Harmony in Political Discourse? The Impact of High-Quality Listening on Speakers' Perceptions Following Political Conversations

Abstract

Conversations with people who hold opposite partisan attitudes can elicit defensiveness, reinforce extreme attitudes, and undermine relationships with those with opposing views. However, this might not be the case when speakers experience high-quality (attentive, understanding, and non-judgmental) listening from their conversation partners. We hypothesized that high-quality listening would increase speakers' positive views toward, and their willingness to further interact with, others who hold politically opposed attitudes, and that these effects would be mediated by greater state openness. We conducted three experiments using different modalities to manipulate listening. In Study 1 (N = 379), participants recalled a conversation with an opposing political party member, with listening quality described as high-quality, low-quality, or control. Study 2 (N = 269) used imagined interactions, with participants reading vignettes describing either high-quality listening or a control condition. In Study 3 (preregistered; N = 741), participants watched a video of a listener modeling high-quality or moderate-quality listening and imagined themselves engaging in a similar interaction. Across studies, we found that high-quality listening consistently increased speakers' state openness to politically opposed others but did not change political attitudes. We found inconsistent evidence for speakers' increased willingness to engage in future interactions (meta-analytic effect: = 0.20, p = 0.015). However, we observed a consistent indirect effect of listening on positive attitudes and willingness for future interactions through increased openness.