Chapter 4: Listening

Chapter 4: Listening Lecture by: Chris Ross

Why Is Listening Important? • Listening & Education • Listening & Career • Listening & Religion & Spirituality • Listening & Health Care • Listening & Relationships • Listening Objectives

Why Is Listening Important? • Listening & Education • Is a primary channel of instruction at all levels in a person’s education. • Is fundamental to academic achievement and yet the least-taught type of communication skill

Why Is Listening Important? • Listening & Career • Crucial to success and advancement • Is a high ranked skill by employers • Effective listening is connected to both organizational and personal career success and achievenment.

Why Is Listening Important? • Listening & Religion & Spirituality • Includes intrapersonal listening when engaging in mediation and prayer. • Interpersonal listening during sermons, music or study of texts • Interfaith listening occurs when one is attempting to understand the beliefs and perspectives of other religions.

Why Is Listening Important? • Listening & Health Care • Patients and providers must listen effectively in order to have a great impact on whether correct diagnoses are established and directions are followed • Staff need to listen to instructions to ensure patients get the care they need

Why Is Listening Important? • Listening & Relationships • A key role in relationship development and maintenance. • Successful listening pairs tend to be successful, long lasting and positive compared to relationships compared to when one or neither of them fail to engage in effective listening.

Why Is Listening Important? • Listening Objectives • Relational Development & Enrichment: people may engage in listening for the development and enhancement of relationships. Through listening, you gain a greater understanding of yourself, your partner, and the relationship. • Gaining & Comprehending Information: People also listen to gain and comprehend information. As a student you are likely well aware of this objective as you listen to lectures during class or to a classmate during class discussions.

Why Is Listening Important? • Listening Objectives • Critical Listening: The goals of critical listening include evaluating the accuracy of a message as well as its value in a given situation. For example, you may listen critically during a class lecture or when listening to a salesperson discussing a product. Critical listening may lead to negative or positive evaluations of the message.

Why Is Listening Important? • Listening Objectives • Enjoyment & Appreciation: people also listen for enjoyment or appreciation: listening to a friend tell a story about a recent trip, music on an iPod, or birds sing while you are walking. The objective of these listening experiences is to gain pleasure.

Why Is Listening Important? • Listening Objectives • Therapeutic Listening: enables someone to talk through a problem or concern. Ex: listening to a coworker complain about a customer or client. In these situations, the person might simply be needing to express certain anxieties or frustrations, might be seeking approval or justification for feelings or might be seeking advice and counsel about appropriate actions.

Process of Active Listening • Hearing and listening are two different things! • Hearing => passive physiological act of receiving sound that takes place when sound waves hit your eardrums. • Listening => active process of receiving, attending to, interpreting and responding to symbolic activity.

Process of Active Listening • Receiving is the first step in the listening process • Receiving => sensory stimuli as sound waves travel from the source of sound to your eardrums

Process of Active Listening • Attending, the second step in the listening process • Attending => occurs when you perceive and focus on the stimuli • You are always inundated with stimuli, but can only pick up some. • Those that receive your attention are those you deem most necessary to accomplish a task

Process of Active Listening • The third step, interpreting • Interpreting => when you assign meaning to sounds and symbolic activity. • Someone is pounding on their desk and shouting in a loud tone, what could that symbolize?

Process of Active Listening • Additional step to listening, responding. • Responding => essentially your reaction to the message or communication of another person. • Vocal agreement, head nods, etc

Process of Active Listening • Reflecting => (sometimes referred to as paraphrasing) involves summarizing what another person has said in your own words to convey your understanding of the message.

Engaged & Relational Listening • Engaged Listening => entails making a personal relational connection with the source of a message that results from the source and the receiver actively working together to create shared meanings and understandings. • Involves: caring, trusting, wanting to know more, and feeling excited, enlightened, attached and concerned.

Engaged & Relational Listening • Disengaged Listening examples • Standard attempts to be friendly or positive in boilerplate responses to technical support questions • Apologies from companies after complaints • Most responses start out with how important you are and the rest of the message contradicts the message.

Engaged & Relational Listening • Relational Listening => involves recognizing, understanding and addressing the interconnection of relationships and communication

Questions to Consider When Receiving • What impact does this message have on my understanding of this relationship? • What impact may this message have on the other person’s understanding of this relationship? • Does this message correspond with my understanding of this relationship? 4. Is something absent from this message that would correspond with my understanding of this relationship? 5. Is this message being communicated in a manner that corresponds with my understanding of this relationship? 6. What does this message mean based on my understanding of this relationship? 7. What does this message tell me about the other person’s understanding of this relationship?

Recognizing & Overcoming Listening Obstacles • Environmental Distractions • Medium Distractions • Source Distractions • Factual Diversions • Semantic Diversion • Content (Representational) Listening • Selective Listening • Egocentric Listening • Wandering Thoughts • Experiential Superiority • Message Complexity • Past Experience with the Source

Recognizing & Overcoming Listening Obstacles • Environmental Distractions => result from the physical location where listening takes place. • Classroom, but an emergency vehicle passes by the open windows with its siren going and lights flashing.

Recognizing & Overcoming Listening Obstacles • Medium Distractions => Result from limitations or problems inherent in certain media and technology, like cell phones or internet connections. • Trying to talk to a friend but their cell phone keeps cutting out or loses signal.

