Listening Fast and Slow

Like other constructs studied by communication scientists, listening has been viewed as a predominantly deliberate process that requires considerable cognitive resources to perform well. Listening, contrasted with hearing as a more passive mode of information processing, requires a person to actively receive, process, and sensibly respond to aural information. The emphasis on deliberate processing might perhaps have been fueled by research in social psychology, from which much communication theory is drawn. That literature has emphasized rational, deliberate processing at the expense of a more intuitive mode that tends to be viewed as inferior in human decision making and grounded much more in emotions. Using a general dual-process framework, the authors argue that an intuitive, experiential system plays a much more important role in the listening process than previously recognized. They lay out their rationale and model for experiential listening and discuss ways in which people can improve their intuitive listening through mindfulness-based metacognitive practices.