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Could podcasts be changing how we listen, speak, and think? Studies indicate that the answer is yes to all three.
People react almost as much, when listening to a recording of two people talking, as when they are engaged in conversation themselves, found a study titled A Voice Inside My Head: The Psychological and Behavioral Consequences of Auditory Technologies, published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
Headphones are key. “We find that headphones produce a phenomenon called in-head localization, which makes the speaker sound as if they’re inside your head,” study co-author On Amir, a professor of marketing at the University of California San Diego’s Rady School of Management, said in a statement. “As a result, listeners… feel and behave more empathically toward (the communicator), and they are more easily persuaded by them.”
In one of the experiments conducted as part of this study, 1,310 adults were asked to listen to an audio clipping of a mother and daughter talking about being homeless. Part of the group listened on headphones, the rest on speakers. Those using headphones reported feeling more empathetic towards the women and reported that they found them more genuine.
Another experiment in this series found that people who listened on headphones were more likely to retain and engage with what they had heard, and more likely to discuss it with others.
Organisations may consider this when designing training programmes, Juliana Schroeder, associate professor of management at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, said in a statement. That’s the impact of podcasts on how we listen.
When it comes to how we speak, the more informal and intimate the tone, the stronger the para-social relationship built with the podcast host, suggests a 2022 study titled Why People Listen: Motivations and Outcomes of Podcast Listening, published in Plos One. Listen to such hosts often enough and one might find similar intonations creeping into one’s speech, in a phenomenon called socially mediated syntactic alignment.
The same paper reported that people who listen to more podcasts per month reported greater levels of curiosity. Whether the curiosity leads them to the podcasts or vice-versa, is admittedly not clear.
But, on that note, a different study that used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to scrutinise neurological reaction to such content did find that podcasts stimulate the imagination, engaging several broad regions within the brain.
Lethargic, listless or otherwise in need of a boost? One solution, it would seem, is to tune in.
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