The Evidentiary Basis for Political Listening: A Meta-Analysis of the Effect of Feeling Heard

For this special issue on democratic listening, we review the quantitative findings of interpersonal listening research. Though such studies were not conducted in a political context, we show how they provide a broader foundation for understanding listening. Doing so requires a wide-angle lens, generalizing across methodological variations and broad outcome categories to discern the broader impacts of perceived listening. Our meta-analytic review of this literature on dyadic interactions between speakers and listeners draws on 50 studies from 25 articles, which yield 127 effect sizes and a total N of 9,601. Feeling heard had a significant effect on all of the outcome variables in this analysis. Of these, the strongest associations (r > .60) were for the speaker’s perceptions of the listener, such as feeling a sense of relatedness (k = 5, r = .62) and trust (k = 5, r = .68). Moderator analysis revealed the stronger effects of perceived listening in workplace contexts compared to political contexts. From these results we draw methodological and theoretical implications for interpersonal political persuasion, deliberative democracy, political socialization, and civic engagement.