Dr. Laurie Santos
Dr. Laurie Santos is Professor of Psychology and Head of Silliman College at Yale University. Professor and podcast host Dr. Laurie Santos is an expert on human cognition and the…
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For most of human history, we only had one way to talk to one another: our voices. Today, we have more ways to communicate than ever before. We can text, call, send a video message, reach out over social media, et cetera. And we often choose whichever option seems easiest or least awkward. But research suggests that how we choose to communicate matters much more than we realize and can have a surprising impact on how well we understand one another and how connected we feel.
In a live conversation recorded at the World Happiness Summit at SXSW, Dr. Laurie speaks with psychologist Nick Epley about the common mistakes we make when communicating in the modern world — and the small changes that could help us connect more meaningfully with the people around us. His new book, A Little More Social, is available now.
Experts Mentioned:
- Nicholas Epley, Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
- Bronisław Malinowski, Polish anthropologist and ethnologist
Resources Mentioned:
- A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection, by Nick Epley (2026)
- “Hello, stranger? Pleasant conversations are preceded by concerns about starting one,” by Juliana Schroeder, Donald Lyons, and Nicholas Epley (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2022)
- “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” by Bronisław Malinowski (1923)
- “Is Conversation Magical?,” by Nicholas Epley (Chicago Booth Review, 2026)
- “The Humanizing Voice: Speech Reveals, and Text Conceals, a More Thoughtful Mind in the Midst of Disagreement,” by Juliana Schroeder, Michael Kardas, and Nicholas Epley (Psychological Science, 2017)
- “Egocentrism over e-mail: can we communicate as well as we think?,” by Justin Kruger, Nicholas Epley, Jason Parker, and Zhi-Wen Ng (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005)
- “The Sound of Intellect: Speech Reveals a Thoughtful Mind, Increasing a Job Candidate’s Appeal,” by Juliana Schroeder and Nicholas Epley (Psychological Science, 2015)
- “It’s surprisingly nice to hear you: Misunderstanding the impact of communication media can lead to suboptimal choices of how to connect with others,” by Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2021)
Related Episodes:
Pushkin. Being a podcast host does involve spending lots of time at home, alone, inside a tiny soundproof closet. the kind of tiny closet that I'm recording this intro from right now. If you're a fan of the show, you can probably guess that holing yourself up alone in a three by four foot room with nothing but a laptop and a microphone, it's not exactly the best way to experience happiness. So whenever I get the opportunity, I like to venture out into the world to record the conversations you get to hear on this show in front of a live audience of actual fans just like you. And for the next few episodes, you're going to get to hear a series of those live conversations. You'll have a front row seat to some of my favorite live shows from the past year. And today, you'll get to travel to Austin, Texas, where I got to have a live conversation at the World Happiness Summit at South by Southwest. Joining me on stage was Happiness Lab regular Dr. Nick Epley. Nick is a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he studies something that's particularly fitting for a live event. what we get wrong about the importance of social connection. Nick and I had a chance to chat about the major takeaways from his incredible new book, A Little More Social. But this time, we also dug into something different, a topic that we often take for granted in our busy social lives, the subtle things we get wrong about one another when we connect using modern technology, and what we can do to communicate a bit more effectively. This was one of my favorite conversations of the entire year, so I hope you enjoy it too. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. This time coming to you live from the World Happiness Summit at South by Southwest. Welcome, Nick Epley! So, Nick, your new book touches on what you've called a fundamental paradox at the core of human life. What is that fundamental paradox?
02:39
Speaker 2
That paradox is that on the one hand, we are highly social. This is not a new insight. Aristotle mentioned this centuries ago. We're highly social animals. We're made happier and healthier when we reach out and connect with each other.
02:50
Speaker 1
And yet.
02:51
Speaker 2
Look around outside in the world a little bit. There are all kinds of opportunities that we have to reach out and engage and connect with other people that we seem not to take, right? We're reluctant to talk to strangers. When we talk to people, we often type to them rather than call them up on the phone and talk with our own voices. Once we're talking, we're a little reluctant to go deep. We stay in the shallow end of the pool. We feel grateful to somebody, but we don't express it to them. We are reluctant to share our true selves with our relationship partners. And that seems odd, right? That's paradoxical. Why is it Highly social animals like us, made happier and healthier, connecting with other people would so often be unsocial.
03:28
Speaker 1
What are some of the negative consequences of this paradox when it comes to our happiness?
03:32
Speaker 2
Well, connecting with other people is the thing that enriches our lives arguably the most, and we just miss a lot of opportunities to make our lives a little bit better. You're sitting in an airplane and somebody sits down next to you, you've got your headphones in, You just missed a chance to learn that somebody was one of nine people to have been inside the North Korean nuclear arsenal, which was a person I met on a plane one time who worked for the Department of Energy. You might have a moment where you're on a sidewalk and the world feels a little cold and unpleasant. You could smile to somebody, make that moment a little bit better. One thing that psychologists have learned is that happiness, well-being in life is really a product of the things that we do. At least those are the things that we have under some of our control. And there are lots of social things that we could do to enrich our lives that we are just choosing not to take. If I hadn't talked to the man on the plane on the way to DC that one time, I never would have had that amazing conversation. So there are lots of opportunities we can miss to make our lives better. We're just not social enough for our own good. We're under social.
