Chief Change Officer
#193 Dr. Juliana Schroeder: AI is Changing How We Talk—Are You Ready?
Sat, 22 Feb 2025
What happens when humans and AI start sharing the same conversations? Dr. Juliana Schroeder, Associate Professor at UC Berkeley Haas, unpacks how generative AI is reshaping communication and collaboration. Whether it’s using paralinguistic cues, knowing when to switch modes, or ensuring tech doesn’t drown out emotional intelligence, Juliana makes one thing clear—real connection still comes down to being human. Key Highlights of Our Interview: The Mind Behind the Machine “AI isn’t just changing technology; it’s reshaping how we think, act, and perceive power. When virtual assistants act human-like, they give users a psychological boost that can even alter decision-making.” Confirmation Bias Central “When users consult ChatGPT, it often mirrors their ideas, reinforcing their thoughts. It’s a colleague that nods a lot but rarely challenges, creating a unique kind of echo chamber.” Medium Matters “From text to video to voice, the platform you choose shapes how your message lands. Want to make a strong first impression? Skip the text and go for face-to-face—or at least a well-delivered elevator pitch.” Humanize the Experience “Paralinguistic cues—like tone of voice and facial expressions—are what make conversations truly human. To connect, think beyond words and embrace the richness of full-spectrum communication.” High Stakes, High Scrutiny “In critical domains like hiring, people demand transparency. The idea of an algorithm handling everything creates unease, sparking backlash when decisions feel like they emerge from a ‘black box.’” Connect with us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Juliana Schroeder, PHD ______________________ --Chief Change Officer-- Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself. Open a World of Deep Human Intelligence for Growth Progressives, Visionary Underdogs, TransformationGurus & Bold Hearts. 6 Million+ All-Time Downloads. Reaching 80+ Countries Daily. Global Top 3% Podcast. Top 10 US Business. Top 1 US Careers. >>>100,000+ subscribers are outgrowing. Act Today.<<< --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.12 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>140,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: Who is Dr. Juliana Schroeder and what are her credentials?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Coming to us from the halls of UC Berkeley is associate professor and psychologist, Juliana Schroeder.
You might have noticed most of our guests have taken quite the scenic route through their careers. Juliana, on the other hand, has kept her eyes on one prize, digging deep into the human mind. which is now leading the charge in teaching negotiation and management to both MBA students and seasoned executives.
Take a quick look at her website or UC Berkeley's, and you'll be blown away by her achievements. We are talking a laundry list of titles, a mountain of papers, and a substantial collection of awards. And get this, she's bagged not one, but two master's degrees and two PhDs at an age where many are still figuring things out.
I could easily spend a good 10 minutes here just running through her credentials bio and all the incredible things she's achieved. But let's be honest, I know you're here for the insights. So while I'm skipping the long intro to save us some time, I can't recommend enough diving into her profile yourself. Trust me, if you're even a bit of a nerd like me, Juliana's work is a gold mine.
Juliana and I met at Chicago Booth. She was my TA for two courses taught by two amazing professors and social psychologists, Nick Apley and Linda Ginzel. I still remember the first day we met, I was sitting next to her on the front row when the whole classroom was packed. I didn't know she was actually my TA. I raised hand and answered the question. I got the question wrong.
Then she whispered to me, trying to explain the reason why. Then we met again in Singapore. This time, I pulled her aside. asking her about reciprocity, a very important concept in psychology and negotiation. In my eyes, she is very sharp. Those who know me well understand that I use this word very selectively as a compliment. Over time, I've observed the growth of her academic career.
I told myself, I must invite her to my podcast. So, wish granted, here we are. Let's get started.
Good afternoon, Juliana. Thank you so much for having me, Vance. Good afternoon.
Let's start with a brief introduction of your background. For the benefit of the audience, how I met Juliana, that was when I was at Chicago Bull.
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Chapter 2: Why is mind perception crucial in social interactions?
Check out your personal website. You have published a lot of papers over time. Like you said, you study power, study negotiation, decision making. I was wondering when you were in the master, PhD program, when you were thinking of
Choosing specific areas of research, why you chose language, mind perception, what's fascinating about those areas that you decide, well, yeah, I really, really want to go deep to become a deep thinker, researcher, and teacher in those areas?
