4.3: Listening Styles
Janie Harden Fritz
Learning Objectives
- Understand the nature of listening styles.
- Explain the people listening style.
- Explain the action listening style.
- Explain the content listening style.
- Explain the time listening style.
If listening were easy, and if all people went about it in the same way, the task for a public speaker would be much easier. Even Aristotle, over 2,000 years ago, recognized that listeners in his audience were varied in listening styles. He differentiated them as follows:
Rhetoric falls into three divisions, determined by the three classes of listeners to speeches. For of the three elements in speech-making—speaker, subject, and person addressed—it is the last one, the hearer, that determines the speech’s end and object. The hearer must be either a judge, with a decision to make about things past or future, or an observer. A member of the assembly decides about future events, a juryman about past events: while those who merely decide on the orator’s skill are observers (Aristotle, c. 350 BCE).
Thus Aristotle classified listeners into those who would be using the speech to make decisions about past events, those who would make decisions affecting the future, and those who would evaluate the speaker’s skills. This is all the more remarkable when we consider that Aristotle’s audiences were composed exclusively of male citizens of one city-state, all prosperous property owners.
AI Insight
AI assistants often adapt to your “style”—whether brief, detailed, or relational. Reflect: Do you lean toward efficiency, depth, or connection in how you listen to others?
Our audiences today are likely to be much more diverse. Think about the classroom audience that will listen to our speeches in this course. Our classmates come from many different religious, ethnic, racial, ability, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Some of them may speak English as a second language. Some may be survivors of war or other forms of conflict and trauma. Being mindful of such differences will help us prepare a speech in which we minimize the potential for misunderstanding.
Part of the potential for misunderstanding is the difference in listening styles.
In an article in the International Journal of Listening, Watson et al. (1995) identified four listening styles: people, action, content, and time. While there are several different approaches to understanding listening styles and preferences, the following four listening styles are utilized most often across disciplines:
People
The people-oriented listener is interested in the speaker. People-oriented listeners listen to the message in order to learn how speakers think and how they feel about their message. For instance, when people-oriented listeners listen to an interview with a musician or athlete, they are likely to be more interested in the artist or sports figure as an individual than in the music, even though the people- oriented listener might also appreciate the artist’s work. If audience members (receivers) are a people-oriented listeners, they might have certain expectations about questions that will be answered, such as: Does the artist or athlete feel successful? What’s it like to be famous? What kind of educational background does he or she have? In the same way, if we’re listening to a doctor who responded to an earthquake crisis, we might be more interested in the doctor as a person than in the state of affairs for the affected persons. Why did he or she go in response to this crisis? How did he or she get away from his or her normal practice and patients? How many lives did he or she save? Although we might certainly be interested in the equally important and urgent needs for food, shelter, and sanitation following the earthquake, we may want to hear about those issues in the context of the doctor’s experience.
The people-oriented listener is likely to be more attentive to the speaker than to the message. People-oriented listeners understand that the message is about what is important to the speaker.
Action
Action-oriented listeners are primarily interested in finding out what the speaker hopes to accomplish through the message. Does the speaker want votes, donations, volunteers, or something else? Action-oriented listeners may need less description, evidence, and explanations underlying a speaker’s case.
Action-oriented listening is sometimes called task-oriented listening. In it, the listener seeks a clear message about what needs to be done and seeks less focus on the reasons behind the task. This can be especially true if the reasons are complicated. For example, when we are passengers on an airplane waiting to push back from the gate, a flight attendant delivers a brief speech called the preflight safety briefing. The flight attendant does not read the findings of a safety study or the regulations about seat belts. The flight attendant doesn’t explain that the content of the speech is actually mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration. Instead, the attendant says only to buckle up so we can leave. An action-oriented listener finds “buckling up” a more compelling message than a message about the underlying reasons.
Content
Content-oriented listeners are interested in the message itself, whether it makes sense, what it means, and whether it’s accurate. When we give speeches, many members of our classroom audience will be content-oriented listeners who will be interested in learning from us. We therefore have an obligation to represent the truth as accurately as possible. We can emphasize an idea, but if we exaggerate, we could lose credibility in the minds of our content-oriented audience members. We can advocate ideas that are important to us, but if we omit important limitations, we are withholding part of the truth and could leave our audience with an inaccurate view.
Imagine delivering a speech on the plight of orphans in Syria. If we just talk about the fact that there are over forty-five million orphaned Syrians, but don’t explain why, we will sound like an infomercial. In such an instance, our audience’s response is likely to be less enthusiastic than we might want. Instead, content-oriented listeners want to listen to well-developed information with solid explanations.
Time
People using a time-oriented listening style prefer a message that gets to the point quickly. Time-oriented listeners can become impatient with slow delivery or lengthy explanations. This kind of listener may be receptive for only a brief amount of time and may become rude or even hostile if the speaker expects a longer focus of attention. Time-oriented listeners convey their impatience through eye rolling, shifting about in their seats, checking their cell phones, and other inappropriate behaviors. If asked to speak to a group of middle-school students, the speaker needs to realize that their attention spans are simply not as long as those of college students. This is an important reason speeches to young audiences must be shorter, or broken up by more variety than speeches to adults.
AI Insight
Different listening styles influence leadership, teaching, and teamwork. Beyond the podium, knowing your style—and others’—strengthens collaboration.
Let’s consider a professional situation. Some audience members will have real time constraints, not merely perceived ones. Imagine being asked to deliver a speech on a new project to the board of directors of a local corporation. Chances are the people on the board of directors are all pressed for time. If the speech is long and filled with overly detailed information, time-oriented listeners will simply start to tune the speaker out or may even get up and leave. Obviously, if time-oriented listeners start tuning out or leaving, they will not be listening to the message. This type of listening, however, may be contextual rather than dispositional. In other circumstances, the same listeners may exhibit a person-oriented, action-oriented, or content-oriented style under most conditions, but, but when other matters must be attended to, message length matters. In such cases, time orientation may accompany the other styles of listening, depending on the context.