Recognizing & Overcoming Listening Obstacles • Source Distractions => Result from auditory or visual characteristics of the message course. • Someone speaking with vocalized pauses (um, uh, ya know, etc) or someone standing too close for comfort or touching you.

Recognizing & Overcoming Listening Obstacles • Factual Diversion => occurs when so much emphasis is placed on attending to every detail of a message that the main point becomes lost. • Over studying for an exam.

Recognizing & Overcoming Listening Obstacles • Semantic Diversion => happens when people are distracted by words or phrases used in a message through negative response or unfamiliarity. • Some words make people feel uncomfortable, so if you use a specific word to describe something it could make the person focus on that word and not what you are trying to tell them.

Recognizing & Overcoming Listening Obstacles • Content (Representational) Listening => occurs when people focus on the content level of meaning or literal meaning rather than the social or relational levels or the meaning.

Recognizing & Overcoming Listening Obstacles • Selective Listening => Occurs when people focus on the points of a message that correspond with their views and interests and pay less attention to those that do not. • You tell your child if they do their chores all week you will go to the movies on Saturday. All they chose to hear was ‘go to the movies on Saturday’ and not the first part of the message.

Recognizing & Overcoming Listening Obstacles • Egocentric Listening => occurs when people focus more on their message and self-presentation than on the message of the other person involved in an interaction. • Occurs a lot in disagreements and conflicts.

Recognizing & Overcoming Listening Obstacles • Wandering Thoughts => occur when you daydream or think about things other than the message being presented. • Sitting in class, but you have so much to get done when you get home all you can do is think of the list of chores/activities and no longer focus on the lecture.

Recognizing & Overcoming Listening Obstacles • Experiential Superiority => takes place when people fail to fully listen to someone else because they believe that they possess more or superior knowledge and experience than the other person. • The new person at work tries to inform a coworker that they are not completing a task correctly, but the coworker dismisses the message because the person is new.

Recognizing & Overcoming Listening Obstacles • Message Complexity => is an obstacle to someone listening when they find a message so complex or confusing that he or she stops listening. • When learning a new subject material and the instructor presents the information with a bunch of jargon that you can no longer follow their lecture

Recognizing & Overcoming Listening Obstacles • Past Experience with the Source => happens when previous encounters with the person result in you ignoring the message. • Someone has a habit of lying or making a big deal out of little things so you pass up their messages.

Critical Listening • Critical Listening => involves analyzing and evaluating the accuracy, legitimacy and value of messages and is part of the more general process of critical evaluation of everything in life.

Critical Listening • Critical Evaluation in Everyday Life • Always need to make evaluations and judgments as we encounter messages and experiences. • Some are major life decisions (accepting a new job) and others are smaller in size (what to have for lunch).

Critical Listening • Four Elements of Critical Listening • Evaluation of Plausibility • Evaluation of Source • Evaluation of Consistency • Evaluation of Evidence

Critical Listening • Evaluation of Plausibility • When you are evaluating you experience feelings of the message that make it seem legitimate.

Critical Listening • Evaluation of Source • Your past experiences shape if you find them credible • Status of the source impacts how critical you are of the message. • Individuals of equal status tend to have more critically evaluated thoughts than those of higher status.

Critical Listening • Evaluation of Consistency • Concerns whether the message is free of internal contradiction and in harmony with information you already know is true. • You are told by a source you no longer have a final, but you know you already have one scheduled for December. This would violate information you know is true from your instructor.

Critical Listening • Evaluation of Evidence • You must evaluate the evidence by considering the following criteria: verifiability, quantity, and quality. • Verifiability => indicates that the material being provided can be confirmed by other sources and means.

Critical Listening • Critical Listening & Fallacious Arguments • Fallacious Arguments => those that appear legitimate but are actually based on faulty reasoning or insufficient evidence.

Critical Listening • Types of Fallacious Arguments • Argument against the source • Appeal to authority • Appeal to people (bandwagon appeal) • Appeal to relationship • Post hoc ergo propter hock & cum hoc ergo propter hoc • Hasty generalization • Red herring • False alternatives • Composition & Division Fallacies • Equivocation

Critical Listening • Argument Against the Source • Occurs when the source of a message, rather than the message itself, is attacked. • This happens a lot in politics.

Critical Listening • Appeal to Authority • Happens when a person’s authority or credibility in one area is used to support another. • An actress trying to sell a special microwave in an infomercial.

Critical Listening • Appeal to People (Bandwagon Appeal) • Claims that something is good or beneficial because everyone else agrees with this evaluation. • Used a lot in advertisements where ‘everyone’ is doing something or buying their product.

Critical Listening • Appeal to Relationships • Occurs when relationships are used to justify certain behaviors and to convince others of their appropriateness. • If you were my friend you would….

Critical Listening • Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc • “After this; therefore, because of this” • Argues that something is caused by whatever happens before it. • Since we voted this way, a tornado hit our city.

Critical Listening • Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc • “With this; therefore, because of this.” • Argues that if one thing happens at the same time as another, it was caused by the thing with which it coincides. • I had a car accident when it rained, so it I have accidents when it rains.

Critical Listening • Hasty Generalizations • Arises when a conclusion is based on a single occurrence or insufficient data or sample size. • My friend buys a Envoy and it runs bad so I will never buy one.

Chapter 4: Listening