Andrew Brodsky
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There's a lot of limitations for group brainstorming, whether it's you're in a business team or whether you're a bridal party trying to come up with ideas for the party. And what happens when you're in a group is a few things with brainstorming. Only one person can talk at a time when you're engaging synchronously.
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We tend to be more concerned that other people are going to judge your ideas negatively. And we tend to anchor onto other people's ideas. So someone says an idea, and then all of a sudden, all of our ideas are kind of sticking close to their ideas.
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But research shows that when you engage in brainstorming the initial stages, separately and virtually, you tend to come up with more novel ideas because A, everyone can do it all at once, and B, you're not anchoring each other on your ideas here. So there are a lot of situations where less rich modes of communication can be really useful.
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And that gets to one of the core pieces of advice about making the implicit more explicit when it comes to communication. The researcher on this started an email. And what these researchers found is that there's this email urgency bias in that when we receive an email, we think the other person wants a response much sooner than it turns out they actually do.
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So Mike, if you sent me an email, I'd be like, OK, Mike's this really important guy. I got to respond real quickly. I bet he is expecting me response. But in reality, you're like, I don't care if Andrew doesn't respond for a couple of days. And the problem with this misunderstanding is that can create a lot of stress because everyone's potentially checking their phone all the time.
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And what these researchers found is that when you're explicit about response expectations, it ends up taking away that stress. So if you say, hey, could you respond within a couple of days? That ends up really decreasing people's stress. They need to constantly check these things.
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And then taking that a level up, what I generally recommend in people's relationships, on their teams, is actually having conversations about Hey, you know, what response speed should we have for text messages? What about phone calls? How should I get in touch with you if there's something urgent? As opposed to just leaving people wondering.
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And this relates to all those stories about, you know, you're early in a relationship and you text someone and they don't respond for five hours and you think they must hate you. But the other person really just generally doesn't respond to texts for usually a day.
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And by having those conversations more openly, you don't end up making these false assumptions that can undermine relationships, that can stress you out, and really just make everything worse.
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Yeah, so there definitely are these norms associated with different modes. One of the examples that I like to use is instant message or chat versus email. In theory, they're both text-based communication, but we feel like texting and instant messaging should get quicker responses than email because we have these associations tied to it.
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That said, you can't assume that everyone has the same hierarchy as you. Particularly for younger generations now, they really hate phone calls and voicemails. Although they're okay with voice notes, which is kind of funny when you consider how it's not all that different from voicemail. But there are these norms that are associated with different things for different people depending on...
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what they're used to, where they grow up, how old they are, what technology they're used to. So it's not always aligned. And even if you have the same hierarchy as someone else, they may expect quicker response times to everything. They have the same ordering, but they expect response times in half the time that you do.
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And just by having these open conversations and getting on the same page, at least for those important relationships that matter, can really avoid those awkward situations where people are misreading the situation.
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When it comes to video, I always get this question, should we have video on, video off calls or meetings? And this gets to the idea of the best mode or the best choice depends on your goal in the situation. So as you noted, having videos on can be useful for showing you're engaged in the conversation.
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So imagine you're interacting with someone who maybe you don't think is that good a friend or that hard worker. If you don't see them in an interaction, you may assume that they're doing something else. Maybe they're looking up recipes on their phone or doing emails to somebody else. But when you see them, it creates the illusion that they're more engaged.
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And I say illusion because it doesn't necessarily mean that they are because they could still have their emails up instead of your face on the screen. But we interpret it as, okay, they're looking at us a little bit more, but less somewhat irrationally, let's say, seeing the other person is also useful for building trust. We trust those that we feel familiar with.
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For example… If you're engaged in a potential conflict with a friend or an acquaintance and you're doing it over text or email, it would sometimes be really beneficial to say, hey, it seems like we're not reading each other correctly, can we have a quick phone call? But people tend not to do that.
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So if we understand what someone looks like, if we understand their mannerisms, then we tend to trust them more. If we've never met someone or we've only barely seen them, having that opportunity to gather more information about them so we feel more familiar with them can help build that trust. But now let's go to the other side of things. Video off.
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There's a lot of good research on what's called Zoom fatigue or video conferencing fatigue. And the idea behind this is that having your camera on can be really fatiguing. It can be really exhausting. There's some research that shows that we spend a good chunk of the video calls just staring at ourselves during the call. And that's correlated with our negative emotions during the call.
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So if your goal is to conserve energy, then video off. If your goal is to show that you're engaged to try and build trust, then video on.
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Yeah. And I feel the same way too. And there's research that shows that at least in work context, being able to wear more casual clothes can make you feel more authentic during these interactions. And it's just, it's stressful to have to engage in this kind of impression management.
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And it's even worse on video because at least in person, you're not staring at yourself in the mirror as you're engaging in a high importance conversation. Whereas on video, you see every little thing you're doing. And that can be really stressful in conversations where you're trying to make a good impression on somebody.
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We found that typos can relay emotion. So it's kind of like putting your fist up in the air, where it's not clear what emotion you're showing by doing that, but it can amplify our emotions. So if your fist is up in the air, it can make you seem more proud or more angry or more excited. Typos act the same way. So in an angry email, they make you seem angrier.
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Because the idea here is that by showing that, hey, I wasn't overly proofing this message, I was just so excited or so angry that I wrote it, people interpret that as your emotions being stronger. But there was an interesting finding in this set of studies as well. So first, there was the obvious finding that typos generally make you look less intelligent.
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But we found that in the context of emotional emails, the senders were penalized less for typos. They weren't seen as less intelligent as much. And the idea here is that when we're receiving messages, we're looking for reasons why something happened. So if there's a typo, we say, oh, the person's often not as intelligent.
