The Power of Listening in Helping People Change

Willful ignorance is a pervasive phenomenon with significant consequences for decision-making, belief maintenance, and social polarization. While past research has identified various motivational and contextual factors underlying this behavior, less attention has been paid to attitude characteristics that shape the likelihood of engaging in willful ignorance. Addressing this gap, this paper introduces attitude strength as a critical and heretofore unexplored psychological factor that should affect when and why individuals engage in willful ignorance. We argue that strong attitudes, such as those held with certainty, are highly accessible, or are perceived as morally relevant, are particularly likely to elicit willful ignorance. Drawing on cognitive dissonance theory and motivated reasoning, we synthesize findings across domains, from political partisanship to responses to misinformation and AI-mediated communication.

Can perceived responsiveness, the extent to which an individual feels understood, validated, and cared for by close others, reduce prejudiced attitudes? We hypothesized that perceived responsiveness by meaningful other people would increase recipients’ intellectual humility and attitude ambivalence and that these changes would reduce prejudice. Five studies (total N = 3362), four of which were preregistered, manipulated perceived responsiveness by a specific person (Studies 1–3, 5) or measured the effects of perceived responsiveness by the closest social network of the recipient (Study 4). All studies supported the hypotheses. Specifically, Studies 1 and 2 found that perceived responsiveness increased intellectual humility and attitude ambivalence and reduced prejudice toward a group from a pre-determined list. Study 3 replicated these findings when participants freely chose the social group. In Study 4, perceived responsiveness from individuals’ closest social networks predicted the dependent variables a few days afterward, controlling for positive and negative affect and social desirability. Finally, in Study 5, we added a condition of positive social interaction to rule out the possibility that the prior findings were due to recalling an affectively positive experience. The effect of perceived responsiveness on prejudice reduction (i.e., increased attitude favorability toward the social group) was not moderated by attitude certainty (Study 2), anxious or avoidant attachment style (Study 2), or attitude morality (Study 3). This work suggests that fostering perceived responsiveness can serve as a strategy for mitigating prejudice and promoting more open-minded attitudes.