Like other constructs studied by communication scientists, listening has been viewed as a predominantly deliberate process that requires considerable cognitive resources to perform well. Listening, contrasted with hearing as a more passive mode of information processing, requires a person to actively receive, process, and sensibly respond to aural information. The emphasis on deliberate processing might perhaps have been fueled by research in social psychology, from which much communication theory is drawn. That literature has emphasized rational, deliberate processing at the expense of a more intuitive mode that tends to be viewed as inferior in human decision making and grounded much more in emotions. Using a general dual-process framework, the authors argue that an intuitive, experiential system plays a much more important role in the listening process than previously recognized. They lay out their rationale and model for experiential listening and discuss ways in which people can improve their intuitive listening through mindfulness-based metacognitive practices.
TopListening Fast And Slow
Listening is most often defined as the active and effortful processing of aural information, contrasted with the more passive mode of “hearing” (for reviews see Worthington & Bodie, 2018, 2020). An early taxonomy that distinguished types of music listening (i.e., experts, good listeners, culture consumers, emotional listeners, entertainment listeners; Adorno, 1976) is illustrative of this point as are warnings offered in early radio research that listeners not become distracted or otherwise “passive” consumers of information (Lacey, 2020). Through the 1980s and 1990s, arguably the heyday of modern attention to listening as an important communication competency, scholars crafted myriad models of listening as close, effortful scrutiny involving attending to, drawing inferences from, and deriving meaning from the speech of others (Wolvin, 1989; Worthington, 2018). In sum, conscious, deliberate cognitive processing is frequently emphasized as the prime ingredient of “ideal” listening, whereas unconscious, automatic, intuitive processing is said to merely bias our ability to fully process and understand others--and thus does not allow us to fully listen.
In some ways, this emphasis is perfectly reasonable. Whereas intuition is a knee-jerk, fast emotional reaction or reflects self-evident (moral) truth (e.g., thou shall not kill), reasoning is a deliberate process people use to produce post-hoc justifications for judgments or intuitions (Haidt, 2001). When we experience “feeling heard” we often attribute that evaluation to behaviors of the listener that appear quite “active” (Bodie et al., 2015) and suggest “genuine engagement” (Myers, 2000). In other words, it does not seem to make rational sense that someone could listen well if they were not fully present with undivided attention and complete attunement to us. But what if our intuitions are far more essential, consequential, and beneficial for listening to others than we previously assumed? In this chapter, we argue that listening is primarily serviced by and profits from an automatic, experiential, intuitive, emotionally-driven, implicit cognitive system that operates quickly and outside of our awareness, and that is capable of guiding our behavior. We begin by situating listening in dual-process theories of human information processing and focus particularly on Cognitive Experiential Self-Theory (Epstein, 2003) to conceptualize our model of listening. We then discuss in what ways thinking fast can be advantageous to listening well. We conclude by suggesting ways we might teach people to become better listeners, not by making them more rational and careful but by creating better intuitive pathways for “ideal” listening.
The General Dual-Process Framework
The dual-process (DP) perspective is one of the most influential theoretical frameworks in cognitive science (Varela et al., 1991). Although various theories fall under this perspective, they all share one assumption: Human behavior is the combined result of two qualitatively different cognitive “processing mechanisms … which employ different procedures and may yield different, and sometimes conflicting, results” (Frankish & Evans, 2009, p. 1). These two processing mechanisms are variously labeled but are defined similarly and make up a set of dual-processes: one set of processes is fast, intuitive, and outside of our awareness; the other is slow, deliberative, and in our awareness. Although distinctions between intuitive and analytical modes of thinking date back to Greek philosophy, Humean moral sentiments and were a key theme in late 19th century accounts of the human mind (e.g., Freud, James), the term “dual-process” was first used to explain results from a card selection task and has since become the leading metaphor for a range of human behaviors (see Evans, 2004, for a more thorough history). We describe the card selection task next.