Opinion Science

#75: High-Quality Listening with Guy Itzchakov

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Episode notes

Guy Itzchakov knows how to listen. He's an associate professor in the Department of Human Services at the University of Haifa. He studies the markers of high-quality listening. But it's not that he tries to figure out who listens well and who doesn't. Instead, he's focused on how receiving high-quality listening affects us as speakers. He finds, for example, that when someone really, deeply listens to what we have to say, it provides us with a safe opportunity to explore where we really stand, realizing that the world is more nuanced than our simple opinions make them out to be. In our conversation, Guy shares the hallmarks of quality listening and what impact they have on speakers.

Things that come up in this episode:

• Psychologist Carl Rogers and his pioneering work on person-centric therapy and empathic listening. Sources for the intro included: Boettcher, Hofmann, and Wu (Noba Textbook); Owen (2022); Rogers and Roethlisberger (1952)
• The markers of good listening: attention, comprehension, and positive intention (see Kluger & Itzchakov, 2022)
• Being listened to can lead people to openly acknowledge their ambivalence (Itzchakov et al., 2017) while becoming more clear in their views (Itzchakov et al., 2018).
• Speakers who experienced high-quality listening became less prejudiced in their views of other groups (Itzchakov et al., 2020)

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