That's a great question because psychology is so broad. There are so many different aspects of of human bias and decision making and behavior that you could study. But to me, I kept coming back to the fact that we live in a social world and, you know, man is a social animal. And so all of our society kind of rests on having this cooperative function with those that are around us.
And that involves having to engage with other people effectively and productively. And so I see the umbrella of all of my research as being around mind perception, which is how we come to perceive and understand the minds of those around us. And this is a really fascinating topic because Of course, we can't just directly read other people's minds.
And if we could, the world might be kind of a mess. You can imagine that that could end up leading to all sorts of problems and issues. And it's good that we are allowed to keep secrets from each other. But the fact that we don't have very much insight can lead to challenges as well, because sometimes we have to make these guesses at what other people are thinking and feeling.
And there are systematic ways in which we can go astray in that. And I basically study all the different building blocks and how people come to make inferences about others' minds. Think about both the top down and bottom up influences on people's mind reading and mind perception. The top down is like I bring to bear beliefs about the world and stereotypes about certain people.
So the very first time I might have met you and talked to you, Vince, I'll have like certain beliefs that I have in my mind and I immediately start forming these inferences about you. They happen in this kind of split second. might be based on the way you look or your accent, where you're from.
And then at the same time, the longer I engage with you, like say we're having an actual back and forth conversation, might be synchronous or might be asynchronous. I'm starting to modify kind of those overall beliefs and stereotypes based on like this bottom up feedback I'm getting regarding your specific characteristics.
So what you're actually saying to me, how you're saying it, kind of your non-verbals and your verbals together. And I'm integrating all that information in my mind in this really fluent, amazing way to come up with an overall belief about you or belief system about you.
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Chapter 3: How does AI influence our sense of power and decision-making?
Of course, as you mentioned, there are so many more types of virtual agents that are out in the world, and they're not necessarily just assistants anymore either. Like, I don't know. So we haven't tested this in ChatGPT, for example. I don't know if people, when they engage with ChatGPT, they see it as being an assistant for them.
Or if they see it, I know a lot of people who would just anecdotally will say that when they engage with chat GPT, they try to be very respectful and very kind because you never know when the machine overlords are going to take over. You know, so they probably are seeing themselves as being more low power, right? I don't know like subjectively how that would work with certain virtual agents.
that are out in the world now, but I do know that if people see the virtual agent as an assistant, like they're there to serve you and they humanize it, then I think we would expect to see these results of goal orientation. Now, the humanization piece I mentioned is interesting too, because at the time we were thinking about humanization as being more about
For example, whether you interact with it as if it's like a human, like, does it talk to you? Can you talk back to it? As opposed to, you know, writing, does it have an avatar with it? Like, so would there be some sort of face that you can see? And now I think there's a lot more sophistication in terms of humanization. I think that even
So research now suggests that for most LLMs, like CHAP-2BT and other ones, most people cannot differentiate it from a human when they don't pass like the Turing test is what we call it. So they cannot tell whether or not in abstract, in isolation, if you're just give it the responses, they can't tell whether It is a human or not with any sense of accuracy.
So they're essentially at the level where they are using language to the degree that a human would. And I do think that still the voice to voice interaction is important. fundamentally humanizing, and I have some other research on this. So I think that voice to voice will make people see agents as being more human-like.
I think language, yes, we already know that the LLMs are at the level of human. And then we've been studying just other random cues to humanness that exist, especially when you're engaging in text-based online communication with an ambiguous agent. So, for example, we found one of another cue that you might not expect is whether or not it makes typos and corrects those typos. So we found that.
So it's interesting, like typos in general are kind of dehumanizing. When you see a type, you're like, oh, that, you know, it's not very competent. Whenever the agent is, if you imagine it's possible that it could be. some sort of chat bot or some sort of LLM and it's making a lot of typos, perhaps you just think it's like a poorly programmed chat bot.
