4.4 Styles of Effective Listening
Before reading about the styles of listening, examine your own listening habits and tendencies by responding to the following statements with the following scale: 1 = always, 2 = frequently, 3 = sometimes, 4 = seldom, and 5 = never._____ 1. I listen actively, communicate acceptance of the speaker, and prompt the speaker to further explore his or her thoughts.These statements focus on the ways of listening discussed in this chapter. All of these ways are appropriate at some times, but not at other times. It depends. So the only responses that are really inappropriate are “always” and “never.” Effective listening is listening that is tailored to the specific communication situation. Listening is situational; the type of listening that is appropriate will vary with the situation, and each situation will call for a somewhat different combination of listening styles. A case in point is in listening to the emotions of others (see Table 4.5).
_____ 2. I listen to what the speaker is saying and feeling; I try to feel what the speaker feels.
_____ 3. I listen without judging the speaker.
_____ 4. I listen to the literal meanings that a speaker communicates; I don’t look too deeply into hidden meanings.
_____ 5. I listen without active involvement; I generally remain silent and take in what the other person is saying.
_____ 6. I never interrupt the speaker.
_____ 7. I listen objectively; I focus on the logic of the ideas rather than on the emotional meaning of the message.
_____ 8. I listen critically, evaluating the speaker and what the speaker is saying.
_____ 9. I look for the hidden meanings: the meanings that are revealed by subtle verbal or nonverbal cues.
_____ 10. I listen politely no matter who is speaking.
The art of effective listening is in making appropriate choices along the following five dimensions: (1) empathic and objective listening, (2) nonjudgmental and critical listening, (3) surface and depth listening,
(4) polite and impolite listening, and (5) active and inactive listening. These dimensions exist on a continuum
with, say, extremely empathic at one end and extremely objective at the other end. Most, if not all, listening exists somewhere between these extremes. Yet, they’ll be an emphasis toward one side or the other depending on the specifics of the communication situation. Let’s take a look at each of these dimensions.
4.4.1 Empathic and Objective Listening
To understand what a person means and feels, listen with empathy (Rogers, 1970; Rogers & Farson, 1981). To empathize with others is to feel with them, to see the world as they see it, to feel what they feel. Empathy will enable you to understand other people’s meanings, and it will also enhance your relationships (Barrett & Godfrey, 1988; Snyder, 1992).Empathy is best understood as having two distinct parts: thinking empathy and feeling empathy (Bellafiore, 2005). In thinking empathy you express an understanding of what the person means. For example, when you paraphrase someone’s comment, showing that you understand the meaning the person is trying to communicate, you’re communicating thinking empathy. The second part is feeling empathy; here you express your feeling of what the other person is feeling. You demonstrate a similarity between what you’re feeling and what the other person is feeling. Often you’ll respond with both thinking and feeling empathy in the same brief response; for example, when a friend tells you of problems at home, you may respond by saying, for example, “Your problems at home do seem to be getting worse. I can imagine how you feel so angry at times.”
Empathic listening is the preferred mode of responding in most communication situations, but there are times when you need to go beyond it to measure meanings and feelings against some objective reality. It’s important to listen to Peter tell you how the entire world hates him and to understand how Peter feels and why he feels this way. But then you need to look more objectively at Peter and perhaps see the paranoia or the self-hatred behind his complaints. Sometimes, in other words, you have to put your empathic responses aside and listen with objectivity and detachment.
In adjusting your empathic and objective listening focus, keep the following recommendations in mind:
■ Punctuate from the speaker’s point of view (Chapter 1). If you want to understand the speaker’s perspective, see the sequence of events as the speaker does, and try to figure out how this can influence what the speaker says and does. Keep your focus (your thoughts and your messages) on the speaker.
■ Seek to understand both thoughts and feelings. Don’t consider your listening task finished until you’ve understood what the speaker is feeling as well as what he or she is thinking.
■ Avoid “offensive listening,” the tendency to listen to bits and pieces of information that will enable you to attack the speaker or find fault with something the speaker has said.
■ Strive especially to be objective in listening to friends and foes alike. Be aware that your attitudes may lead you to distort messages—for example, to block out positive messages about a foe or negative messages about a friend.
■ Avoid trying to solve the problem or even giving advice when trying to achieve empathy. Being empathic is hard enough, and at this point it’s better to communicate your support and understanding rather than your evaluation of the situation.
■ Encourage the speaker to explore his or her feelings further by demonstrating a willingness to listen and an interest in what the speaker is saying.
