Listening to Others

1. Significance of Listening

2. The Listening Process
   1. Comprehending: Discriminating for Understanding
      1. Discriminating Speech Sounds: Comprehending Phonemes
      2. Speech Segmentation: Comprehending Morphemes
   2. Retaining: Memories
      1. Fallibility of Memory: You Can't Retain Everything
      2. Benefits of Forgetting: Curse of Infallible Memory
      3. Why You Forget: Inattention, Meaninglessness, and De-motivation
   3. Responding: Providing Feedback

3. Competent Informational Listening
   1. Information Overload: Too Much of a Good Thing
   2. Shift Response: Conversational Narcissism
   3. Competitive Interrupting: Dominating Conversations
   4. Glazing Over: The Wandering Mind
   5. Pseudolistening: Faking It
   6. Ambushing: Focused Attention with Prejudice

4. Competent Critical Listening
   1. Skepticism, True Belief, and Cynicism: Differences
   2. The Process of True Believing: Uncritical Listening
      1. Confirmation Bias: Searching for Support
      2. Rationalization of Disconfirmation: Clinging to Falsehoods
      3. Shifting the Burden of Proof: Whose Obligation Is It?

   3. The Skepticism Process: Exercising Competent Critical Listening
      1. Possibility: Could Happen, But Don't Bet On It    
      2. Plausibility: Making a Logical Case
      3. Probability: Likelihood of Events
      4. Certainty: Without Exception
      5. Self-Correction: Progressing by Mistake
      6. Parsimony: Making Fewer Assumptions

5. Competent Empathic Listening
   1. Response Styles: Initial Response Patterns
      1. Evaluative Response: Making Judgments
      2. Advising Response: Telling Others How to Act
      3. Interpreting Response: Explaining Meaning
      4. Content-Only Response: Ignoring Feelings
      5. Probing Response: Asking Questions
      6. Supporting Response: Bolstering Others
      7. Understanding Response: Paraphrasing and Perception Checking
   2. Response Styles and Empathic Listening: Making Choices
      1. Empathic Response Styles: Probing, Supporting, and Understanding
      2. Nonempathic Responses: Evaluating, Advising, Interpreting, and Content-Only
      3. Choosing Competent Response Styles: Frequency, Timing, and Solicitation

6. Summary