Develop Ethical Listening Skills
The act of hearing is what our body does physically; our ear takes in sound waves. However, when we interpret [or make sense of] those sound waves, that’s called listening. Think about the last time you gave a speech. How did the audience members act? Do you remember the people that seemed most attentive? Those audience members were displaying traits of ethical listening. An ethical listener is one who actively interprets shared material and analyzes the content and speaker’s effectiveness. Good listeners try to display respect for the speaker. Communicating respect for the speaker occurs when the listener: a] prepares to listen and b] listens with his or her whole body.
“Bored Students” by cybrarian77. CC-BY-NC.
One way you can prepare yourself to listen is to get rid of distractions.[2] If you’ve selected a seat near the radiator and find it hard to hear over the noise, you may want to move before the speaker begins. If you had a fight with your friend before work that morning, you may want to take a moment to collect your thoughts and put the argument out of your mind—so that you can prevent internal distraction during the staff meeting presentation. As a professional, you are aware of the types of things and behaviors that distract you from the speaker; it is your obligation to manage these distractions before the speaker begins.
In order to ethically listen, it’s also imperative to listen with more than just your ears—your critical mind should also be at work. According to Sellnow,[3] two other things you can do to prepare are to avoid prejudging the speaker and refrain from jumping to conclusions while the speaker is talking. Effective listening can only occur when we’re actually attending to the message. Conversely, listening is interrupted when we’re pre-judging the speaker, stereotyping the speaker, or making mental counterarguments to the speaker’s claims. You have the right to disagree with a speaker’s content, but wait until the speaker is finished and has presented his or her whole argument to draw such a conclusion.
Ethical listening doesn’t just take place inside the body. In order to show your attentiveness, it is necessary to consider how your body is listening. A listening posture enhances your ability to receive information and make sense of a message.[4] An attentive listening posture includes sitting up and remaining alert, keeping eye contact with the speaker and his or her visual aid, removing distractions from your area, and taking notes when necessary. Also, if you’re enjoying a particular speaker, it’s helpful to provide positive nonverbal cues like head-nodding, occasional smiling, and eye-contact. These practices can aid you in successful, ethical listening. However, know that listening is sometimes only the first step in this process—many times listeners are asked to provide feedback.
Constructive criticism isabout finding something goodand positive to soften theblow to the real critique ofwhat really went on. –Paula Abdul
Listening Critically
As a student, you are exposed to many kinds of messages. You receive messages conveying academic information, institutional rules, instructions, and warnings; you also receive messages through political discourse, advertisements, gossip, jokes, song lyrics, text messages, invitations, web links, and all manners of communication. You know it’s not all the same, but it isn’t always clear how to separate the truth from the messages that are misleading or even blatantly false. Nor is it always clear which messages are intended to help the listener and which ones are merely self-serving for the speaker. Part of being a good listener is to learn when to use caution in evaluating the messages we hear.
Critical listening in this context means using careful thinking and reasoning to see whether a message makes sense in light of factual evidence.
Critical listening can be learned with practice but is not necessarily easy to do. Some people never learn this skill; instead, they take every message at face value even when those messages are in conflict with their knowledge. Problems occur when messages are repeated to others who have not yet developed the skills to discern the difference between a valid message and a mistaken one. Critical listening can be particularly difficult when the message is complex. Unfortunately, some speakers may make their messages intentionally complex to avoid critical scrutiny. For example, a city treasurer giving a budget presentation might use very large words and technical jargon, which make it difficult for listeners to understand the proposed budget and ask probing questions.
Types of Ineffective Listening
All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Just like happiness [or happy families], effective listening is fairly easy to describe. Our page on Effective Listening provides a model that is generally applicable to most situations. However, there are many, many different ways to listen ineffectively, and a huge number of barriers that may prevent or hinder listening.
However, we can also identify some particular categories of ineffective listening. John Stoker, an author and communications teachers, has identified seven different types. They are:
1. Evaluative listening
Evaluative listeners spend all their time evaluating what you are saying, and making judgements about it. You can spot an evaluative listener, because they will always respond with either agreement or disagreement [or possibly both, in the form of ‘yes, but…’].
The big problem with these listeners is that they are hearing everything from their own point of view. Everything is passed through a prism of their own experiences and opinions. This means that they often miss critical information simply because it does not fit with their view of the world.
