Poor listening by the audience leads to

Concept

Listening is an active process of receiving, interpreting, and assigning meaning to a spoken message. When listening is poor, the listener fails to fully receive and correctly interpret the speaker's intended meaning, so the conclusions or judgments the listener forms about the message become faulty.

Application

In communication, a listener constantly draws inferences — conclusions that go beyond what is literally said — by combining the message with attention and context. Poor listening removes the accurate input on which those conclusions depend, so the inferences the audience forms become distorted and unreliable, i.e. inaccurate inferences.

Contrast

• Appreciating the speaker is a positive outcome of attentive, good listening, not a result of poor listening.

• Wild imaginations describes fantasising unconnected to the message; poor listening fails on interpreting the actual message rather than inventing unrelated fantasies.

• Disrespecting the speaker is an attitude or cause that can hinder listening, not the outcome that poor listening produces in the message's meaning.

Therefore, poor listening by the audience leads to inaccurate inferences.