Chapter 4: Listening
4.5 Summary: The Paradox of Listening
Chapter 6 explores persuasion as a form of communication, and most research on persuasion has focused on formulating effective messages. I have taught out of many good persuasion textbooks, but none has included a chapter on listening. Only recently have there been the first glimmers of acknowledgement that listening is in itself a persuasion technique. As David Leonhardt put it in a New York Times editorial about the failure of recent social movements (“Differ We Must,” Oct. 6, 2023), “it’s difficult to persuade others when you stop listening to them.” He demonstrates that “refusing to listen to the other side of a debate doesn’t have a very good record of success,” implying that all the persuasion techniques in the world get you nowhere if the targets of your persuasion are closed off because they don’t feel that you’re listening to them.
How can listening be a persuasive process? Isn’t trying to get someone else to adopt your point of view the very opposite of listening, which requires acceptance of what they say? Are you just humoring them, waiting politely for the right opportunity to tell them how wrong they are? Or if you truly listen to them, don’t you run the risk of them changing your mind?
Likewise, Chapter 17, on conflict management, explores the healthiest and most productive ways to get through the conflict process. What you say is obviously key, and the chapter is not intended to diminish the importance of speaking your mind. It is, however, intended to stress the importance of the other side of the coin: without listening, nothing happens. I would not characterize the listening process as easy; it is perhaps more accurate to say that listening is an activity that’s easy to do poorly, and difficult to do well. It’s a fundamentally paradoxical activity: to be a good listener, you must “put yourself away” — temporarily put your own concerns on the back burner, give up your chance to speak, set aside other things you may want to be doing, and sometimes suppress your own opinions. Yet it also requires you to “be present” — to engage in a potentially demanding cognitive activity, be emotionally empathetic, and let your imagination follow where the speaker wants to take you.
Perhaps the biggest paradox of all is that people want others to be good listeners, yet are reluctant to do the work necessary to become good at it themselves. It is so easy to shout “Why aren’t you listening to me?” How many people stop and ask themselves, “Why aren’t I listening to you?”
If you do want to become better at listening, this exercise may help:
BOX 4.5: EXERCISE: Do You Mean?
The exercise works best in groups of 4–6 people. It takes roughly 20 minutes.
- Assemble into groups of 4–6. Each member will take a turn being the speaker, while the others are listeners. One listener should also be the counter.
- The speaker makes a simple declarative statement, such as a statement of opinion or preference — “I like snow” or “I’m sorry I got rid of my old car.” The statement does not have to be cryptic or deliberately loaded with secret messages, but it should be meaningful to the speaker, not trivial.
- Listeners ask interpretive questions beginning with the phrase “Do you mean ______?” (Examples: “Do you mean you enjoy skiing?” “Do you mean you think you didn’t ask a high enough selling price for your car?”).
- The speaker can respond in one of four ways:
- Yes
- No
- Irrelevant (may be true or not, but is not contained in the original statement)
- Redundant (already covered under someone else’s Do You Mean question)
- The counter counts “yes” responses until reaching five (“no” responses don’t count). Note: although they don’t count toward the tally of five “yes” responses, “no” responses can actually be more informative.
- After five “yes” responses, a listener asks the speaker, “Is there anything else you meant by that statement that we didn’t get to?” and lets them respond.
- Switch to the next speaker; repeat until everyone has had a turn.
- Ask for general observations at the end. Students are often surprised at how much can be contained in one simple sentence, how easily they make assumptions about what other people mean, and what listeners don’t pick up in statements they thought were clear and simple.