4.4.2 Nonjudgmental and Critical Listening
Effective listening includes both nonjudgmental and critical responses. Listen nonjudgmentally (with an open mind and with a view toward understanding) and listen critically (with a view toward making some kind of evaluation or judgment). Listen first for understanding; only when you understand should you be willing to evaluate or judge the messages.Listening with an open mind will help you understand messages better; listening with a critical mind will help you analyze and evaluate the messages. In adjusting your nonjudgmental and critical listening, focus on the following guidelines:
- Keep an open mind. Avoid prejudging. Delay your judgments until you fully understand the intention and the content the speaker is communicating. Avoid both positive and negative evaluation until you have a reasonably complete understanding.
- Avoid filtering out or oversimplifying difficult or complex messages. Similarly, avoid filtering out undesirable messages. Clearly, you don’t want to hear that something you believe in is untrue, that people you care for are unkind, or that ideals you hold are self-destructive. Yet it’s important that you reexamine your beliefs by listening to such messages.
- Recognize your own biases. These may interfere with accurate listening and cause you to distort message reception through the process of assimilation—the tendency to integrate and interpret what you hear or think you hear to conform to your own biases, prejudices, and expectations. For example, are your ethnic, national, or religious biases preventing you from appreciating a speaker’s point of view?
- Avoid uncritical listening when you need to make evaluations and judgments. Recognize and resist the normal tendency to sharpen—a process in which one or two aspects of a message become highlighted, emphasized, and perhaps embellished. Often the concepts that are sharpened are incidental remarks that somehow stand out from the rest of the message.
- Recognize fallacies—ways of using language to subvert instead of clarify truth and accuracy—and don’t be persuaded by their pseudo-logic. Here are just a few types of words to which you’d want to give special critical listening:
- Weasel words. These are terms whose meanings are slippery and difficult to pin down (Hayakawa & Hayakawa, 1989). Good examples can be easily found in commercials such as those claiming Medicine A works “better” than Medicine B but failing to specify how much or in what respect Medicine A performs better. It’s quite possible that Medicine A performs better in one respect but less effectively according to nine other measures. Other weasel words are help, virtually, as much as, like (as in “it will make you feel like new”), and more economical. Ask yourself, “Exactly what is being claimed?” For example, “What does ‘may reduce cholesterol’ mean? What exactly is being asserted?”
- Euphemisms. These terms make the negative and unpleasant appear positive and appealing as in an executive’s reference to the firing of 200 workers as “downsizing” or “reallocation of resources.” Often euphemisms take the form of inflated language designed to make the mundane seem extraordinary, the common seem exotic (“the vacation of a lifetime,” “unsurpassed vistas”). Don’t let words get in the way of accurate firsthand perception.
- Jargon. This is the specialized language of a professional class, the language of the computer hacker, the psychologist, or the advertiser. When used to intimidate or impress, as when used with people who aren’t members of the profession, jargon prevents meaningful communication. Don’t be intimidated by jargon; ask questions when you don’t understand.
- Gobbledygook. This is overly complex language that overwhelms the listener instead of communicating meaning and usually consists of extra-long sentences, complex grammatical constructions, and rare or unfamiliar words. Some people just normally speak in complex language. But others use complexity to confuse and mislead. Ask for simplification when appropriate.
4.4.3 Surface and Depth Listening
In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, in giving the funeral oration for Caesar, says: “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. / The evil that men do lives after them; / The good is oft interred with their bones.” And later: “For Brutus is an honourable man; / So are they all, all honourable men.” But if we listen beyond the surface of Marc Anthony’s words, we can see that he does indeed come to praise Caesar and to convince the crowd that Brutus was dishonorable—despite the fact that at first glance his words seem to say quite the opposite.In most messages there’s an obvious meaning that you can derive from a literal reading of the words and sentences. But there’s often another level of meaning. Sometimes, as in these famous lines from Julius Caesar, the deeper level is the opposite of the literal meaning. At other times it seems totally unrelated. In reality, most messages have more than one level of meaning. For example, suppose Carol asks you how you like her new haircut. On one level, the meaning is clear: Do you like the haircut? But there’s also another, perhaps a more important level: Carol is asking you to say something positive about her appearance. In the same way, the parent who complains about working hard at the office or in the home may, on a deeper level, be asking for an expression of appreciation.
To appreciate these other meanings, engage in depth listening. If you respond only to the surface level communication (the literal meaning), you miss the opportunity to make meaningful contact with the other person’s feelings and needs. If you say to the parent, “You’re always complaining. I bet you really love working so hard,” you fail to respond to the call for understanding and appreciation. In regulating your surface and depth listening, consider the following guidelines:
■ Focus on both verbal and nonverbal messages. Recognize both consistent and inconsistent “packages” of messages, and use these as guides for drawing inferences about the speaker’s meaning. Ask questions when in doubt. Listen also to what is omitted. Remember that speakers communicate by what they leave out as well as by what they include.
