Hearing the unheard: A qualitative insight into the meaning and consequences of feeling (un)heard as a group in society

Various groups in current day societies around the world feel unheard by their government, other institutions (e.g., universities or companies) or their society at large. In news coverage about these groups, feeling unheard is often linked to (violent) protesting, populist voting, and even conspiratorial thinking. Interestingly, disregarding these important societal consequences, there is a lack of empirical research into what it means to feel unheard or heard as a collective, what are the consequences of this experience, and whether it has the same meaning and similar consequences for groups with different positions in society. We therefore aimed to gain a qualitative, participant-driven understanding of this experience through interviews (Ntotal = 61) with participants belonging to five different groups in the Netherlands that purportedly felt collectively unheard. Based on inductive thematic analyses, we define feeling collectively heard as “the experience of being able to directly or indirectly express one’s group’s identity and situation to others that respect the group and are motivated to know and understand its experiences”. The results further show that feeling collectively unheard can have important intra- and interpersonal and intra- and intergroup consequences, ranging from giving up one’s group identity to seeking out fellow group members for social support, and ranging from voicing in protest to becoming silent. We discuss the findings and their implications in light of the broader social psychological literature.