The other problem is that speaker and listener can get into a negative spiral of argument and counter-argument. Instead of building on each other’s communication, they are engaged in knocking it down.
2. Assumptive listening
Assumptive listeners make assumptions about the speaker’s meaning or intention—and usually before the speaker has finished.
They may therefore finish other people’s sentences, or jump in with a response before the speaker has really finished. Engaging with an assumptive listener is hard work, because you constantly have to go back and explain your meaning again because they have interpreted it incorrectly.
3. Self-protective listening
Here, the listener is so wrapped up in their own situation and/or emotional response to it that they simply have no brain-space to hear or concentrate on anything else.
In other words, they are NOT really listening at all, and they are certainly not engaging with what anyone else says. It is a moot point whether this should actually be described as ‘listening’ at all—except that these listeners will often be nodding and smiling, and generally looking like they are engaging with what is being said. However, when they come to respond, it will be obvious that they have not really heard or taken on board anything that is said.
These listeners often simply repeat their negative stories over and over again—and with increasing levels of negative emotion. The only way out is to break the spiral [see box].
A way out
Self-protective listeners may need help to break out of their ‘vicious spiral’. Transactional analysis offers some clues about how to do this, suggesting that they may be in ‘Child’ mode. This makes them turn inward, and want to avoid anything that might be threatening, like other ideas.
To help them, you will have to ‘hook’ their Child with sympathy, then find a way to engage the Adult.
There is more about this in our page on Transactional Analysis.
4. Judgemental listening
Judgemental listeners will constantly criticise what speakers are saying. This type of listening is similar to evaluative listening, but usually with more negativity and less opportunity to respond. These listeners often have preconceived ideas about the speaker [for example, bias or prejudice based on how they look, or their background]. This may prevent them from considering the speaker’s ideas with an open mind.
This type of listening tends to result in the speaker shutting down, and refusing to provide any more information. Being constantly criticised quickly becomes unpleasant.
5. Affirmative listening
Affirmative listening is more or less the polar opposite of judgemental listening. Affirmative listeners only ‘hear’ messages with which they agree. They therefore only listen for points that they can support, and not those that show different opinions.
Having an affirmative listener is at first quite pleasant. They tend to agree with you, which is nice. However, after a while, you realise that they only agree with some points—and possibly not very important ones—but refuse to engage with anything else.
The problem here is that these people only listen for themselves. They want their opinion to be validated—and have no real interest in anyone else. This quickly gets one-sided and tiresome, especially if you are genuinely interested in a debate that explores different perspectives.
6. Defensive listening
A defensive listener takes everything that is said as a personal attack.
These people therefore feel the need to defend themselves against everything, and to justify everything that they say. They often use the phrase ‘Yes, but…’, because they have no interest in building on any other communication—only to justify themselves. They also find it hard to explore other points of view, because anything different is a threat.
7. Authoritative listening
Authoritative listeners listen solely in order to advise. They always know best, and are always ready to tell you what to do.
You can often spot authoritative listeners by the use of the words ‘You should…’ or ‘You need…’ in their sentences.
A Common Thread?
You may have spotted that all these types of ineffective listening are related to the listener’s attitude. They may perceive a problem with the speaker, or simply have a ‘mental block’ about the subject.
Whatever the cause, their pattern of thinking is not conducive to genuine, effective listening.
It is affecting how they relate to other people, and the messages that they hear in other people’s communication. These attitudes may have many causes, such as
Preconceived ideas or bias
These mean that you are not open to other people’s ideas and opinions. Biases may be personal or cultural. For example, in some cultures, ideas are only considered acceptable from those in senior positions [and you may be interested in our page on Intercultural Awareness for more examples like this]. You may not trust the speaker on a personal level, and therefore find it hard to be open to their ideas on an intellectual level.
Previous experiences
These may affect your expectations about people and/or topics or situations. We are all influenced by previous experiences in life. We respond to people based on personal appearance, how initial introductions or welcomes were received and/or previous interpersonal encounters. This may affect how you approach an individual. You may also find that someone says something that reminds you of a previous experience, and you start to think about that instead of listening. The key here is to consider whether your previous experience is going to be helpful—and if not, set it aside.