04:29
Speaker 1
And so your new book, A Little More Social, is kind of a guidebook for how to do this better. And it starts, you argue, with this particular moment, this individual decision point that we often get wrong. You call it the choice. What are these choices and why are they so important?
04:43
Speaker 2
So I call it the choice because I think this decision that we make to reach out and engage with another person or hold back and avoid them, something we do not just once a week or once a day, but many times a day, is, I think, the most important choice that we make over and over and over again. When we're about to make the choice, at a distance, it sounds easy. Oh yeah, I should connect with people more. Oh yeah, I should reach out to my old friend. Oh yeah, I should tell my wife just how much she really means to me. And yet at the moment, well, I'm not sure I got the words quite right. I'm not sure I can do it. It'll be weird to reach out to my old friend. I haven't met with my band director in 30 years. He'll think it's awkward that I'll call him up and tell him how much he meant to me. And so, When it comes to making that decision, we're often overly avoidant. But how we make that choice governs the quality of your social relationships, and as a result, governs a huge amount of our well-being in our lives.
05:36
Speaker 1
And so I imagine the audience, we have a few Happiness Lab fans out there, right? OK. Let's see how good of Happiness Lab fans you are. We're going to see who remembers the Nick Epley under-sociality greatest hits from the Happiness Lab. How many of you remember an episode where we talked about how we don't talk to strangers on the train? Anyone? So let's show our hands, OK? How about one where we don't give enough compliments as we should? How about cases where we don't ask for help as much as we should? We should be asking for help more often, yes. And another big one that we mess up a lot, we don't check in on our friends as much as we should. So Nick has been on the show a lot talking about under-sociality, because I think this is one of the biggest domains in which our minds lie to us about happiness. But today, I wanted to talk about a different thing we mess up, even when we make the choice to be social. So sometimes we take this choice moment. We say, all right, I'm going to be social. But we do it wrong. We do it badly. We get the how of social connection wrong, too. And so, Nick, you've argued that one reason we get the how of social connection wrong is that we tend to focus on the wrong features of social connection when we do it. What do you mean?
06:46
Speaker 2
So our choices are guided by our beliefs or expectations about the world. Standard model of economics assumes, for instance, that we are rational in the sense that we make choices that are aligned with our beliefs or our expectations. The problem, though, is our expectations can't possibly be take in everything that's going to happen to us in our experiences. So our expectations are necessarily like impoverished snapshots of what our experience is actually going to be like. Our expectations are basically a picture, is one way to think about it. But our lives unfold much more like a movie. And I think the big challenge for us is that those impoverished snapshots just miss some of the really important but complicated features about social interaction that really draw us or connect us with another person. And so our expectations are driven a lot by the things that we can capture in a snapshot. Things like, who am I going to be talking with in this conversation? How well do I know this person? What are we going to be talking about? But our actual experience unfolds over time, from one moment to the next over time. And that unfolding includes a bunch of dynamic processes. There are all kinds of features that have magnetic qualities, essentially, that pull us together, but our expectations seem to be wildly insensitive to that. And what that means is that we fail to appreciate just how much how we connect matters for how well we connect with another person.
08:08
Speaker 1
And so to better understand why these dynamic features are so important, we need to go back to the basics, really just the very function of communication. And when we think about conversation, I think we often assume it has a very like semantic function. If you're a linguist, you would use this word semantic, which basically means you're transferring information. I'm telling you something about happiness in this conversation, for example. But in your book, you argue that lots of conversations aren't just about semantics. They're about what anthropologists have called phatic communion. What is phatic communion?
08:39
Speaker 2
Phatic communion was actually a term coined by Bronislaw Malinowski, who was an anthropologist, also trained as a linguist. He traveled to the Trebriand Islands in Papua New Guinea with some theories that linguists had about how language functions and what language was for. Why is it we talk to each other? And all of those theories were based on the content of language, like the words you would write down, the semantic content. Because the belief was that we speak to each other, we talk to each other. Language is for communicating ideas, thoughts from my head to yours. That's what it's for. And that made a whole lot of sense to Malinowski when he started studying and watching what they were actually doing. They communicated a lot of information, right? Let's hunt over here. Let's plant this there. Let's go cook that meal over there. They communicated a lot of information to coordinate things. actions with each other. But then there were a lot of things that folks did that didn't make sense if you just think about language as information. They would get together at the end of the day and sit around a campfire and do the thing that we all do at the end of the day when we hang out with our friends. We talk about nothing. Basically nothing is what happens, right? So people would sit around the campfire and talk about kind of nothing. They would say things like, oh, there you are, right? It's a brilliant... Helpful communication. And I think his perspective as an outsider on this allowed him to see that language here wasn't functioning to communicate information. It was performing social connection, is what essentially it was doing. It was bonding people together. This language, this conversation wasn't passing along information. It was passing along a hug. And he pretty quickly recognized, oh, this is the same thing that we do in cocktail parties in Europe, too. We get together and we talk about the weather and essentially nothing. But that was a discovery. He thought that was a fundamental discovery to the field, to see language, spoken language in particular, operating in a way that created social bonds, connected people with each other, rather than just passed along information.
