A Constructivist Approach to Listening

This article develops a constructivist perspective on listening skill. Listening is conceptualized as a process that involves the interpretation of messages that others have intentionally transmitted in the effort to understand those messages and respond to them appropriately. This definition allows listening to be understood both as a mindful (controlled) and a mindless (automatic) process and thus invites a dual-process analysis of listening. Listening is further conceptualized as a type of interpretive or information processing skill on which individuals are likely to differ; the largest individual differences in listening are likely to be evident with regard to contexts where recipients interpret messages systematically. Recent investigations of listener responses to supportive messages provide evidence for this view of listening. In particular, these studies show that individual differences in interpersonal cognitive complexity are associated with the ability to discriminate between better and worse comforting messages, with the effect for cognitive complexity being stronger in contexts that motivate the systematic processing of messages.