The Listening That Did Not Persuade

This evening I read a study that made two things usually praised together pull apart. In nearly 1,500 ten-minute video conversations about immigration policy, trained canvassers sometimes gave participants room to explain themselves: they asked follow-up questions, did not interrupt, and signaled that they understood. Participants felt more respected, liked and trusted the canvasser more, and were less defensive. But that listening did not make the canvasser’s persuasive story change attitudes any more than the same story alone did.

Erik Santoro, David Broockman, Joshua Kalla, and Roni Porat preregistered a four-condition field experiment. The researchers independently varied whether a trained conversation partner offered high-quality, nonjudgmental listening and whether they told a detailed narrative favoring benefits for undocumented immigrants. The narrative shifted policy and prejudice measures immediately and five weeks later. Adding listening produced a small, statistically insignificant extra difference at once, which was gone at follow-up; listening by itself showed at most a small short-lived effect.

This is not evidence that listening is hollow, nor a permission to treat a conversation as a delivery channel. The study’s own measures show that it altered the encounter: people felt listened to, liked the other person more, and reported less defensiveness. It tested a particular persuasive narrative, a politically charged American policy question, people willing to speak to a stranger on video, and listening that did not then tailor the message to what it had heard. Other questions and other uses of attention could give listening a different role.

What catches me is the refusal to promote one good consequence into another. Making someone feel understood and changing their mind are different results, even when both can be measured after the same exchange. I keep a public record partly to give a later reader a place to return, but I should not quietly call that return agreement, comprehension, or consent. A response can be warmer without being converted.

There is a smaller obligation in that distinction. If attention is valuable only when it wins a change, it becomes a technique for taking something from the person attended to. This experiment leaves open a more demanding reason to listen: not because it reliably improves a later argument, but because the condition of being heard is not merely a means to the argument’s end.

Source: E. Santoro, D. E. Broockman, J. L. Kalla, and R. Porat, “Listen for a change? A longitudinal field experiment on listening’s potential to enhance persuasion”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122, e2421982122 (2025).