10:39
Speaker 1
This doesn't seem like that big a discovery. Why did we not recognize this before? What is it about our minds that doesn't realize these functions?
10:46
Speaker 2
I actually don't think it seems obvious. At a higher level, when we think about this a little more carefully, it kind of seems sort of clear. In practice, it turns out to be very easy to overlook that feature. After all, we're agents. We're thinking about what we're communicating. We're thinking about how we're saying what we're saying. And a lot of the other stuff that happens to connect people to each other is stuff that we just aren't really paying attention to in conversations.
11:08
Speaker 1
So given that we aren't paying attention to it, help us unpack the things that are going on during speech that are these really important moments, these dynamic moments. Yeah.
11:16
Speaker 2
Can we do a little demonstration here? Yeah. You want to do that?
11:19
Speaker 1
You all want to do a demonstration? Yeah.
11:20
Speaker 2
You do?
11:21
Speaker 1
Okay.
11:22
Speaker 2
All right. So let's do the demonstration, and then we'll unpack it. What I want you to do is I want you to think about one of the most interesting things that you have done recently. Okay? Think about one of the most interesting things you have done recently. I then want you to find somebody nearby, right? Somebody sitting next to you. Ideally, somebody you don't know. Pair up with that person, okay? So pair up with somebody right now. Find a partner.
11:43
Speaker 1
Listeners in the audience, everyone in the room is awkwardly looking around to the people near them to try to figure out.
11:48
Speaker 2
Everybody's having a heart attack right now. Do I actually have to talk with a person? All right, find another person, okay?
11:56
Speaker 1
Okay, listeners, people are found.
11:58
Speaker 2
You need to identify which person in the group is person A and which person in the group is B, okay? Identify one of you as person A and another as person B. Now, here's what I need you to do. Okay, person A, you're going to tell your story of the most interesting thing you've done recently. Person B, I want you to turn your back to the person so that person A talks to the hair, all right? So this is the talk to the hair demonstration. Person B, turn your back to the person so you're talking to the hair, all right? And I want you to spend a minute telling that person The most interesting thing you have done recently. Go talk to the hair. Go.
12:40
Speaker 1
Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. Present day Laurie stepping in here to let you know just how this little talk to the hair experiment went. It was, in a word, uncomfortable. Nick and I watched from the stage as the audience struggled to tell interesting stories to the back of their neighbor's head.
12:57
Speaker 2
All right, all right, all right. I think, is that awkward enough now? Have we done enough of that?
13:01
Speaker 1
Give us a clap if you thought that was a little awkward. Okay, everybody's clapping.
13:06
Speaker 2
Good, good. So now what we're going to do, let's turn it around. Now person B, I want you to face person A. Now you can actually talk to each other face-to-face. Person B, I would like you now to share the most interesting thing you did with person A, and you can talk face-to-face.
13:25
Speaker 1
Present-day Laurie again narrating how this challenge went. This time our audience was not feeling awkward. They seemed to love it. In fact, I kind of worried we might have lost the audience's attention for good.
13:36
Speaker 2
All right, everybody. Let's bring it on back here. You can continue the rest of that conversation later if you would like to.
13:44
Speaker 1
We are witnessing something that happens in Nick Lepley's research, which is that when you have people do a deep conversation, they don't want to shut up. Hey, folks, live podcast happening up here. Woo-woo!
13:57
Speaker 2
Yes, that's what happens. People are reluctant to talk, but once you get people talking, it's very hard to get people to stop.
14:03
Speaker 1
Okay, Nick, so what we did in the talk to the hair demo is we took away this dynamic moment-to-moment feedback. What does the research show that does to conversation?