■ Listen for both content and relational messages. The student who constantly challenges the instructor is, on one level, communicating disagreement over content. However, on another
level—the relationship level—the student may be voicing objections to the instructor’s authority or authoritarianism. The instructor needs to listen and respond to both types of messages.
■ Make special note of statements that refer back to the speaker. Remember that people inevitably talk about themselves. Whatever a person says is, in part, a function of who that person is. Attend carefully to those personal, self-reference messages.
■ Don’t disregard the literal meaning of messages. Balance your listening between surface and the underlying meanings. Respond to the different levels of meaning in the messages of others, as you would like others to respond to yours—sensitively but not obsessively, readily but not over-ambitiously.
4.4.4 Polite and Impolite Listening
Politeness is often thought of as the exclusive function of the speaker, as solely an encoding or sending function. But politeness (or impoliteness) may also be signaled through listening (Fukushima, 2000).Of course, there are times when you would not want to listen politely (for example, if someone is being verbally abusive or condescending or using racist or sexist language). In these cases you might want to show your disapproval by showing that you’re not even listening. But most often you’ll want to listen politely and you’ll want to express this politeness through your listening behavior. Here are a few suggestions for demonstrating that you are in fact listening politely. As you read these you’ll notice that these are strategies designed to be supportive of the speaker’s positive and negative face needs:
■ Avoid interrupting the speaker. Avoid trying to take over the speaker’s turn. Avoid changing the topic. If you must say something in response to something the speaker said and can’t wait until he or she finishes, then say it as briefly as possible and pass the speaker’s turn back to the speaker.A somewhat different slant on politeness and listening can be seen in “forcing” people to listen when they don’t want to. Generally, the polite advice is to be sensitive to when the other person wants to leave and to stop asking the person to continue listening. Closely related to this is the “forced” listening that many cell phone users impose on others, a topic addressed in Table 4.6.
■ Give supportive listening cues. These might include nodding your head, giving minimal verbal responses such as “I see” or “yes, it’s true,” or moving closer to the speaker. Listen in a way that demonstrates that what the speaker is saying is important. In some cultures, polite listening cues must be cues of agreement (Japanese culture is often used as an example); in other cultures, polite listening cues are attentiveness and support rather than cues of agreement (much of U.S. culture is an example).
■ Show empathy with the speaker. Demonstrate that you understand and feel the speaker’s thoughts and feelings by giving responses that show this level of understanding—smiling or cringing or otherwise echoing the feelings of the speaker. If you echo the speaker’s nonverbal expressions, your behavior is likely to be seen as empathic.
■ Maintain eye contact. In much of the United States this is perhaps the single most important rule. If you don’t maintain eye contact when someone is talking to you, then you’ll appear to be not listening and definitely not listening politely. This rule, however, does not hold in all cultures. In some Latin and Asian cultures, polite listening would consist of looking down and avoiding direct eye contact when, for example, listening to a superior or much older person.
■ Give positive feedback. Throughout the listening encounter positive feedback will be seen as polite and negative feedback as impolite. If you must give negative feedback, then do so in a way that does not attack the person; for example, first mention areas of agreement or what you liked about what the person said and stress your good intentions. And, most important, do it in private. Public criticism is especially threatening and will surely be seen as a personal attack.
4.4.5 Active and Inactive Listening
One of the most important communication skills you can learn is active listening. Consider the following interaction. You say: “I can’t believe I have to redo this entire budget report. I really worked hard on this project, and now I have to do it all over again.” To this, you get three different responses.Andy:All three listeners are probably trying to make you feel better. But they go about it in very different ways —and surely with very different results. Andy tries to lessen the significance of the rewrite. This well-intended and extremely common response does little to promote meaningful communication and understanding. Connie tries to give the situation a positive spin. In their responses, however, both Andy and Connie are also suggesting that you should not be feeling the way you do; they’re saying that your feelings are not legitimate and should be replaced with more logical feelings.That’s not so bad; most people find they have to redo their first reports. That’s the norm here.Connie:You should be pleased that all you have to do is a simple rewrite. Peggy and Michael both had to completely redo their entire projects.Greg:You have to rewrite that report you’ve worked on for the last three weeks? You sound really angry and frustrated.
