A concept that I found interesting this week was the concept of pseudolistening. When a person pseudolistens they pretend to listen to the speaker, but in reality their minds are somewhere else. People usually do this because they don’t want to offend the speaker by seeming uninterested. The easiest way to tell that someone has been pseudolistening is to listen to their responses. Oftentimes their responses will be tangential or completely irrelevant to the conversation.
I know that I am guilty of pseudolistening, especially in class. Sometimes it’s just really difficult to focus on what the professor is saying, especially if it’s a really dry topic. I’ll continue to look at the professor and nod my head to appear that I am being attentive, but in reality I’m daydreaming about studying abroad or thinking about my art homework. I think that everyone is guilty of doing this whether it be during a meeting, in class, or listening to a lecture from parents.
I completely agree that it can be hard to avoid pseudolistening. I'm often guilty of being a pseudolistener as well. More often than not, I also find myself zoning out during my boring classes, thinking of completely irrelevant things like whether or not I'm going to get the job I applied for, if I'll have enough money to last me until the end of the month, what my friends and I are going to do later that night, etc. I find pseudolistening to be one of the biggest hinderances when I'm doing homework as well. I can be such a bad listener sometimes that I even start to ignore myself when I'm reading an article or chapter of a book for class.
ReplyDeleteI thought pseudolistening was a really interesting topic also. I find myself doing this a lot, but I never really thought about how much I engaged in this behavior in class until I read this blog. I already knew I did this in my social life if I have a lot on my mind, but I never even considered class. I now realized that I do this in class all the time (even though I probably should not admit this). I also realized that I then to pseudolisten in classes that I am not as interested in a lot more than classes I am more interested in. I know that in some of my general education class that I have absolutely no interest in, I tend to do this a lot.
ReplyDelete