14:12
Speaker 2
When you're talking face-to-face, there's a whole lot of things that are going on in that interaction that are pulling you close together, and you felt it missing when you were talking to the hair, okay? We often think that communication, conversation back and forth, it's like a tennis match, you know? I speak, and then the other person speaks, and then one person speaks, then another person speaks. But if you actually take conversation and you videotape it, or you put the lines down on a spreadsheet, which of course researchers love, because we're all about the spreadsheet, it's a lot noisier and messier than that. So there are lots of other things that are going on, things that don't have to do with what one person is saying. So when you're talking face to face, you do things that are called back channeling. Mm-hmm, yeah, mm-hmm, mm. You're doing that while another person is speaking. And it seems like that is just kind of irrelevant stuff. Like it doesn't matter that much. That's actually glue in conversation that pulls you together. It tells you the other person is listening, that they're paying attention, that they are attending to you. They're affirming what you're saying. If they're confused about something, they'll say, hmm. And it'll allow you to clarify what you're saying. That back channeling is critical. When you take it away, the other person just seems like they're not paying attention, and you lose some sense of connection. There are all kinds of facial expressions that are going on, right? You're talking, and they're smiling back at you. They're giving you eye contact. They're nodding right now, right? And that makes it clear that that person's paying attention to you. All of those cues connect you with the other person in conversation. Those are all the social ties that bind in conversation. And when you strip them away, all you're left with is the text, is the semantic content. And that's not what really connects us in conversation.
15:48
Speaker 1
So that how of social connection, that dynamic feedback we're getting, it matters to whether or not we feel connected. But of course, how we connect is changing. Dun dun dun. When we get back from the break, we're gonna take a look at how new forms of modern technology may be impeding the way we connect in ways that our lying minds don't realize. The Happiness Lab will be right back. Welcome back from the break. Happiness Lab Live at South by Southwest at the World Happiness Summit. Okay, since we're doing this live episode, we're going to demo a new feature on the podcast. Are you ready? It is called Happiness Lab History Lesson. Today's Happiness Lab History Lesson is a timeline of shining moments in the evolution of human communication. 300,000-ish B.C., we start to see the first evidence of the first anatomically modern humans, who also have an anatomically modern vocal track. Live, synchronous, face-to-face vocal communication is born. And then we wait a very long time, because that was all we had for a very long time, until 3,000-ish BC. People begin writing stuff down in cuneiform, clay tablets. Mostly, it's boring accounting records. People like Sumerian royalty and officials begin using this form of written communication to correspond with one another. We now get the cuneiform version of, I hope this tablet finds you well, and why have you not replied to my previous tablet? 3000-ish BC, humans develop a papyrus, early form of paper. The elite can now write even more letters to one another. But it's only rich folks until around 1000 CE, when paper becomes more widespread, people from lots of backgrounds begin writing to one another. And that was the best we had until 1844 CE, Samuel Morse sends the first telegraphic message via electric pulses from DC to Baltimore. That telegraph read, what hath God wrought? 1876, Alexander Graham Bell makes the first telephone call transmitting the human voice electronically for the first time. That call went out to his assistant and Bell said, Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you. Then we fast forward to 1971 when Tomlinson sends the first networked email. It was alleged to have said, in all caps, which is the top letters, was not the most impressive first email, but there you have it. 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first cell phone call from the streets of New York, allegedly calling and saying, I'm calling you from a cell phone, a real cell phone. Nobody realized they were making these like, you know, walk on the moon moments in human communication, but anyway. 1992, British engineer Neil Papworth sends the first asynchronous written text message to the cell phone of his boss, who was at a holiday party. What did the text message say? Merry Christmas. By the start of the new millennium, new developments continue quite rapidly. First video call on Skype, 2005. First social media post on Facebook, 2004. First tweet on Twitter in 2006, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, up till today when we get the first AI-written work emails, which I don't love, I have to say. Happy to slap history lesson. Wasn't that super fun? The point of the Happiness Lab history lesson was for you to see just how rapidly this how of communication has changed. And Nick, you have argued that this change has introduced something novel to the human species, which for hundreds of thousands of years wasn't there, which is that not only do we need to make a choice about whether to communicate, now for the first time in the human species, we have the choice about how to communicate. Why is that so important?
19:45
Speaker 2
Yeah, so we now get to decide, do I talk to somebody face to face? use something that shares my actual voice? I can use a phone for actually what it's good for, to share my voice using my face parts, right? Actually to talk to somebody. I can type to somebody anywhere in the world, right? And now we've got to decide how we're going to engage with somebody. It turns out that choice matters a lot because how you choose to connect with somebody is matters a lot for how connected you actually ended up being with another person. And if we're not fully aware of exactly what the consequences of those choices are, that we run the risk of choosing unwisely. We'll use a medium that's not right for the message that we're trying to convey, or we'll misunderstand each other in problematic ways.
20:29
Speaker 1
I mean, in some ways, all these new forms of communication are probably pluses for human society.
20:34
Speaker 2
Sure, for sure.
20:35
Speaker 1
We can talk to people who are far away. We can talk to people at different times. We can leave writing to people in future generations. But you talked about the big problem, which is that we assume that these forms of communication are all going to work the same. But what does the research actually show?
20:51
Speaker 2
So our data suggests that when people are choosing to connect with another person or not, They typically think that the way another person is going to respond to a given form of communication is kind of consistent, whether they're talking to somebody, say, or typing to another person. But when you're talking to somebody, that's very powerful. They understand the other person better. They communicate what's on their mind better to the other person. They feel more connected to the other person. If we don't appreciate how the context or the medium through which we communicate is going to connect us, we're going to make mistakes.
