Listening Response Types and Perceptions of Listener

Kristie Meyer
Green River College/CMST&210 Interpersonal Communication
Carel Neffenger, Instructor
March 19, 2023

This study sets out to explore the relationship between listener response types and the speaker’s perception of the listener as a person. Which listening response types inspire a positive opinion of the listener, and which create a negative perception?

I was inspired to conduct this research by the trend of videos on Tiktok with people complaining about how annoying it is when they’re telling a story and the person they’re speaking to responds with an example of something similar happening to them. That is just an “Empathizing” listening response, and seemed appropriate given the context, but caused a negative perception of the listener in the speaker. They claimed that it was “interrupting” or “making it all about them.” This made me curious if the average person is typically annoyed with Empathizing, or other listening responses.

Literature review

For this study, I used eight different listening response types (Wrench, Punyanunt-Carter, & Thweatt, 2020). Silent Listening is saying nothing in response to the speaker’s words, Questioning is to clarify or get more facts and details, and Paraphrasing is restating what the listener believes the speaker just said in their own words to show understanding. Empathizing is the listener showing that they relate to what the speaker said. Supporting shows the speaker how the listener feels about them rather than about the content of their message and includes praise, offers to help, reassurance, agreement, and diversion. Analyzing offers alternative interpretations of the message, Evaluating makes a judgment of the speaker’s thoughts and behaviors, and Advising suggests a solution or course of action in response to the message.

Similar research done in the past has focused on communication in friendships or familial relationships. One such study explores the effects of communicated perspective-taking (CPT) in conversations between friends when telling difficult stories. It measured perceived communication competence and face threat. CPT is like empathizing because it involves a break in the speaker’s story, which could be perceived as an interruption, for the listener to show that they relate and confirm that they understand the emotion and motive behind the story. This work showed a positive correlation between CPT and perceived communication competence, and a negative correlation between CPT and face threat – in other words, CPT led to the speaker having a more positive perception of the listener (Koenig Kellas, Baker, Cardwell, Minniear, & Kranstuber Hortsman, 2020).

Another study of 415 college students showed that “relational listening,” which is also similar to empathizing in that it involves “interrupting” the speaker’s story to explain how the listener can relate to it, led to speakers’ increased willingness to self-disclose (Keaton, Bodie, & Keteyian, 2015). This supports common knowledge that conversation is transactional, and an exchange of information and feeling is the best way to build rapport and improve relationships.

Research Question

How does listener response type impact speaker’s perception of listener? I hypothesize that empathizing will not create a more negative perception of listener.

Method

An online survey was shared with people of all ages and genders via social media. Approximately half of respondents were known to me personally and half were strangers. The same scenario was presented to each participant:

“Imagine you’ve been working at a job you love for three months. On a random Monday, your power blinks in the middle of the night and your alarm doesn’t go off. After waking up in a panic and rushing to get ready, you go to your car only to realize your battery is dead. You’re forced to wait on AAA to bring you a new battery, and you arrive to work two hours late. When you walk in, the receptionist, who you barely know, asks you, “What happened?” You aren’t obligated to explain anything to them, but they’ve always seemed nice, and you’d like to vent before going to speak with your boss. You tell them about your rough morning.”

Then, 15 questions reflecting examples of 8 different listening response types (Wrench, Punyanunt-Carter, & Thweatt, 2020) were given to the participants. Participants were asked to rate on a Likert scale from “Much worse” to “Much better” their perception of the receptionist as a person after each statement. No gender was given for the receptionist because I did not want gender bias to impact my data.

Participants

I was not selective in who could respond to my survey. I ended up with 25 respondents. Because of the way the respondents’ demographics are skewed, I cannot determine any statistically significant data based on gender or age. See Figures 1 and 2 for demographic information.

Figure 1

Age of participants.

Figure 2

Gender of participants.