Greg’s response, however, is different from the others. Greg uses active listening. Active listening owes its development to Thomas Gordon (1975), who made it a cornerstone of his P.E.T. (parent effectiveness training) technique. Active listening is a process of sending back to the speaker what you as a listener think the speaker meant—both in content and in feelings. Active listening, then, is not merely repeating the speaker’s exact words, but rather putting together into some meaningful whole your understanding of the speaker’s total message. And, incidentally, when combined with empathic listening, it proves the most effective mode for success as a salesperson (Comer & Drollinger, 1999).
Active listening helps you check your understanding of what the speaker said and, more importantly, of what he or she meant. Reflecting back perceived meanings to the speaker gives the speaker an opportunity to offer clarification and to correct any misunderstandings. Active listening also lets the speaker know that you acknowledge and accept his or her feelings. In the sample responses given above, Greg listened actively and reflected back what he thought you meant while accepting what you were feeling. Note too that he also explicitly identified the feelings (“You sound angry and frustrated”), allowing you the opportunity to correct his interpretation. Still another function of active listening is that it stimulates the speaker to explore feelings and thoughts. Greg’s response encourages you to elaborate on your feelings and perhaps to understand them better as you talk through them.
Three simple techniques may help you master the process of active listening: paraphrasing the speaker’s meaning, expressing understanding, and asking questions.
■ Paraphrase the speaker’s meaning. Stating in your own words what you think the speaker means and feels helps ensure understanding and demonstrates your interest. Paraphrasing gives the speaker a chance to extend what was originally said. In paraphrasing, be objective; be especially careful not to lead the speaker in the direction you think he or she should go. Also, don’t overdo paraphrasing. Paraphrase when you feel there’s a chance for misunderstanding or when you want to express support for the other person and keep the conversation going.A summary of these listening choices appears in Table 4.7.
■ Express understanding of the speaker’s feelings. In addition to paraphrasing the content, echo the feelings the speaker expressed or implied (“You must have felt horrible”). This expression of feelings will help you further check your perception of the speaker’s feelings and will allow the speaker to see his or her feelings more objectively (especially helpful when they’re feelings of anger, hurt, or depression) and the opportunity to elaborate on these feelings.
■ Ask questions. Asking questions ensures your own understanding of the speaker’s thoughts and feelings and secures additional information (“How did you feel when you read your job appraisal report?”). Ask questions to provide just enough stimulation and support so that the speaker feels he or she can elaborate on these thoughts and feelings.
4.5 Listening, Culture, and Gender
Listening is difficult, in part, because of the inevitable differences in the communication systems between speaker and listener. Because each person has had a unique set of experiences, each person’s communication and meaning system is going to be different from every other person’s. When speaker and listener come from different cultures or are of different genders, the differences and their effects are naturally so much greater. Let’s look first at culture.4.5.1 Culture and Listening
In a global environment in which people from very different cultures work together, it’s especially important to understand the ways in which cultural differences can influence listening. Four of these listening influences include: (1) language and speech, (2) nonverbal behaviors, (3) feedback, and (4) credibility.4.5.1.1 Language and Speech
Even when speaker and listener speak the same language, they speak it with different meanings and different accents. No two speakers speak exactly the same language. Speakers of the same language will, at the very least, have different meanings for the same terms because they have had different experiences.Speakers and listeners who have different native languages and who may have learned English as a second language will have even greater differences in meaning. Translations are never precise and never fully capture the meaning in the other language. If your meaning for the word house was learned in a culture in which everyone lived in their own house with lots of land around it, then talking about houses with someone whose meaning was learned in a neighborhood of high-rise tenements is going to be difficult. Although you’ll each hear the same word, the meanings you’ll each develop will be drastically different. In adjusting your listening—especially in an intercultural setting—understand that the speaker’s meanings may be very different from yours even though you’re speaking the same language.
4.5.1.2 Nonverbal Behaviors
Speakers from different cultures have different display rules—cultural rules that govern which nonverbal behaviors are appropriate and which are inappropriate in a public setting. As you listen to other people, you also “listen” to their nonverbal cues. If these are drastically different from what you expect on the basis of the verbal message, you may see them as a kind of noise or interference or even as contradictory messages. Also, of course, different cultures may give very different meanings to the same nonverbal gesture; for example, the thumb and forefinger forming a circle means “OK” in most of the United States, but it means “money” in Japan, “zero” in some Mediterranean countries, and “I’ll kill you” in Tunisia.4.5.1.3 Feedback
Members of some cultures give very direct and honest feedback. Speakers from these cultures—the United States is a good example—expect the feedback to be a forthright reflection of what their listeners are feeling. In other cultures—Japan and Korea are good examples—it’s more important to be positive than to be truthful, so people may respond with positive feedback (say, in commenting on a business colleague’s proposal) even though they don’t actually feel positive. Listen to feedback, as you would all messages, with a full recognition that various cultures view feedback very differently.4.5.1.4 Credibility
What makes a speaker credible, or believable, also will vary from one culture to another. In some cultures people would claim that competence is the most important factor in, say, the choice of a teacher for their preschool children. In other cultures the most important factor might be the goodness or morality of theteacher. Similarly, members of different cultures may perceive the credibility of various media very differently.
