The Science and the So What? #1
Skillful Listening: There’s Way More to It Than Paraphrasing
Marcy Crawford and Louis Wilde, Ph.D.
The Science
Active listening is something that many people have heard about but don’t know much about except that it involves repeating back in some way what a person has said. This is known as paraphrasing. In fact, classic active listening has three elements, nonverbal communication of unconditional attention, nonjudgemental paraphrasing of the speaker’s message in terms of both content and feelings, and asking questions that encourage the speaker to elaborate on their beliefs or feelings. One might well imagine that there is some subtlety in how to implement these elements in an actual conversation, and there has been some research on what types of paraphrasing are most effective but, perhaps more fundamentally, there has also been research on whether paraphrasing in the absence of follow up questioning has any effect at all on the speaker’s perception of the conversation. Specifically, Weger, et al. (2010) found that, “message paraphrases [alone] were associated with the social attractiveness of the listener but were not associated with participants’ conversational satisfaction or perceptions of feeling understood by the listener.”
The So What
Skillful listening is well-recognized as being a fundamental component of relational mindfulness. However, even classic treatments of listening in relational mindfulness tend to focus primarily on suggestions for the listener on how to hear with more precision what the speaker is trying to communicate. But no matter how mindful the listener, no one is a mind-reader, and there are inevitable and severe limits on one’s understanding without confirming it with the speaker. Further, the speaker may lack clarity on their own beliefs or feelings. Paraphrasing alone will not solve these problems. However, the combination of skillful paraphrasing and skillful follow up questioning can foster skillful listening, to the benefit of the listener and the speaker. Of course this begs the question what constitutes skillful paraphrasing and skillful follow up questioning, both of which are context dependent and neither of which comes naturally for most people.
Harry Weger Jr., Gina R. Castle & Melissa C. Emmett (2010) Active Listening in Peer Interviews: The Influence of Message Paraphrasing on Perceptions of Listening Skill, The Intl. Journal of Listening, 24:1, 34-49, DOI: 10.1080/10904010903466311.