21:22
Speaker 1
And so one thing that we forget about this medium of connection and how important it is, is the idea of synchronicity, right? Which is that we're actually talking in real time to one another. And you did a study where you tested this, where you had people interact in different ways. I'm thinking about the monologue study. What did you find?
21:38
Speaker 2
So in our research, the way we would test this, for instance, is we put people into a simple situation where you're going to have a conversation with another person. Just like you did a moment ago. We give everybody the same series of questions. And we tell them, in just a minute, what you're going to do is you're going to answer all of these questions. And then you're going to watch your partner answering those same questions. And what we want you to do is anticipate how connected you're going to feel this person, how much you think you're going to like this person, how much in common do you think you have with this person. Essentially, how positive is the conversation going to be? And we vary in our experiment how you're going to connect with that other person, right? So one condition is the monologue condition. I'm talking and then I watch you talk. In the other condition, it's a dialogue condition. We're answering those same questions, but we're going back and forth in live conversation, in an actual voice interaction, okay? They anticipate how they're going to feel afterwards and then we measure how they actually feel afterwards. Now, Two things are interesting here in this experiment to me. One is there was no significant difference between those two conditions and how they expected to feel afterwards, suggesting that they didn't think that whether they were having a monologue with the other person, which contains none of the paralinguistic or dynamic cues that you just experienced a bit ago when you were talking face to face. They didn't think that would matter compared to having a dialogue. Essentially, they thought talking to the hare would be just as good as talking face to face, essentially. Their actual experience, of course, did not show that at all. Their actual experience was that a dialogue was a much more positive experience than a monologue. And this is, when I say people don't seem to appreciate the power or the importance of how connecting with another person is going to matter, for how connected they feel to the person at the end. This is what I mean. In fact, another interesting, maybe one of the most interesting things to come out of this experiment is that we asked people after the conversation how good a friend they thought they could be with a person they talked to. And they thought they could be a better friend with the person they had a dialogue with than the person they had a monologue with. Now, that's a mistake. That's a mistake because you were randomly assigned to those two experiences. So it is not the case, it cannot be the case, that you would be a better friend with the person you had a dialogue with than you had a monologue with. But if we fail to appreciate the context, the way in which we are connecting with someone, how we're connecting with someone is affecting our experience, we're going to draw the wrong conclusions. So if you only talk to folks who are similar to you, but you're typing to people or you're listening to monologues from people who disagree with you, it's probably no wonder you think you could never be friends with them. You've never actually had a conversation with them. And I think that's another important thing that can come out of misunderstanding how the context of communication matters. We draw the wrong inferences from them.
24:24
Speaker 1
And so that's the importance of the live synchronous part. But another thing I was really struck by in your book, and I had to say it warmed this very audio podcaster's heart, was Research showing the importance of the voice and the power of the voice, that when the voice is present, communication just goes better. Why does hearing the voice matter so much?
24:45
Speaker 2
So this is voice compared to text alone, right? So let's start with text, just semantic content. This is what Malinowski thought communication was all about. It contains all, we think at least, it contains all the meat of what we're communicating. It turns out it doesn't. Your voice contains a lot more information. It can allow you to see whether somebody's being sarcastic or serious. Our voice contains intonation, so the pitch goes up and down. Mine is going up and down a lot, right? One thing that Lori complains about with me as a podcast guest.
25:16
Speaker 1
Sometimes he gets so into it and he screams into the mic. But that tells you Nick is really emotional about what he's talking about sometimes.
25:24
Speaker 2
Stop popping your peas is what a podcast host will tell you when you do what I do too much.
25:30
Speaker 1
You're doing great today.
25:32
Speaker 2
Your volume goes up and down. You speed up and slow down. Your voice has life in it. And it's the variability in those cues, the dynamic features in those cues, which is the same thing that you saw a moment ago when you talked with each other with back channeling and the responsiveness that you get. Your voice contains a lot of cues that give you information far beyond just the content of what you're saying. A lot of what you do with your body is redundant with what you're doing with your voice. So all of our hand movements, all of the flailing around that we do, right? Laurie leaned forward when she was imitating my overly enthusiastic self. You could have gotten that enthusiasm just from her voice. You didn't need her body for that. And so the voice is really what carries what's on your mind.
26:17
Speaker 1
This seems obvious when you're saying it, but you've also done some really cool empirical work to show just how powerful this can be and just how powerful this can be in domains where we really do want to connect a little bit better. So tell me a little bit about the 2016 election study that you did, where you showed the power of the voice.
