I’ve just completed teaching another class for volunteer mediators.

As in previous cases, most who attended believed they were good listeners, but soon learned their assumptions of what they thought they heard duing the session was distorted compared to the actual messaging presented throughout the course.

This is one of the reasons mediators stress the importance of listening and don’t iagree with listening by “putting yourself in the other person’s shoes.” Recent studies have found no evidence that intentionally applying this approach improved one’s ability to understand another person’s feelings. If anything, the concept may decrease accuracy while simultaneously increasing misdirected confidence in one’s judgment.

Imagining how we would understand another person’s world based on our own history and experiences, not on theirs. is a recipe for disaster.

To improve listening, we need to engage each other in conversation. This “perspective getting” to understand how the other person sees their situation is a more effective listening skill.

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Fred Jandt is the author of “How to Survive a Mediation,” available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and wherever books are sold.

Do women and men behave differently after experiencing conflict?

One interesting attempt to answer that question was a study of four sports in 44 countries. The study found men were far more likely to engage in friendly physical contact—handshakes, back pats, and hugs—after a competition than women were.

This conclusion, based on animal studies and assumptions of early human behavior, contends that females focused on family relationships and had a few close friends, while males actively cultivated large friendship networks. From this, the researchers concluded women frequently reconciled with family and close friends, while men more typically reconciled with a larger number of unrelated same-sex peers.

The researchers go one step further to suggest current studies support the observation that when women compete in the workplace the aftermath of possible reconciliation is more challenging after a disagreement than it is for men.

The researcher’s observations also suggest that in mediation women may place greater value on resolution with close relationships compared to casual and professional ones, while men may reconcile more indiscriminately.

In other words, reconciliation may have a significant contextual meaning and value for women and a more transactional one for men.

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Fred Jandt is the author of “How to Survive a Mediation,” available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and wherever books are sold.