Results

The results of my survey supported my hypothesis that Empathizing did not create a more negative perception of a listener. In fact, the only listening response type to create a more negative perception of the receptionist was Advising. After being given advice in response to this imagined dilemma, only 18% of respondents felt better about the receptionist, while 42% felt worse about them. For one of the two Advising questions, question 9. “Why don’t you take this donut from the break room and offer it to your boss to butter them up?” zero respondents said that they felt better about the receptionist after. 60% said they felt worse about them, and 40% maintained a neutral perception.

The results for Analyzing were very close, with 40% of respondents stating they felt better about the receptionist after an Analyzing response, and 38% saying they felt worse about them. Only 22% of respondents said they remained neutral about the receptionist after this response type, the lowest neutral response after Paraphrasing.

With specific regard to Empathizing, 46% of respondents felt better about the receptionist and only 14% felt worse. That’s a bigger statistical difference than Advising, with opposite results.

Figure 3

How percpetion of listener changed

Note: Blue represents respondents who felt better, orange represents respondents who felt worse, and gray represents respondents who remained neutral after the given response type.

Questioning had a significant difference in responses to the two questions that fell under this response type. To question #2. “Is your boss normally a stickler for being on time?” 30% of respondents said they felt worse about the receptionist while only 4% felt better about them. In contrast, to question #11. “How long did AAA take to get to you? Sometimes they take forever!” only 4% of respondents said they felt worse about the receptionist while 44% felt better. See Figure 4 for a visual.

Figure 4

Listening response type.

Discussion

My research did not support the theory that Empathizing leads most people to perceive their listener poorly, even in situations where the speaker and listener do not know each other well. This could be a generational difference. The inspiration for this research was Tiktok videos, and Tiktok users are most often Gen Z, while most of my respondents were millennials or older. Further research could investigate the impact of age on how listening types affect a speaker’s perception of their listener, but any such research would need to account for the fact that Gen Z members were born from 1997 to 2013, meaning most of them do not yet have fully developed prefrontal cortexes in their brain (Arain, Haque, Johal, Mathur, Nel, Rais, Sandhu, & Sharma, 2013). The prefrontal cortex is responsible for much of our empathy, and that could be why many Tiktok users view Empathizing as an interruption or “making it all about them.”

The only listening response type that created an overall more negative perception of the fictional receptionist was Advising. This could be because people are not appreciative of advice from people they barely know, or people with low stakes in the speaker’s personal problem. Maybe if the receptionist had more credibility, like getting out of trouble with the same boss for being late last week, Advising would have been met with more positivity.

Regarding the difference in perception that stemmed from the two different Questioning responses, my theory is that there was a more positive response to question 11 than to question 2 because of the small element of Empathizing contained in question #11 (“Sometimes they take forever!”). This could further support my hypothesis that Empathizing does not typically create a more negative perception of a listener.

There could also be a study done that specifically uses a male receptionist to explore how gender stereotypes and perception affect the data. I tried to avoid this in my own research, but also understand that “receptionist” is a stereotypically feminine role and so most of my participants likely pictured a woman.

References

Arain, M., Haque, M., Johal, L., Mathur, P., Nel, W., Rais, A., Sandhu, R., & Sharma, S. (2013). Maturation of the adolescent brain. Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment 9(default). pp. 449-461.

Keaton, S.A., Bodie, G.D., & Keteyian, R.V. (2015, September 1). Relational listening goals influence how people report talking about problems. Communication quarterly. 63(4) pp. 480-494.

Koenig Kellas, J., Baker, J., Cardwell, M., Minniear, M., & Kranstuber Hortsman, H. (2020). Communicated perspective-taking (CPT) and storylistening: testing the impact of CPT in the context of friends telling stories of difficulty. Papers in communication studies – University of Nebraska. Available: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1234&context=commstudiespapers

Wrench, J.S., Punyanunt-Carter, N.M., & Thweatt, K.S. (2020). Interpersonal communication: A mindful approach to relationships. ch. 7. Milne Open Textbooks. Available: https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/interpersonalcommunication/chapter/7/