For example, members of a repressive society in which the government controls television news may come to attribute little credibility to such broadcasts. After all, these listeners might reason, television news is simply what the government wants you to know. This reaction may be hard to understand or even recognize for someone raised in the United States, for example, where traditionally the media have been largely free of such political control.
4.5.2 Gender and Listening
Men and women learn different styles of listening, just as they learn different styles for using verbal and nonverbal messages. Not surprisingly, these different styles can create difficulties in opposite-sex interpersonal communication.
4.5.2.1 Rapport and Report Talk
According to Deborah Tannen (1990) in her bestselling You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men inConversation, women seek to share feelings, build rapport, and establish closer relationships, and they use
listening to achieve these ends. Men, on the other hand, play up their expertise, emphasize it, and use it to dominate the interaction. Their focus is on reporting information. Tannen argues that in conversation a woman seeks to be liked, so she expresses agreement. The goal of a man, on the other hand, is to be given respect, so he seeks to show his knowledge and expertise.
4.5.2.2 Listening Cues
Men and women give different types of listening cues and consequently show that they’re listening in different ways. In conversation, a woman is more apt to give lots of listening cues—interjecting “Yeah” or “Uh-huh,” nodding in agreement, and smiling. A man is more likely to listen quietly, without giving lots of listening cues as feedback. Women also make more eye contact when listening than do men, who are more apt to look around and often away from the speaker (Brownell, 2010). As a result of these differences women seem to be more engaged in listening than do men.4.5.2.3 Amount and Purposes of Listening
Tannen argues that men listen less to women than women listen to men. The reason, says Tannen (and on this not all researchers agree, see Goldsmith and Fulfs, 1999), is that listening places the person in an inferior position, whereas speaking places the person in a superior position. Men may seem to assume a more confrontational posture while listening and to ask questions that are argumentative or seek to puncture holes in the speaker’s position as a way to play up their own expertise. Women are more likely than men to ask supportive questions and offer constructive criticism. Men and women act this way to both members of the same and of the opposite sex; their usual ways of speaking and listening don’t seem to change depending on whether the person they’re communicating with is male or female.Gender differences are changing drastically and quickly; it’s best to take generalizations about gender as starting points for investigation and not as airtight conclusions (Gamble & Gamble, 2003). Further, as you no doubt have observed from your own experiences, the gender differences—although significant—are far outnumbered by the similarities. It’s important to be mindful of both similarities and differences.
Summary: Listening in Human Communication
4.1 The Importance of Listening: Task and Relationship Benefits1. Effective listening yields a wide variety of benefits, including more effective learning, relating, influencing, playing, and helping.4.2 The Listening Process
2. Listening is a five-part process that begins with receiving and continues through understanding, remembering, evaluating, and responding.4.3 Listening Barriers
3. Receiving consists of hearing the verbal signals and perceiving the nonverbal signals.
4. Understanding involves learning what the speaker means, not merely what the words mean.
5. Remembering involves retaining the received message, a process that involves considerable reconstruction.
6. Evaluating consists of judging the messages you receive.
7. Responding involves giving feedback while the speaker is speaking and taking your turn at speaking after the speaker has finished.
8. Among the barriers to listening are physical and mental distractions, biases and prejudices, lack of appropriate focus, and premature judgments.4.4 Styles of Effective Listening
9. Effective listening involves adjusting our behaviors on the basis of at least four dimensions: empathic and objective listening, nonjudgmental and critical listening, surface and depth listening, and active and inactive listening.4.5 Listening, Culture, and Gender
10. The empathic–objective dimension involves the degree to which the listener focuses on feeling what the speaker is feeling versus grasping the objective message.
11. The nonjudgmental–critical dimension involves the degree to which the listener evaluates what is said.
12. The surface–depth dimension has to do with the extent to which the listener focuses on literal or obvious meanings versus hidden or less obvious meanings.
13. The polite–impolite dimension refers to the presence or absence of civility and courtesy.
14. The active–inactive dimension involves the extent to which the listener reflects back and expresses support for the speaker.
15. Listening is influenced by a wide range of cultural factors, such as differences in language and speech, nonverbal behaviors, credibility criteria, and feedback approaches.
16. Listening is influenced by gender: Men and women seem to view listening as serving different purposes.