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But if there's some alternative explanation, oh, they're emotional, or oh, they're in a rush, then we intend to lean that interpretation on something more favorable. And there's other research that shows that when you have sent from my iPhone in your signature, typos are penalized less.
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So a key thing to take away from this aside from we're sending more motion cues than we realize is that sometimes giving the other people a little more information like, hey, I just wanted to get back to you ASAP, I just heard, I'm really excited, as opposed to being overly professional or overly scripted in your communication can be really useful for helping to make sure that any mistakes you do make are attributed to something that makes you look good as opposed to something that makes you look bad.
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So when your son texts you from the other room, for instance, that's showing low effort. And when people purposely choose less rich technology that's easier for them, in many ways, it sends a signal like, I can't be bothered to walk the five feet away to ask you that question. And so understanding what we're telling the other person by which mode we choose is really important.
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And that's a great point. I actually did some research and what I was looking at in this set of studies is how do we evaluate effort or authenticity based on the mode of communication that others choose? there's two kinds of authenticity. There's the true authenticity that I really feel what I'm saying.
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And then there's a second type of authenticity that I also talk about, which is you wanna seem like you're authentic and you care, but you don't necessarily actually care. And there's a lot of reasons for this. So maybe you had a really bad day. Then you're going out to lunch with one of your friends, and they're telling you some really exciting news.
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And you're not excited because you're so upset about what happened earlier in the day, but it wouldn't be good for you to tell them about that when they just announced that They're engaged or something like that. So that's what we call surface acting, where you engage in this in business. They call it service with a smile.
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But it's this idea that you're putting on a good face for somebody else, even if you might not be feeling that underlying emotion. So first, what my studies found is when you are being truly authentic, you actually are feeling what you want to express emotionally.
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Choosing the richest mode of interaction, whether that's in person or whether that's a video call, that's best because that is seen as the highest effort and it lets your authenticity shine through. But when you're engaging in the surface acting, so you're faking your emotions potentially for the other person's benefit.
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It's a little bit tricky because when you choose the richest mode of communication in person or via video, yes, it's seen as the highest effort. But the downside is that your cues of underlying emotion can sneak through and other people can tell.
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And I found that when people were not being truly authentic, you know, they were trying to fake it, that they tended to be more likely to end up using text or email. But That also backfires because text-based communication is just seen as so low effort that it doesn't seem like they care.
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What I did find though, is that audio serves as this interesting sweet spot where it is much higher effort than email, text messaging, instant messaging, but you don't have to worry about all your nonverbal behaviors that happen in face-to-face interactions, that happen in video. So all you have to worry about is your words and your tone of voice.
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So you don't end up having that inauthenticity leak through. So in that way, audio can be this kind of sweet spot. And so when you say audio, you mean a phone call? Yeah, phone call, voice note, or video call with cameras off. There's more ways, but yeah, the most common one is still phone call for audio.
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Yeah, and this is this default bias that we just tend to default to whatever we normally use. So if we're in the middle of an email conversation, we don't think to switch modes. Or if we always do something in person, we don't think to switch it otherwise. There's some downsides to this.
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So if you're engaged in a potential conflict with a friend or an acquaintance, and you're doing it over text or email, it will sometimes be really beneficial to say, hey, it seems like we're not reading each other correctly. Can we have a quick phone call? But people tend not to do that.
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So there's a lot of these times where it would be really beneficial to switch or to change what we normally do, but we don't put in the effort or the time to think about, is this actually the best approach to this communication?
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When I teach my students, one of the classes I teach is negotiations. What students will often tell me is I prefer to negotiate via email. It gives me time to think about it. It feels safer.
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And one of the first things I point out is engaging in these kind of conversations, whether it's high conflict, but just between friends, whether it's a negotiation, oftentimes text-based communication is absolutely the worst way you could go for a few reasons. One, it's really hard to read the other person over text-based communication, especially when you don't know them well.
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And secondarily, let's just say you think the conversation is going well, and suddenly they indicate that it's not for some reason. And let's say you manage to figure it out over text-based communication. The problem is if it's texting, minutes have probably already passed. If it's email, potentially hours have already passed, and you've lost that opportunity to immediately correct it.
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So if you're talking over a video call or in person and you see them suddenly frown, you realize, uh-oh, something I said didn't come across as I meant, and you have that immediate opportunity to fix it, and that's lost when you use less rich communication.
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There's some research to indicate that it's not necessarily always for worse either. There's this theory called channel expansion theory, which is simply what it says is that when you're more familiar with a communication technology, the topic of the conversation or the person you're interacting with, the differences between modes matter less.
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So for an example, if I get an instant message or text message or email from a stranger or someone I barely know, there's a good chance I'm gonna misinterpret their underlying meaning. But alternatively, if I were to just to get a text message from my wife, I know exactly what she's saying. I can fill in the gaps in between the lines with all the information I know about her.
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So the idea being that when you have a really strong relationship, you know about the person, and you're just really, really good at the technology, those differences between them start to shrink. They definitely don't disappear, and there's definitely strengths and weaknesses for each, But there are certain situations where that choice is much more meaningful than others.
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It really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. So, for instance, this conversation you and I are having now. I'm someone who's fairly talkative, so each of my answers to you are multiple paragraphs long, and you've got a bunch of questions for me. If you had emailed me these questions and each of my responses were five paragraphs long, this would have taken me a long time to write.
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And so here's the time when having this conversation is much quicker than text. But let's push it in the other direction. When is text better than having the face-to-face or the synchronous interaction that we're having? Well, an example is, let's just say we're trying to brainstorm something.