“You’re Not Listening”: Negotiating and Problematizing Ideal Interaction Through Metatalk About Listening in the Waco Standoff

Agne, Robert R.

doi:10.1080/10570314.2017.1355979

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 41 publications

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“…What happens when people believe that their conversation partners are not listening when they actually are (Type II error)? From marriage counselors to customer service employees to international mediators, conflict resolution professionals are frequently tasked with repairing the relational damage resulting from one party accusing the other of failing to listen (e.g., Agne, 2018).…”

Section: Overly Optimistic Perceptions Of Listeningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conveying and detecting listening during live conversation.

Collins,

Minson,

Kristal

et al. 2024

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Across all domains of human social life, positive perceptions of conversational listening (i.e., feeling heard) predict well-being, professional success, and interpersonal flourishing. However, a fundamental question remains: Are perceptions of listening accurate? Prior research has not empirically tested the extent to which humans can detect others' cognitive engagement (attentiveness) during live conversation. Across five studies (total N = 1,225), using a combination of correlational and experimental methods, we find that perceivers struggle to distinguish between attentive and inattentive conversational listening. Though people's listening fluctuated naturally throughout their conversations (people's minds wandered away from the conversation 24% of the time), they were able to adjust their listening in line with instructions and incentives-by either listening attentively, inattentively, or dividing their attention-and their conversation partners struggled to detect these differences. Specifically, speakers consistently overestimated their conversation partners' attentiveness-often believing their partners were listening when they were not. Our results suggest this overestimation is (at least partly) due to the largely indistinguishable behavior of inattentive and attentive listeners. It appears that people can (and do) divide their attention during conversation and successfully feign attentiveness. Overestimating others' attentiveness extended to third-party observers who were not immersed in the conversation, listeners who looked back on their own listening, and people interacting with partners who could not hear their words (but were incentivized to act like they could). Our work calls for a reexamination of a fundamental social behavior-listening-and underscores the distinction between feeling heard and being heard during live conversation. Public Significance StatementThis research reveals that there is a difference between being and feeling heard. People's listening fluctuated naturally throughout their conversations (with mind wandering reported 24% of the time)-and their conversation partners were often unable to detect the rise and fall of their partner's attentiveness (whether via natural fluctuation or via our experimental interventions). Across a diverse set of studies, we find support for three key results: (a) perceptions of conversational listening often do not align with listeners' cognitive attentiveness; (b) perceptions of listening are often inaccurate due to a lack of diagnostic behavioral cues displayed by listeners-inattentive listeners behave similarly to attentive listeners; and consequently (c) perceivers primarily overestimate the extent to which their conversation partners are listening to them. These results emphasize the importance of recognizing that moments of inattentiveness happen in conversation-encouraging conversants to acknowledge, forgive, and repair these moments to achieve relational and informational success.

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Section: Overly Optimistic Perceptions Of Listeningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conveying and detecting listening during live conversation.

Collins,

Minson,

Kristal

et al. 2024

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Engaging contested community issues

Dollar

2021

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This article presents an analysis of dialogue as an alternative to debate and argument for engaging contested community issues. Treating dialogue as a communication practice, I draw on ethnography of communication, cultural communication theory, and cultural discourse analysis to describe and interpret how participants practiced community dialogue as a communication event comprised of sequences of listening and verbally responding. When topics and identities were elaborated upon and socially negotiated through personal communication in the form of narratives and emotional responses, participants reported effective dialogue. These sequences were dialogic moments partially due to the dialectical tension between Americans’ once predictable civic routine of public expression of individual’s beliefs and the process of dialogue featured in our War and Peace dialogue workshop.

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Discourse strategies that co-construct relational identities in STEM peer tutoring

Agne

Muller

2019

Communication Education

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“You’re Not Listening”: Negotiating and Problematizing Ideal Interaction Through Metatalk About Listening in the Waco Standoff

Cited by 3 publications

References 41 publications

Conveying and detecting listening during live conversation.

Conveying and detecting listening during live conversation.

Engaging contested community issues

Discourse strategies that co-construct relational identities in STEM peer tutoring

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