[nonrandomstring]

"Hear" is a slippery word.

Hearing is not listening. First you hear, but you do not listen. Then you want to listen. Then you can listen. Finally, with effort, you listen. In addition to intent there must be theory of mind, and inter-subjectivity, some one to listen to. Then, say back what you really think you heard - acknowledge the reality not your own lens;

"We hear that you feel we were greedy, took our users for granted and treated you with disrespect."

Is different from;

"We are frightened and reacting to your signals of disengagement" (expect more manipulative acting-out as we try to "fix you")

[jraph]

"We heard you" sounds like an idiom though, for which the difference between hearing and listening is not really relevant.

(English is not my primary language, but I've seen on Linguee at least one occurrence of "We heard you" translated into the equivalent French phrase, which does use the literal translation of "listen")

[Macha]

In common language, I think that's true.

In carefully worded corporate PR speak, it has unfortunately been sullied by those particularly using it to appear to be listening to feedback without making the changes that the feedback wanted.

[johnnyanmac]

They are synonymous, and in reality it doesn't matter much for the PR here. but there is some idiomatic and metaphorical differences between the two that can be hard to explain to someone that is ESL. "hearing" is receiving sound to your ears. "listening" is understanding those sounds. People in this case really want to be understood.

Also keep in mind that "We're listening" is another common PR response.

[nonrandomstring]

Forgive me. its very much psychoanalytic babble. You sort of need to get that context before it really makes sense.

[BoorishBears]

"Listen" is a slippery word.

Listening is not hearing. You can listen to a song and not hear the words it contains. Not hear the intent behind each line.

You hear by...

[tourmalinetaco]

You heard what OP said, but did not listen to their message.

[nonrandomstring]

I'll bite :) There's a couple of research texts that I'd suggest make "listening" an attentive activity higher up the cognitive than hearing. Auditory neuroscience: Schnupp, Nelken and King (2011) and Thinking in Sound: Bigand and McAdams both talk about "hearing" mainly at the physioacoustic (signal perceptual) level, whereas "listening experiments" tend to focus on the structural and semantic processing faculties.

Of course that's an over-rigid appeal to scientific words, and I appreciate your saying it can kinda work with the words exchanged. Bit like the tussle we once had here over "ethics" versus "morals" :)

[BoorishBears]

There's a bit of critical thinking that I'd suggest makes the distinction moot here:

Unity could have said 'listen', and given the insane mismatch between their past actions and the current rather predictable response, there'd be precious little comfort the sentence "We Have <Either> You" could provide compared to whatever their next actions are.

With all your research I'm sure you've come across this concept in the often quoted form: "actions speak louder than words"

(And for posterity, they even said they're listening: they just don't open with it...)