Report: Headphones Can Make Audio More 'Intimate'

As podcast listenership rose over the pandemic, reports emerged of people developing a kind of parasocial intimacy with podcast hosts – feeling, in some cases, like they were friends. Now, new research has revealed that how we chose to listen to podcasts could actually be enhancing our perceived intimacy with their hosts.

The Guardian reports researchers from UC San Diego’s Rady School, UCLA, and UC Berkeley have found that when people listen to auditory messages – like podcasts, audiobooks, and radio news – via headphones, they feel more empathic and persuadable than when listening to those same messages through speakers.

In one experiment, participants listened to a speech clip from a CEO whose company provides visual information for the blind. After listening to the speech, participants were asked whether they would write a letter in support of the CEO winning an award for her work. People who listened to the podcast via headphones were twice as likely to agree to write a nomination (30%) as those who listened via speakers (14%).

\Researchers found headphones are a superconductor for emotional connection due to the phenomenon of “in-head localization”. Because headphones make it sound as though the voices are coming from inside your head, they “trigger a feeling of greater closeness to the person speaking to you”, explains On Amir, co-author of the study, which is forthcoming in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

The idea for the study was sparked one day when UCLA Anderson School of Management assistant professor Alicea Lieberman turned on the podcast This American Life in her car.

As a longtime listener, Lieberman felt she had developed a kind of relationship with its host, Ira Glass. However, that day she noticed something strange about Glass’ distinctive intonations coming through the speakers in her car. “I remember being like, ‘Oh, I don’t feel the connection with him that I normally feel when I listen through my headphones,” she says.

That was a “click moment” for Lieberman. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute, why is that happening? And what does that mean for how I actually perceive these stories?”

To test the hypothesis that headphones facilitate deeper emotional connections to storytellers and their narratives, Lieberman and fellow researchers conducted five separate studies involving a total of more than 4,000 participants.

And there may be implications beyond podcasting too. Remote workers could feel more connected to their colleagues by using headphones during Zoom calls, for example. Marketers may be keen to learn more about headphone habits to appeal to shoppers at their most suggestible, and politicians could proselytize to their constituencies during rallies that look like silent discos.