how deeper incorporation of relationship processes can enhance the informativeness and completeness of social psychological theories.