Hanne Collins

Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations

About

Hanne K. Collins’ research examines effective listening in conversation. In particular, she studies the conversational behaviors that ensure people are both being and feeling heard in order to foster interpersonal connection and rapport. Throughout her work, she uses a combination of experiments and computational social science techniques (e.g., natural language processing). Her research reveals that people’s perceptions of listening in conversation aren’t always inaccurate — there are often moments in our conversations where we are feeling heard, but aren’t being heard (and vice versa). These inaccuracies are driven, in part, by people’s ability to effectively feign common signals of listening (e.g., eye-contact, nodding). These discoveries led her to develop a novel model of conversational listening, which emphasizes the unique importance of behavioral expressions of listening — particularly the effectiveness of verbal expressions (such as asking relevant follow-up questions or calling-back to something said earlier).

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