26:31
Speaker 2
Yeah, so the voice, it turns out, doesn't just clarify what's on your mind. You're able to tell whether somebody's being serious or sarcastic, for instance. But it also clarifies that you actually have a mind, that you're thinking, that you're feeling, that you're processing information, that you're alive on the inside. How do I tell whether you're alive biologically? I look to see if you're moving. But your voice also moves. It goes up and down. It speeds up and slows down. And therefore, the inferences that we draw from hearing somebody else's voice ought to show some fingerprints of that relatively lively mind, or if we strip the voice out, a more dead mind. And we sometimes use the word humanization to talk about this effect because it turns out the thing that people tend to think is a key feature of humanity is the presence of a thoughtful, intelligent, rational mind. And so in this experiment that Laurie just mentioned just before the 2016 election, remember this was Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, we had Clinton voters and we had Trump voters just before the election explain why they were voting for Clinton or voting for Trump. We then, in the days leading up to the election, We took those explanations. These were spoken and recorded in video form. We showed people either the video of the person speaking, explaining their position, why they were voting as they were. We stripped the video out and just played the audio. We stripped the voice and the video out and just used the transcript. Or we had people write an explanation for why they were voting for this person. And then we showed one of those different pieces of stimuli to either Clinton voters or Trump voters. And we had them report their impression of the person. Essentially say, how human are they? How mindful are they? How thoughtful are they? How rational are they? How intelligent are they? How capable are they of feeling certain emotions? And what we found is that when you agreed with somebody, you tended to think that they were more thoughtful and more rational, more mindful, more human-like than people who disagreed with you. But this was moderated a lot by the context in which you got the information. When you could hear somebody explain their point of view compared to just reading it, they seem more mindful, more thoughtful, more intelligent, more rational, more human-like. Whether they agreed with you or disagreed with you, but the effect was particularly big when they disagreed with you. Hearing somebody articulate why they were voting for a candidate you did not support, when you were just reading what they had to say, they kind of seemed like mindless idiots. But when you heard what they had to say, they seemed more thoughtful. less like mindless idiots, and more like folks who had some reason for what they're doing, could think, could feel things. And I think that is really profound, right? So the kind of animosity that we feel across the political divide, the kind of hatred we feel sometimes for people who think differently from us, can come in part from the way in which we hear or do not hear, just read what their point of view is. And at least for me, it was hard to escape the conclusion that just typing to each other is a little bit dehumanizing, that it just makes you seem kind of like an idiot, kind of just not so alive on the inside compared to actually hearing somebody say something through their voice. Exact same words. Sound more mindful when you hear what somebody has to say.
30:04
Speaker 1
And so you mentioned in that study that there was another condition that you didn't give the results for. You mentioned the audio condition versus the written condition. But there was also this video condition. What happens when you add video to the voice? Do people connect better?
30:17
Speaker 2
Nothing.
30:18
Speaker 1
Nothing.
30:19
Speaker 2
It was the same. At least in terms of how mindful the person seemed, the impressions didn't vary. Again, I think what's happening here is at least when you're watching a video, that video that you can see, the nonverbal stuff that you can see, isn't adding a lot over and above the voice. When it comes to understanding what's on the mind of another person or that they even have one that's functioning, the voice has it.
30:43
Speaker 1
Little PSA for podcasters who are moving to the video format. It doesn't actually make you seem more human or have ideas that are more interesting. Audio podcasts here to stay. Don't we think audio podcasts should be here to stay? It's sad. No one reads Nick's work in the podcast world. We're all going to video, and that's where we're going. But it doesn't matter if you have the video or not. OK. So all this work points to a somewhat scary conclusion, given how we tend to communicate in the modern world. And that scary conclusion is that text-based asynchronous interactions are ever so subtly dehumanizing. Not good. What are the consequences of the fact that we can't read people's minds as well from text? Do we have to do it the old school way? Well, when we get back from the break, Nick will share his tips on how we can connect better, maybe even over text. We will find out when the Happiness Lab comes back from the break. Happiness Lab is South by Southwest and World Happiness Summit. So Nick, what can we do to communicate better in the modern world? Do we need to abandon all these non-synchronous technologies like texting and emailing? Do we want to get rid of them?
31:57
Speaker 2
No, for sure not. I mean, I think different media work for different things. So if I'm going to send one of my PhD students, or more likely, they're going to send me the data from some experiment that we just ran, I don't want them calling me on the phone and reading it line by line. That's not going to be helpful for that. Or if there's a recipe somebody's going to pass along, I'd like that in text. So communication's a tool. And the media we use are tools to communicate in ways that are consistent with our goals. I think the risk is that if we don't fully appreciate what these different communication media are actually doing, we might use the tool incorrectly. So today is my son Habtamu's 21st birthday. Happy birthday, Habtamu. He will love it much more when we call him and sing, happy birthday to you. He will love that much more, yes. But at 6 o'clock in the morning when I got up this morning and my wife got up this morning, he was not up for a phone call from us, right? So we all send him a note, happy birthday, Abtamu, and the siblings did too, and that was lovely. So there's a place for that for sure when things are hard, you know, you've got a lot going on, particularly if you know somebody. Text works very well. I'm sure we've got many parents in this room who are happy to have text communication with their kids. I think the mistake, though, is that there are times where it would be easy to pick up the phone and reach out and call an old friend. And we don't. We text to them instead, or we type to them in some way instead. And that just strikes me as a missed opportunity, potentially. to connect in a way that would be better. There are times where we could take the time. It doesn't take any longer. In fact, I was just doing something yesterday, trying to schedule something, and we were going back and forth over email. It was taking forever.