Having a closed mind.
We all have ideals and values that we believe to be correct. It can therefore be difficult to listen to contradictory views. However, the key to effective listening and interpersonal skills more generally is the ability to open your mind, and take time to understand why others think about things differently to you—and then use this information to gain a better understanding of the speaker.
Environmental and Physical Barriers to Listening
Environmental factors such as lighting, temperature, and furniture affect our ability to listen. A room that is too dark can make us sleepy, just as a room that is too warm or cool can raise awareness of our physical discomfort to a point that it is distracting. Some seating arrangements facilitate listening, while others separate people. In general, listening is easier when listeners can make direct eye contact with and are in close physical proximity to a speaker. You may recall from Chapter 4 “Nonverbal Communication” that when group members are allowed to choose a leader, they often choose the person who is sitting at the center or head of the table [Andersen, 1999]. Even though the person may not have demonstrated any leadership abilities, people subconsciously gravitate toward speakers that are nonverbally accessible. The ability to effectively see and hear a person increases people’s confidence in their abilities to receive and process information. Eye contact and physical proximity can still be affected by noise. As we learned in Chapter 1 “Introduction to Communication Studies”, environmental noises such as a whirring air conditioner, barking dogs, or a ringing fire alarm can obviously interfere with listening despite direct lines of sight and well-placed furniture.
Physiological noise, like environmental noise, can interfere with our ability to process incoming information. This is considered a physical barrier to effective listening because it emanates from our physical body. Physiological noise is noise stemming from a physical illness, injury, or bodily stress. Ailments such as a cold, a broken leg, a headache, or a poison ivy outbreak can range from annoying to unbearably painful and impact our listening relative to their intensity. Another type of noise, psychological noise, bridges physical and cognitive barriers to effective listening. Psychological noise, or noise stemming from our psychological states including moods and level of arousal, can facilitate or impede listening. Any mood or state of arousal, positive or negative, that is too far above or below our regular baseline creates a barrier to message reception and processing. The generally positive emotional state of being in love can be just as much of a barrier as feeling hatred. Excited arousal can also distract as much as anxious arousal. Stress about an upcoming events ranging from losing a job, to having surgery, to wondering about what to eat for lunch can overshadow incoming messages. While we will explore cognitive barriers to effective listening more in the next section, psychological noise is relevant here given that the body and mind are not completely separate. In fact, they can interact in ways that further interfere with listening. Fatigue, for example, is usually a combination of psychological and physiological stresses that manifests as stress [psychological noise] and weakness, sleepiness, and tiredness [physiological noise]. Additionally, mental anxiety [psychological noise] can also manifest itself in our bodies through trembling, sweating, blushing, or even breaking out in rashes [physiological noise].
Intent
According to Tilley, the first major consideration to be aware of when examining the ethicality of something is the issue of intent. To be an ethical speaker or listener, it is important to begin with ethical intentions. For example, if we agree that honesty is ethical, it follows that ethical speakers will prepare their remarks with the intention of telling the truth to their audiences. Similarly, if we agree that it is ethical to listen with an open mind, it follows that ethical listeners will be intentional about letting a speaker make his or her case before forming judgments.
One option for assessing intent is to talk with others about how ethical they think a behavior is; if you get a variety of answers, it might be a sign that the behavior is not ethical and should be avoided. A second option is to check out existing codes of ethics. Many professional organizations, including the Independent Computer Consultants Association, American Counseling Association, and American Society of Home Inspectors, have codes of conduct or ethical guidelines for their members. Individual corporations such as Monsanto, Coca-Cola, Intel, and ConocoPhillips also have ethical guidelines for how their employees should interact with suppliers or clients. Even when specific ethical codes are not present, you can apply general ethical principles, such as whether a behavior is beneficial for the majority or whether you would approve of the same behavior if you were listening to a speech instead of giving it.
In addition, it is important to be aware that people can engage in unethical behavior unintentionally. For example, suppose we agree that it is unethical to take someone else’s words and pass them off as your own—a behavior known as plagiarism. What happens if a speaker makes a statement that he believes he thought of on his own, but the statement is actually quoted from a radio commentator whom he heard without clearly remembering doing so? The plagiarism was unintentional, but does that make it ethical?