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This podcast is brought to you
by Knowledge at Wharton. I'm Angie Basiouny. I'm here
today with Rebecca Schaumberg.
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She's a Professor in our
Department of Operations, Information and Decisions.
Rebecca's research focuses on
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interpersonal communication,
negotiations, mood, emotions, the soft skills that we bring to
the office that really make a
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difference. Today we're going to
talk about her new co-authored paper. It's on the skill of
listening. Becky, it's great to
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see you.
- Nice to see you as well. Thank you. So I found this paper to
be really unique.
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The main finding is that
when people talk to each other, when the
listener agrees with the
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speaker, the speaker thinks of
that listener as a good listener. And conversely, when
the listener disagrees, they
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think of that listener as a bad
listener. Can you take us into
the details? Yeah. So you're right that at
the heart of this work is that
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we really have this conflation
between listening and agreement. I think we can intellectually
say that, of course, someone
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could listen to me, they could
attend really closely, and disagree with me. I think
intellectually, we understand
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that listening and agreement are
separate things. But emotionally and viscerally, something is
quite different. Our feelings of
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being listened to appear to be
very closely tied to whether the person ultimately agrees or
disagrees with us. And in this
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work, we ran 11 different
experiments where people talked and exchanged information around
a variety of different topics
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and across different mediums,
such as online chats or video chats, or even through recorded
messages. And what we found is
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that even when people listened
exactly the same— so the experience was exactly the same—
later, when you learned that
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that listener ultimately agreed
with you, you thought that they had listened really well, and
when they disagreed, you thought
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that they had listened poorly,
even when you had objective cues otherwise.
- What made
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you want to study this
particular aspect of interpersonal communication?
- Listening
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has been sort of elevated as a
key aspect or trait of good leaders, as essential in
workplaces, and actually as an
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essential tool for helping to
bridge differences. But one of the things that we started to
find in our research was that
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one of the key predictors about
whether somebody actually felt heard was just whether that
person agreed with them. But
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that seems somewhat problematic,
because ultimately, when we want to think about listening,
listening is meant to be about
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information exchange,
particularly in the workplace. And I know listening can be very
different in, like, an
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interpersonal context. But in
the workplace, listening is really a tool for information
exchange. It's not necessarily
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supposed to just be about
affirmation. But what our work shows is what it means to
actually listen well, and then
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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
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perceived as a good listener is
simply to agree. And that seems somewhat problematic, when
ultimately, what we want to do
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with listening is help to
exchange differing views. Right. I noticed in your paper, one of the
phrases that you come back to is
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"You're not listening to me."
Which, you know— anyone who's had
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a conversation with someone else
has felt that way at a certain time period. Let's go back to—
you mentioned the experiments
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that you ran. You ran a number
of experiments. - Yes. I'm imagining, like, throwing a bunch
of people in a room and having
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them have conversations about
difficult topics, but tell us how you— how you studied this,
how you proved this theory.
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Yeah. So, we ran 11 different
experiments with over 3000 participants. And we used a
variety of different methods,
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such as having conversations
like this— so, sort of synchronous chats online or
written chats, or people
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recorded messages that somebody
ultimately then listened to. And we had people talk about a
variety of different topics.
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Here at Wharton, some of the
students talked about campus- related issues. We had people
talk about sociopolitical
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topics, or we had them talk
about what were sort of simulated workplace issues, such
as, like, who you might want to
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hire. And in every experiment,
what we did is we held constant the actual listening. And this
was because, unbeknownst to our
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participants, all of our
listeners in experiments were hired by us. They were
trained actors who we trained to
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listen in a particular way. And
that the reason for that is we want to say, like always, the
actual listening experience was
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the same. But after this
listening experience, we gave information to participants
about the views of the listener.
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Whether they agreed with the
listener's position, disagreed or we didn't share that
information at all, and what we
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found was that when we provided
that information, people thought that the listener who agreed
with them was a great listener,
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those who disagreed with them
were a pretty poor listener, and then somewhere in the
middle was when we perceived no
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information at all. And this
occurred even when people had very strong cues that the person
deeply understood what they were
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talking about. I noticed that in the paper,
when you walk us through these experiments, you do
mention that you trained the
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listeners to do things like nod
and say yes and give affirmations, verbal cues, non-
verbal cues, that they are
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agreeing with the listener. And
then at the end, when that information was filled out, it's—
it didn't matter. It was
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consistent across the board,
through all your experiments, that if the listener disagreed
that they were considered a bad
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listener. Which I just find
really fascinating. Is there— is there a fairness issue there? I
mean, as you mentioned earlier
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on, intellectually, we know that
there's a difference, but viscerally, emotionally, we
don't. Is there— is there
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something that we can do to make
this proceed differently? Well, I can first say, we
did a— we did a lot, and— we did a
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lot of work to figure out how we
could maybe turn this off. And it was actually in that effort
where the strength of the effect
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became so striking to me. So
there was a couple experiments where we actually thought, let's
manipulate how well somebody
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actually listened. So we trained
our listeners to either listen really well or to listen poorly.
Like, distracted by their phones,
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showing no level of
comprehension. And what we thought is, well, then when you
get a really strong cue that
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somebody has really understood
you, that maybe should override this effect. But what we even
found there— and again, this is
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where we're trying to take away
the effect— we found that a bad listener, someone who was, like,
distracted by their phone,
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looking around, not showing any
level understanding— when they agreed, they were still seen as
a better listener than a person
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who listened very intently,
could comprehend and share back every information that the
speaker had said, but ultimately
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disagreed with them. So we found
that a bad listener who agreed was seen as a better listener
than a very good listener who
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disagreed. And there, when you
come back to this question of fairness, I think that really
puts it in stark relief that
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even when I am doing objective— I
understand, I am taking in the information better, I understand.
But ultimately, just knowing
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your views does not mean that I
should have to agree with them, because I can take that views,
integrate it with other
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information I have, and
ultimately come to a different conclusion. That doesn't mean
that I did not listen well.
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But at least in terms of our
experience, it sure feels like that. It really does say something
about our internal biases, doesn't it?
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- Yeah. - Yeah. What is the main
message from this research? Like, if you were teaching about
this paper in your classes on
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negotiation, etc, etc, what
would you— what is the main message here, especially in the
office?
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Well, it's interesting, because I actually have started
to teach this in my negotiations
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classes. And— because what I want
to say is that we can't necessarily use someone's views,
whether they share our views or
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or not share our views, as an
indication that they really understand our position. And to
understand these things are very
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separate. And a theme that we
keep coming back to in the paper, which you already alluded
to, is that oftentimes when
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people say that, you know, "You're
not listening to me," what they're really saying is you're
not agreeing with me. And one of
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the things that I really want
people to understand is that when you feel that way, right,
that somebody is not listening
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to you, is it— is it that they
don't understand you, or is it that they ultimately are coming
to a different position? So is
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this an issue of listening, or
is this an issue of shared views? And now we see that these
things are very hard to
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separate. But it's absolutely
critical to find a way to separate them. Wonderful. Thank you so much for
all that insight. The paper is
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called "Disagreement Gets
Mistaken for Bad Listening," Becky Schaumberg. We will have that— we
have that link up for you online
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for that paper, if you're
interested in downloading it. Thank you so much for being
here. I appreciate it.
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Thank you very much. For more insight from Knowledge at Wharton,
please visit knowledge.Wharton.upenn.edu.