Why Listening Works When Empathy Fails

• To whom will you give your attention today?
• Which outrage will you willingly participate in today?
• How will you choose to allocate your non-renewable resource of time today?
• What is the smallest hill you are willing to die on today?

We're living through an era saturated with empathy, or at least, the performance of it, where organizations champion psychological safety, leaders demonstrate vulnerability, and entire frameworks are built around understanding feelings. Yet for all this empathetic effort, people seem more entrenched in their positions than ever. That seems odd. Or is it?

This may just be what happens when empathy becomes unproductive, and the goals shift from understanding to validation and clarity to comfort. When we elevate the mere expression of concern over the harder work of actually moving something forward, we end up with a dynamic in which society prizes victimhood and avoids accountability, in which being understood matters more than being challenged.

Is there a more effective path, one grounded not in performative compassion but in strategic listening? Yes. And that path isn't to lecture but to do the far more difficult task of listening to hear and not simply respond. And, you guessed it, some research backs this up in surprising ways.

When something matters deeply, our instinct is to state our position clearly and hold firm. But the tighter we grip our point, the narrower the conversation becomes. The exchange shifts from exploration to protection, and once someone enters this defense mode, progress stalls. In a 2017 study, researchers Guy Itzchakov, Avraham Kluger, and Dotan Castro examined what happens when someone experiences high-quality listening. Participants who felt deeply heard became noticeably less defensive, showed greater openness to new perspectives, and were more willing to reconsider their own positions. The researchers also found that being listened to reduced what psychologists call "attitude extremity," where, when people felt understood, their views became more nuanced and less rigid.

Think about that for a moment.

The shift didn't come from sharper arguments or better rhetoric. It came from the experience of being understood. This is an important distinction. Where unproductive empathy seeks to soothe, strategic listening seeks to understand to move forward. One validates feelings without consequence, and the other creates the conditions for actual change.

Understanding is the foundation of every strong relationship and the prerequisite for genuine influence. And influence is often misunderstood as overpowering someone when it's about moving something forward together. And that forward motion begins when the other person feels understood, not merely affirmed.

Getting out of the puddle of shallow empathy and diving into the deep end of strategic listening may be the most undervalued change in our behavior we can make.