Tell Me More: What Research on Listening and Curiosity Tells Mentors

By Jean Rhodes

An interesting study published late last year asks what actually happens, moment to moment and behavior by behavior, when two people are connecting (West et al., 2025). Drawing on two large archival datasets from prior social connection studies involving 646 adult participants, West and colleagues coded observable listening behaviors during stranger conversations, including follow-up questions, verbal validation, eye contact, and body posture, then examined how those behaviors related to multiple markers of connection. Across both structured deep-talk conversations and unscripted small talk, high-quality listening behaviors were consistently associated with greater connection. Follow-up questions were the single most reliable predictor.

West’s finding adds to a growing body of research making the same case from different angles. Huang and colleagues (2017) found that, across four studies, people who asked more follow-up questions were consistently better liked by their conversation partners. That effect was explained through perceived responsiveness, an interpersonal construct capturing listening, understanding, validation, and care. Likewise, Letendre Jauniaux and Lawford (2024) reviewed 23 studies and concluded that interpersonal curiosity is a trainable state, not a fixed trait, and that overt expressions of curiosity, including follow-up questions, are reliably associated with positive relational outcomes for both parties, while covert forms such as deflection or distraction are not.

For mentors, the most directly relevant evidence concerns what quality listening looks like in adult-youth relationships specifically. Weinstein and colleagues (2021) conducted an experiment with over 1,000 adolescents who watched staged conversations in which a parent listened either attentively or distractedly while a teenager disclosed a difficult situation. Adolescents who viewed the attentive listening condition anticipated greater well-being, more positive affect, and stronger intention to disclose again in the future. Those effects were mediated by anticipated satisfaction of the needs for autonomy and relatedness, specifically feeling free to be oneself and feeling genuinely connected. Itzchakov and colleagues (2025) found similarly that participants who shared a difficult experience with an empathic listener reported significantly greater feelings of autonomy and relatedness than those who received more perfunctory listening. For mentors working with young people who have learned to be guarded around adults, these are not incidental findings. They describe the mechanism by which trust is built. Itzchakov and colleagues (2023) also found that high-quality listening reduced state loneliness after speakers shared past experiences of social rejection, and that it did so partly by satisfying the speaker’s need to express themselves freely. Young people who have experienced chronic disconnection or rejection carry that history into the mentoring relationship. The mentor who listens with genuine curiosity is not just building rapport; she is offering a corrective relational experience.

And, in their great new book How to Feel Loved, Lyubomirsky and Reis (2026) identify two mindsets that go directly to the heart of this research: “listening to learn” and “radical curiosity.” They argue that most of us listen to respond rather than to learn, and that shifting that orientation changes not just the tone of a conversation but its relational outcome. As Lyubomirsky has put it, “tell me more” may be one of the most loving phrases in the English language. Way and Taffe (2024) make the same point from a developmental direction: young people hunger for genuine curiosity from others and know when it is absent.

Pre-match training of mentors should include explicit practice in asking follow-up questions, and ongoing staff check-ins with mentors can build in structured reflection on specific moments from recent meetings. What did you ask? What did you follow up on? Where did you redirect when you might have stayed curious a little longer? These behaviors are observable enough to coach and specific enough to improve. Nalani, Yoshikawa, and Way  (2024) have even developed and validated a behavioral measure of question-asking in active listening among early adolescents, suggesting tools that could be adapted for mentor training.

As AI tools become more present in the mentoring field, questions arise about whether they can replicate the relational work that mentors do. AI can generate follow-up questions. What it cannot do is be genuinely curious about the answer.

Literature cited

Huang, K., Yeomans, M., Brooks, A. W., Minson, J., and Gino, F. (2017). It doesn’t hurt to ask: Question-asking increases liking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(3), 430-452. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000097

Itzchakov, G., Weinstein, N., Saluk, D., and Amar, M. (2023). Connection heals wounds: Feeling listened to reduces speakers’ loneliness following a social rejection disclosure. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 49(8), 1273-1294. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672221100369

Itzchakov, G., Weinstein, N., Legate, N., and Amar, M. (2025). Empathic listening satisfies speakers’ psychological needs and well-being, but doesn’t directly deepen solitude experiences: A registered report. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 117, 104716.

Letendre Jauniaux, M., and Lawford, H. L. (2024). Interpersonal curiosity as a tool to foster safe relational spaces: A narrative literature review. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1379330. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1379330

Lyubomirsky, S., and Reis, H. T. (2026). How to feel loved. Harper Books.

Nalani, A., Yoshikawa, H., and Way, N. (2024). Question asking in active listening scale for early adolescents: Behavioral measure development and initial validation. Journal of Research on Adolescence. https://doi.org/10.1111/jora.12938

Way, N., and Taffe, R. (2024). Interpersonal curiosity: A missing construct in the field of human development. Human Development, 69(2), 79-90. https://doi.org/10.1159/000542162

Weinstein, N., Huo, A., and Itzchakov, G. (2021). Parental listening when adolescents self-disclose: A preregistered experimental study. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 209, 105178. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105178

West, T. N., Huston, S., Zhou, J., Fredrickson, B. L., and colleagues. (2025). High-quality listening behaviors linked to social connection between strangers. Communications Psychology, 3, 165. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-025-00342-2