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Comment by DarkTree | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, it seems as if the article is just bending the definition of listening. It appears their idea of "the best listener" is the person who engages you the most in conversation. Sure, that person might be a more valuable person to talk to, but I fail to see why that has to be the definition of a great listener.

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No, it is not arbitrarily changing the definition. They did a study where they asked people to identify how good others were at listening, and then studied what behaviors distinguished those who got the highest ratings.

That doesn't necessarily identify good listening skills, which perhaps was OP's intent.

The article is freely interchanging the concepts "being a good listener" and "being perceived as being a good listener" from one sentence to the next. That's worse than arbitrarily changing the definition (but being consistent with it).

I don't understand there to be any difference between the two. There's no objective judge of listening. There's only the other person, and how well they feel heard.

There can definitely be separate concepts.

Someone could be perceived as a good listener because they put on a good show of listening and even ask questions in real time—but when you ask them about the conversation afterwards, they might have very little understanding of what was actually discussed.

Likewise, someone could be listening intently while doing a very poor performance of listening.

There's definitely a difference. You could be perceived as a good listener, while actually not understanding or remembering what the other person is saying. On the other hand, you could appear to not be listening, but if later quizzed on the words spoken you would ace it.

Try describing the concepts without using the word "listen". Most likely you agree and are fighting about irrelevant definitions.

I'm not so sure. johnfn claims "There's no objective judge of listening". Why not? Students are familiar with the idea of a standardized reading comprehension test. Is it impossible to imagine that we could construct a listening comprehension test? If so, you could then demonstrate that its possible to flunk the "perceived as good listener" test while acing the "listening comprehension" test -- underscoring that notion that these are distinct concepts.

The meanings of words are determined by usage. If this is what people mean by the term "good listener," then that is what it means.

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