But what we found is that when you're having a synchronous back and forth conversation, like for example, with customer service agents, like on Amazon or something, and they make a typo and then they correct that typo, then people are really likely to think it must be a human.
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Chapter 4: What are the psychological implications of human-like AI assistants?
I would imagine if this is talking to a human colleague, I might be more careful in terms of the language I use. Am I saying any things that may upset you? But I still see it as a machine. And as of now, the emotional aspect of it is not so human yet. So that's why I don't see it just as an assistant. I would take it more like advisor, you know, depending on situation.
Yeah, I share your intuition that it might be a bit more nuanced with ChatGPT. I think when we wrote this article in 2020, we were envisioning a future in which people would just have like armies of virtual assistants, like maybe they're humanized like these robots. Your house is just filled with robots that are just there to serve you and they're very humanized.
And so we were like, what is this going to do to people's psychology and to their minds? And that vision of the future hasn't really played out yet. I guess it's still possible. Who knows? But I think you're right that I don't think people probably see Chachi BTS necessarily just being their servant per se.
If anything, you know, there's maybe more of a sense of uncertainty about like where the power dynamic really lies. in that relationship?
Well, if I structure the questions, I must say they give me some ideas as if I'm talking to a fairly intelligent person. And then we keep communicating. Then this kind of interaction or conversation sometimes, honestly, is more interesting. than talking to a human who may not have any sense of independent thinking.
I do see the value in terms of using the machine, a highly intelligent machine, and me as the human also being aware of what kind of biases that I may face if I use this tool. Just be aware of that, be mindful not to be distracted or get so carried away by that. So far, this conversation, this interaction for me is still manageable.
But then I watched a video posted by an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship from Chicago Bull. The topic is why AI may be your best astrologist. I know you work with and teach a lot of MBAs, executives. Do you see us, like people like us, decision-making, executive decision-making, perhaps AI could be one of our best astrologists?
Yeah, that's a great question.
By the way, while you were talking, I was just thinking about how it would be so interesting if one of the concerns potentially of having people feel like they're high power and they have all these virtual assistants that are working for them is that people that are sometimes in really high power positions can get this very inflated sense of self and they become overconfident and they make their decisions too quickly.
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Chapter 5: How does humanization of AI affect user interaction?
That's a great question. I think that people need to learn how to use technology to their advantage in communications settings, that they shouldn't just be...
thinking about how what are the like uniquely human elements of communication because those are always going to be changing I think that our world is constantly changing so it's more about how do you engage with new technology in order to improve your abilities to communicate and let me give you a bunch of examples here that come from my research
So one is that we now have all these different platforms at our fingertips that we can use to more effectively communicate with those around us. It's amazing that you and I are getting to have this. I think you're all the way across the world and from me, and we're still having this great conversation and we're doing it through an audio only platform here.
We could also be seeing each other via video. And so I think there are both like Technologies that have more or less synchronicity, that's like speed between when I say something and you respond.
And then there's also platforms that have more or less what we call like paralinguistic cues, which are the cues beyond the words, which include the nonverbals, like being able to see facial expression, being able to hear the tone of my voice. Those are all paralinguistics.
And so what we typically find in our research is that the more of these paralinguistic cues, but particularly voice, that are present in an interaction and the more synchronous it is, the more humanizing a conversation is and the more human-like a communicator will appear.
And so if you care about trying to reduce misunderstandings and have clear mind reading and being seen as more human like and making the best possible first impression, we would suggest that you start with the medium, a modality, a communication platform, whether it's like in person or video chat, that is going to be able to maximize those things.
as opposed to starting with text, which a lot of people actually do think that they should start with their text, like their cover letter, when they're trying to make a good impression on recruiters, for instance. And we actually find that the elevator pitch is like much more effective, even controlling for the words that people use.
I would suggest that people should be quick to switch modalities and platforms as it is more or less effective for them. So sometimes people get caught in this meeting culture where they're stuck in these video conversations and they don't need to work out a lot of detail and they don't need the synchronous conversation. They can do some of it asynchronously.
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Chapter 6: What role do typos play in humanizing AI interactions?
And so that's probably what I would like to leave people with.
Until next time, take care.