Listening is a good idea. For example, when markets are telling you it might not be the perfect moment to announce huge tax cuts with no plans for paying for them.
Listening is important for life as well as politics. You might learn something and your interlocutor is expecting their words to have some impact. Men are regularly accused of not being brilliant at listening, but many stridently deny that such gender stereotypes fairly reflect reality.
Luckily, social science has resolved the big listening row. New research involved almost 1,000 Germans in an experiment to investigate how information diffuses between couples.
Each individual was asked about how they thought their household ranked in terms of relative income – a question we know people aren’t good at answering (everyone thinks they are more normal income-wise than they are).
Crucially, those in couples were asked separately and men and women were equally wrong. Then the study gets interesting, because a randomly selected half of participants were then told the true answer. A year later, the survey was repeated to see what effect this had.
Unsurprisingly, those directly given the truth did a better job, with a similar improvement across genders. But the study found a huge gender gap when it comes to indirectly receiving this new information (ie via your partner having been told the truth and sharing it with you in the year between surveys).
Women were affected as much by information given to their partner as if they were given it directly, but men’s beliefs were, somewhat shockingly, entirely unaffected by information given to their partner. Which is an awkward fact for us men. If we happen to listen to it.
• Torsten Bell is chief executive of the Resolution Foundation. Read more at resolutionfoundation.org
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