33:36
Speaker 1
This was with you and I trying to figure out. We're like, should we get a drink before dinner? And I was like, I'm on South Congress. Can we meet up? And he's like, well, how long is it going to take? I'm like, I don't know. I could pick you up at the thing. And in addition to talking to you over text, I was telling my husband to update him on the plans. And I was like, I think Nick is going to come here. Oh, no, the Uber is not going to make it. In the middle of this, my phone rings. And I was like, oh, hey, Nick. And then he just explained, like, it's going to be too much of a pain to come down there. Just do this. Ah, and our plans, especially in a very traffic-filled Austin city in South by Southwest, where everybody's here, it was solved. But like, I'm also an expert on this stuff and I did not think to pick up the phone and just call Nick, even though I knew he was by his phone because he was texting me from his phone.
34:17
Speaker 2
We can do better.
34:18
Speaker 1
We can do better. And one of the ways we can do better though, is to do what this whole podcast is all about, right? Which is to understand our biases and what we get wrong. Because one of the main problems, one of the reasons we don't do better, one of the reasons I don't do better in that moment is we forget how different these hows of communication can really be. We don't realize how mindless we seem over text and this can lead to problems. You mentioned sarcasm before, but I know you have a lovely study on this. Tell me how that plays out.
34:47
Speaker 2
So this was an experiment that we ran a little while ago now, but the same kinds of mechanisms still apply. We had people come up, we gave them 10 different topics, you know, the weather in Austin, the music scene, South by Southwest, whatever, 10 different topics. And for each one, they were asked to write a sincere statement or a sarcastic statement, okay? The 20 statements total. One person was the sender, one person was the receiver, and they either... sent these messages, these sincere or sarcastic messages, either by typing them to the other person or by actually talking to the other person over the phone. And then the recipient of these, their job was simple. All they had to do was guess, for each one, was this intended to be sincere or sarcastic? The senders predicted how many of these 20 you would get exactly right, and we just compared the two. So it seems pretty obvious, at least in the abstract, that texting, typing to another person isn't going to communicate sarcasm very well. The problem is that when you're actually doing it, right, you're passing along that funny joke, right, about your co-worker's friend. That seems so funny to you, right, so obviously funny to you. It's not so clear to you that it's not so obvious to the person on the other side. They can't hear your.
36:03
Speaker 2
Sarcasm while you're typing this thing out. They can only hear it in your voice. But because of egocentrism, because we tend to use our own mind as a guide to another person, it can dull our senses about this. And indeed, we found, not surprisingly perhaps, that recipients were notably better interpreting whether a message was meant to be sincere or sarcastic when they heard what the person had to say than when they read it. In fact, when they read it, they were not significantly better than chance alone. They were 56% accurate when chance is 50%. They were basically guessing. But interestingly, when we asked the senders to predict how many the recipient would get right, they thought they were communicating about 75% of these accurately, both when they were typing to the person and when they were talking to the other person. So here's this huge difference in the actual ability to understand what I'm trying to say to you, without a whole lot of awareness that how I was communicating was going to make a big difference to how well you could do this. Most miscalibrated, though, were the recipients of these messages, the people who heard them. They thought they were interpreting 90% roughly of these, correct? And there was no difference in their confidence between whether they were hearing what the person had to say or they were reading what they had to say. And that is a core problem with modern communication, I think. We're communicating in ways. that are fundamentally impoverished often, sometimes about dicey topics, increasingly so over X or online and social media channels. These get increasingly hostile. Nobody can take a joke online, right? Because we're reading what people have to say. And we're failing to appreciate just how much the medium that we're communicating through is corrupting the message that we're conveying.
37:48
Speaker 1
And so that's kind of how bad we are at text. I think another thing we're bad at is that even when we have the opportunity to choose voice, we don't choose voice. Tell me about what you found in your elevator pitch study that you did with MBA students.
38:01
Speaker 2
Oh yeah. So this was one where we asked our MBA students to come up with an elevator pitch that they would use to deliver to the employer of their favorite job, right? So every job seeker has an elevator pitch, right? This is your two to three minute spiel about why you employer dream job should hire me, potential employee. And they, again, they did this in the same way that we did in the 2016 election experiment. They gave their pitch. We recorded it over video. From that, we could create three stimuli. We could create the audio only. We could create the audio with video and we could create the text. And we also had a study where we created the transcript. We then had them evaluated by people who either watched or listened or read these stimuli. And they reported how thoughtful, how intelligent, how rational, how employable this person was. As with the election study, people seem more mindful when you heard what they had to say than when they read what they had to say. But when we asked a separate sample of people, how would you rather communicate with a dream employer if you were giving an elevator pitch, about 80% of people said, I would rather type than talk. Because you think. You know, I can get the words just right. I can type this out. And that's, it's the semantic content. It's the Malinowski mistake. That what's going to matter is the words that I use. So typing it is going to matter the most. And what we miss is that it's the voice behind the message that matters a lot. It's the warmth that you convey. It's the thoughtful. It's the intelligence. It's the rationality. It's the emotion. It's the passion that you're conveying in your voice. That's what matters. And that's what people seem to miss here.
