Disagreement is often mistaken for bad listening

Have you ever had a dispute with a partner or colleague and, having carefully listened to their opinion, still disagreed, only for them to insist you 'weren't listening!'?

Feeling 'heard' is important in all kinds of social situations. Research shows that it fosters trust, feelings of social connection, and effective collaborative decision-making. Conversely, feeling unheard can leave people frustrated, angry and reluctant to resolve issues. Most of us have probably been in situations in which we feel we have listened well, but that has gone unrecognised.

Now, new research in Psychological Science by Zhiying (Bella) Ren and Rebecca Schaumberg at the University of Pennsylvania provides an explanation for this. Studies on more than 3,000 participants consistently found that we perceive good listeners as bad listeners, purely because they disagree.

In an initial study, a group of student participants took part in a virtual meeting with another individual. The participants gave their views about a topic related to life on campus, and the other person listened. However, the 'listener' was in fact always an actor who had been trained to demonstrate attentive listening — while the participant spoke, they made eye contact, nodded occasionally, and sometimes gave brief feedback, such as "makes sense" and "OK".

Afterwards, the participants were shown a brief response form that had supposedly been completed by the listener. There were two versions of this form. On both, the listener indicated they had understood the speaker and considered the speaker to be thoughtful. However, on one version of the form, the listener strongly agreed with the speaker's views, while on the other, they strongly disagreed. A space for comments included statements that tallied politely with this feedback. The participants then had to rate, on a five point scale, the listener's attentiveness.

The results showed that, in general, the participants thought the listeners listened well. However, they thought the listeners listened better when they also agreed with them.

In subsequent studies, the researchers tweaked the format. Participants instead reviewed details about two job candidates and shared their views on who should be hired with a trained 'supervisor'. Consistent with the earlier results, the participants gave supervisors who agreed with them higher scores for listening, engagement, and for understanding their arguments.  

A further study using the hiring scenario suggested that we think people who agree with us are better at processing information effectively. To put it plainly, we believe that our views are clearly right, and so if listening to us didn't convince others, that has to be because they didn't listen properly.

A variation on the experimental theme, in which speakers recorded their thoughts on a sociopolitical topic and were then given feedback from a purported reviewer, went further. It found that participants gave better listening ratings to reviewers who clearly hadn't paid close attention to their views, but who generally agreed with them, than to reviewers who objectively had paid attention and didn't agree with them.

In only one study, in which listeners displayed 'high-quality' objective listening, were those who disagreed with the speaker perceived to have listened well. This type of listening entails expressing respect for and interest in the speakers' perspective, and explaining in general terms why they disagreed. However, the speakers took this approach to indicate some level of agreement with their views.

Overall, the research paints a clear picture of disagreement consistently being mistaken for bad listening. And the researchers aren't hugely optimistic about the chances of finding effective strategies to combat this. "It may be prohibitively difficult for someone to simultaneously convey that they disagree and that they were listening," they conclude.

Read the paper in full:

Ren, Z. (B.), & Schaumberg, R. (2024). Disagreement Gets Mistaken for Bad Listening. Psychological Science, 35(5), 455-470. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241239935