CANCELLED - The Story of Listening

Practitioners claim that good listeners are highly successful in being leaders, negotiators, parents, romantic partners and healers.  In a similar vein, theoreticians claim that listeners dictate the fluency of speakers (via backchannels), shape speakers' self-knowledge, and that if they use Rogerian listening they can even change the personality of the speaker.  To evaluate these claims and offer theoretical boundaries, I will present an ongoing research program with former and current students.  Specifically, I will present ongoing meta-analyses of all listening-related effect sizes --all suggesting that listening has very powerful effects.  For example, the inverse-variance weighted mean of the correlations, corrected for unreliability, of listening with people-oriented leadership was .73 with CI = [.64, .80]  - an estimate based K = 13, and N = 7,874.  Next, I will assess one extension of Rogers's theory suggesting that listeners make speakers more tolerant of inner contradictions and consequently increase the complexity and reduce the extremity of their attitude towards other people, such as their coworkers.  Then I will consider the costs of listening.  First, I will demonstrate that good listeners are perceived to have low dominance, but high prestige.  Thus, good listeners forfeit status attainment via dominance, but good listeners gain status via prestige, and equalize power distribution with speakers.   Second, I will show that positive effect of listening on psychological safety of the speaker is attenuated, and perhaps even reversed, among speakers who are high on avoidance-attachment style.  To help the audience integrate this complex research program, I will present the theory and the experimental data in a format of a fairy-tale: “The Story of Listening.”