Are Bad Listeners Actually Bad at Listening?

What Makes a Good or Bad Listener

Angie Basiouny: I’m here today with Rebecca Schaumburg. She’s a professor in our Department of Operations, Information and Decisions. Becky’s research focuses on interpersonal communication, negotiations, mood, emotions — the soft skills that we bring to the office that really make a difference. Today we’re going to talk about her new co-authored paper, “Disagreement Gets Mistaken for Bad Listening,” on the skill of listening.

Becky, I found this paper to be really unique. The main finding is that when the listener agrees with the speaker, the speaker thinks of that listener as a good listener. And conversely, when the listener disagrees, they think of that listener as a bad listener. Can you take us into the details?

Becky Schaumberg: Yeah, so you’re right that the heart of this work is that we have this conflation between listening and agreement. I think we can intellectually say that, of course, someone could listen to me, they could attend really closely and disagree with me. I think intellectually, we understand that listening and agreement are separate things. But emotionally and viscerally, something is quite different. Our feelings of being listened to appear to be very closely tied to whether the person ultimately agrees or disagrees with us.

In this work, we ran 11 different experiments where people talked and exchanged information around a variety of topics and across different mediums, such as online chats or video chats or even through recorded messages. And what we found is that even when people listened exactly the same — so the experience was exactly the same — later, when you learned that that listener ultimately agreed with you, you thought that they had listened really well. And when they disagreed, you thought that they had listened poorly, even when you had objective cues otherwise.

Basiouny: What made you want to study this particular aspect of interpersonal communication?

Schaumberg: Listening has been elevated as a key aspect or trait of good leaders, as essential in workplaces, and as an essential tool for helping to bridge differences. But one of the things that we started to find in our research was that one of the key predictors about whether somebody actually felt heard was just whether that person agreed with them. But that seems somewhat problematic. Because ultimately, listening is meant to be about information exchange, particularly in the workplace. I know listening can be very different in an interpersonal context. But in the workplace, listening is really a tool for information exchange. It’s not necessarily supposed to just be about affirmation.

But what our work shows is what it means to actually listen well, and then what it means to be perceived as a good listener, might not necessarily be the same thing. Because one of the best ways you’re perceived as a good listener is simply to agree. And that seems somewhat problematic when ultimately what we want to do with listening is help to exchange differing views.

Separating Listening Skills From Personal Views

Basiouny: I noticed in your paper, one of the phrases that you come back to is, “You’re not listening to me.” Anyone who’s had a conversation with someone else has felt that way at a certain time period. Let’s go back to the experiments that you ran. You ran a number of experiments. Tell us how you studied this, how you proved this theory.

Schaumberg: We ran 11 different experiments with over 3,000 participants. And we used a variety of different methods, such as having conversations like this, synchronous chats, online or written chats, or people recorded messages that somebody ultimately then listened to. And we had people talk about a variety of different topics. Here at Wharton, some of the students talked about campus-related issues. We had people talk about sociopolitical topics, or we had them talk about what were simulated workplace issues, such as who you might want to hire.

In every experiment, what we did is we held constant the actual listening. This was because, unbeknownst to our participants, all of our listeners in our experiments were hired by us. They were trained actors, who we trained to listen in particular way. The reason for that is we want the actual listening experience was the same. But after this listening experience, we gave information to participants about the views of the listener: whether they agreed with the listener’s position, disagreed, or we didn’t share that information at all.

What we found was that when we provided that information, people thought that the listener who agreed with them was a great listener. Those who disagreed with them were a pretty poor listener. And somewhere in the middle was when we perceived no information at all. This occurred even when people had very strong cues that the person deeply understood what they were talking about.

Basiouny: In the paper, when you walk us through these experiments, you mention that you trained the listeners to do things like nod and say “yes” and give affirmations, verbal cues, nonverbal cues, that they are agreeing with the listener. At the end, when that information was filled out, it didn’t matter. It was consistent across the board through all your experiments, that if the listener disagreed, that they were considered a bad listener. Is there a fairness issue there? As you mentioned earlier on, intellectually, we know that there’s a difference. But viscerally, emotionally, we don’t. Is there something that we can do to make this proceed differently?

Schamburg: We did a lot, and we did a lot of work to figure out how we could maybe turn this off. It was actually in that effort where the strength of the effect became so striking to me. There were a couple of experiments where we thought, “Let’s manipulate how well somebody actually listened.” So, we trained our listeners to either listen really well or to listen poorly. Like, distracted by their phones, showing no level of comprehension. And what we thought is, “Well, when you get a really strong cue that somebody has really understood you, that maybe should override this effect.”

Again, this is when we were trying to take away the effect. We found that a bad listener — someone who was distracted by their phone, looking around, not showing any level of understanding — when they agreed, they were still seen as a better listener than a person who listened very intently, could comprehend and share back every information that the speaker had said, but ultimately disagreed with them. We found that a bad listener who agreed was seen as a better listener than a very good listener who disagreed.

When you come back to this question of fairness, I think that really puts it in stark relief that even when I am doing objective work — I understand. I am taking in the information better. I understand. But ultimately, just knowing your views does not mean that I should have to agree with them. Because I can take that view, integrate it with other information I have, and ultimately come to a different conclusion. That doesn’t mean that I did not listen well. But at least in terms of our experience, it sure feels like that.

Basiouny: What is the the main message from this research? If you were teaching about this paper in your classes on negotiation, what is the main message here, especially in the office?

Schaumberg: Well, it’s interesting, because I actually have started to teach this in my negotiations classes. What I want to say is that we can’t necessarily use someone’s views, whether they share our views or not share our views, as an indication that they really understand our position. And to understand that these things are very separate.

A theme that we keep coming back to in the paper, which you already alluded to, is that oftentimes when people say, “You’re not listening to me,” what they’re really saying is, “You’re not agreeing with me.” One of the things that I really want people to understand is that when you feel that somebody is not listening to you, is it that they don’t understand you, or is it that they ultimately are coming to a different position? Is this an issue of listening, or is this an issue of shared views? Now we see that these things are very hard to separate, but it’s absolutely critical to find a way to separate them.