Reformulating dispute narratives through active listening

Abstract

Traditional approaches to mediation treat active listening skills likeformulation (reflecting, mirroring) as neutral means through which mediators may come to know the issues of concern to disputants. This study investigated the use offormulation through the microanalysis of a mediation session and a therapy session. The analysis shows that formulating is a nonneutral means of communication that allows the mediator to (1) transform disputants' statements, (2) select or ignore disputants' issues, and (3) invite or discourage disputants' contributions to these issues. Formulation apparently plays an important function in the reformulation of dispute narratives.Aristotle wrote in Rhetoric that "the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor" (cited in Ross, 1952Ross, , p. 1410. Metaphors color poems and can be powerful rhetorical devices in arguments. Metaphors, however, are not just for poets and speech writers; they saturate all our talk and thought, whether we are cooks, bankers, particle physicists, or mediators. We use metaphors to help us understand the world around us by looking to familiar analogs.Metaphors are created when features of one domain are recognized as being similar to those residing in another domain. Our understanding of minds, for example, is facilitated by comparing them to computers (which need programming) or to gardens (which need cultivating). However, although metaphors facilitate understanding, the understanding created is invariably of a particular kind, thus constraining the way we understand the world around us (Ng and Bradac, 1993).Most mediation theory and research is implicitly built on the conduit metaphor of communication (for example, Folberg and Taylor, 1984; Note: I would like to thank Janet Bavelas, Catherine Morns, and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments on this article. I also thank the Institute for Dispute Resolution at the University of Victoria for support during the summer of 1996. This article is based on my master's thesis, portions of which were presented at Conflict Studies:

The Listener as Addressee in Face-to-Face Dialogue

“…They inevitably preserve some of the speaker's information, delete other information, and thereby transform the original statement, none of which are neutral processes. One of our research group, Bruce Phillips (1998Phillips ( , 1999 demonstrated these nonneutral effects of formulations by comparing them in two different approaches to conflict resolution. He found that the formulations of the traditional, "neutral" mediator focused more on problems than on strengths and successes.…”

Can Questions Lead to Change? An Analogue Experiment

“…• formulation, which is a psycholinguistic term that includes paraphrasing or reflecting Phillips, 1998Phillips, , 1999 • positive versus negative content (Smock, Froerer, & Bavelas, 2011;Tomori, 2004;Tomori & Bavelas, 2007) • questions (McGee, 1999;McGee, Del Vento, & Bavelas, 2005;Tomori, 2004;Tomori & Bavelas, 2007) …”

Active Listening Attitude Scale (ALAS): Reliability and Validity in a Nationwide Sample of Greek Educators

“…Consequently, as shown by the literature's descriptive and experimental research, the interest in active listening has spanned different fields, from marital relationship interventions [18][19][20], to counseling [21,22] and mediation [23], doctor-patient relationships [24,25], nurse-patient relationships [26,27] and even crisis management, such as hostage negotiations [28]. A vast majority of publications for more than 50 years has focused on the corporate world [12,[29][30][31][32] and on the effects of managers' active listening training on workers' mental health [16,17,32,33].…”