Listening and Prejudice Reduction

In light of yesterday's post, I wanted to follow up about both the capacity and value of listening to others even we have strong political disagreements. 

First, thank you to Doyle Srader at Bushnell University for putting this research on my radar screen. Over the last two years I have visited Bushnell to talk about faith and politics. (You can see my first talk here and my most recent one here.) During my second visit, Dr. Srader shared with our gathering the research of Guy Itzchakov about the impact of high quality listening upon prejudice.

Specifically, a 2020 study conducted by Itzchakov showed that exposure to high quality listening reduces social prejudice. High quality listening, also known as reflective or therapeutic listening, involves empathic attention and providing a non-judgmental space which creates a sense of what Itzchakov calls "psychological safety." Empathic and non-judgmental listening provides opportunity for insight, self-exploration, and attitude change. Poor listening, by contrast, tends to create defensiveness and causes people to more deeply entrench into currently held views. Defensiveness is particularly characteristic of extreme views. Consequently, poor listening tends to exacerbate prejudices. 

In his 2020 study Itzchakov had Israeli participants talk about their prejudices regarding "Black, homeless, immigrants to Israel, gay, and transgender" persons, selecting the group from this collection they felt the most bias against. Participants were provided either normal versus high quality listening as they described their prejudice. Overall, exposure to high quality listening reduced self-reported prejudice at post-test. 

Itzchakov's research suggests that listening can either reduce or exacerbate social prejudices. People who hold social prejudices tend to be defensive. When such people are not listened to their prejudices harden and grow more extreme. High quality listening, by contrast, in providing empathy and psychological safety, tends to reduce prejudice by inviting people into a process of self-examination and self-discovery. 

I bring up Itzchakov's research to make the point Dr. Srader shared with us at Bushnell. In our increasingly polarized political climate, where viewpoints are getting more extreme and social prejudices are on the rise, we often wonder what can be done to change people's minds, especially people we are close to. Well, one thing that might help is listening to people rather than debating them. Debating increases defensiveness and exacerbates extremism. High quality listening, by contrast, tends to reduce bias and prejudice. 

Which brings me back to yesterday's post. Specifically, do we have the psychological and moral capacities to provide high quality listening for others? To be sure, wisdom and discernment are needed here. There are public spaces and group contexts where listening to extreme viewpoints wouldn't be warranted. But such spaces aren't the private, intimate, one on one contexts where high quality listening occurs, the conversations we have with friends and family. Itzchakov's research suggests that in those contexts listening rather than debating can be the better path forward, at least if we want to change people's views. Listening isn't passivity, a failure of courage, or capitulation. Listening is a prejudice-reduction intervention that can gently lead some people out of the darkness and into the light.