Project Details
Description
The world is more polarized than ever, and conversations occurring daily between acquaintances, co-workers, family members, decision-makers, politicians, and others drive the nature of these conversations and their impact on our polarized societies. These conversations can help people find common ground, but they can also polarize. The proposed project will test the expectation that high-quality listening can fundamentally shift the social and personal space so that conversations can depolarize attitudes. By providing attention, support, and understanding, despite different perspectives, it will model high-quality listening as a depolarizing agent in discussions centering around social causes. We will furthermore explore this model across four cultures {Israel, the UK, Hong Kong, and Pero) to test for generalizability and to examine similarities in processes in collectivist and individualist cultures. Ultimately, this work will build a foundation for understanding how social and individual factors interact so that we can guide constructive communication between people who disagree on certain topics. We test two primary hypotheses. First, we hypothesize that high-quality listening will act to depolarize speakers after they discuss a topic on which they disagree. Second, we explore the role that challenging speakers on their views, a potentially threatening tactic that is known to backfire, can have additive (positive) effects when it follows high-quality listening. We hypothesize that highquality listening paired with a challenge can be a particularly powerful combination for depolarizing attitudes. Furthermore, across both of these hypotheses, we will explore differences across collectivist and individualist cultures. We target this work towards academics in psychology and related fields interested in understanding depolarization and practitioners and others in the community who benefit from understanding the nature of constructive conversations (e.g., inclusion trainers, educators, leaders within organizations, and clinicians). To reach these groups, we will produce two primary research papers presenting findings of the experimental research developed in four countries and describe our work in strategic (practitioner and researcher) conferences and in well-read online blogs and media articles. We believe this work will contribute to a robust, theory-driven, and data-supported model of how conversations serve to depolarize, which will lay the groundwork for developing future interventions that bridge conversing partners who disagree.
General Objective
The proposed project will test the expectation that high-quality listening can fundamentally shift the social and personal space so that conversations can depolarize attitudes.
Specific Objectives
- Analizar el efecto de la alta capacidad de escucha sobre la comodidad social después de un desacuerdo/discusión.
- Analizar el efecto de la alta capacidad de escucha sobre la autorreflexión después de un desacuerdo/discusión.
- Analizar el efecto mediador de comodidad social entre la alta capacidad de escucha y la polarización afectiva individual.
- Analizar el efecto mediador de autoreflexión entre la alta capacidad de escucha y la polarización afectiva colectiva.
- Analizar el efecto de la capacidad de escucha sobre las creencias o actitudes ideológicas.
Direct Results
This work will build a foundation for understanding how social and individual factors interact so that we can guide constructive communication between people who disagree on certain topics.
Indirect Results
Brindar sugerencias sobre cómo mejorar la escucha interpersonal (comodidad social y autorreflexión) en los niveles de polarización afectiva, tanto a nivel individual como colectivo, durante desacuerdos en conversaciones.
Research Level
Investigacion basica
Research Approach
Disciplinario
Project Type
ADMINISTRADO
Ubigeo
LIMA - LIMA - SAN MIGUEL
Research Lines
- 102 — Salud y bienestar
OECD Fields of Science and Technology
Ciencias sociales - Psicología - Psicología (incluye relaciones hombre
Funding Institution
HAIFA UNIVERSITY
| Short title | DEPOLARIZATION LISTENING |
|---|---|
| Status | Finished |
| Effective start/end date | 1/11/23 → 31/10/25 |