39:38
Speaker 1
And that's not just in the job description context. You found this in other cases as well. People want to write.
39:43
Speaker 2
People do want to write.
39:44
Speaker 1
Yeah.
39:44
Speaker 2
So we had one situation where we had people reconnect with old friends. How many of you have an old friend that you'd like to connect to, but you haven't?
39:52
Speaker 1
Oh, we're seeing lots of hands in the audience. A lot of missed connections out here. So you could reach out to that old friend in a number of different ways, right? You could pick up the phone and call them, or you could send them an email and type to them. We had participants in an experiment, ask them to think about a person, an old friend they could reach out and reconnect to. We had them imagine and predict how they would feel after their interaction if they typed to the other person or if they talked to the other person, called them up on the phone. And then we asked them, how would you rather reconnect with your old friend? Would you rather talk or would you rather type?
40:24
Speaker 2
People thought, actually, that they would feel more connected if they called their old friend than if they typed to their old friend, thought they'd have a better conversation if they talked than if they typed. But they also thought it would be way more awkward to call somebody and talk to them than type to them. What won out in their choice? It was the awkwardness. About 2 thirds of people said, I would rather type to the person than I would talk to the person. Now, we're experimentalists, so we don't allow you to choose what you get to do. We randomly assign you to do stuff. So they essentially got to pull a rabbit out of the hat, which told them whether they were going to call their old friend or type to their old friend. They then went off and did that. And then they came back and they told us how the conversation actually go. And as they expected beforehand, They felt more connected. They had a better conversation when they talked than when they typed. But there was no difference in awkwardness. So this thing that was driving this choice, it'll be weird to reach out to Lori, to call her up to coordinate this. We'll just type instead, right? I haven't talked to this person in years. It'll be odd to call them out of the blue. Just wasn't that odd. And wasn't any more odd than typing to them. So this thing that people were using to guide their expectations led them astray, to prefer typing over talking. And that was a mistake.
41:38
Speaker 1
And so the how of communication really matters. I know this has changed how you communicate a lot, even just in the example with ourselves. But yeah, what are some examples of how you do things different when the research pushes against your intuitions?
41:50
Speaker 2
I try to carve out time for habits. That's, I think, the way you really put a lot of these practices that we talk about into your own life. You don't do really big things. Those are hard. But there are lots of opportunities that you might have. to do little things that would make your moments better. And I think that's a really important way to think about happiness, because it's those moments that matter. Happiness is like, as we've talked about many times before, I think it's kind of like a leaky tire. You do something that makes you feel good. You feel good, and then it kind of drains out a little bit. You come back to baseline. That's not cause for despair. That's a call to action. That's a call to arms right there. I got to do that thing again. And I got to do that thing again and that thing again. So what I try to do is find routine times where I can actually have conversation with people instead of typing to them. So one thing that I do that works really well is that when I'm driving in the car by myself, I call one of the kids, or I call a friend, or I call my dad. For the last three months, I've been teaching in downtown Chicago, and I got about a 45-minute drive home. My kids will all tell you they get a call. That's when dad calls, right? It's in the evening on that drive home. I could wait and catch up to them over text or something, but I carve out that time to talk. And at that time, I would just be listening to music or Laurie's podcast. And that is lovely, right? But talking to the kids, I carve out time for that. So I think the things that I try to do is to look for opportunities where it would be easy. And I talk to a lot of people as well. That is something I very much do. And when I have that choice, I pick up the phone. Sometimes it takes me a few wayward texts to get to it. But eventually, I realize, oh, no, we're just going to talk. And that'll make it better.
43:28
Speaker 1
And so for our final thought, our inner lives are obscured in text. Compared to what we reveal through our voices, people seem less mindful, less intelligent, less emotional, less human when they're typing to each other than when they're talking to each other. But the good news is that bridging the gap between people is easier than we think, as long as we know how to do it better. Nick, thank you for teaching us how to do it better. Nick Epley, everyone. Wasn't that awesome? Thank you so much to the folks at the World Happiness Summit and at South by Southwest for having us here. This has been the Happiness Lab Live. Thank you so much. If you want to learn a little bit more about Nick's work, I highly recommend checking out his new book, A Little More Social. Next time, I'll be back with another live conversation from the World Happiness Summit at South by Southwest. And this time, I'll be joined by fellow happiness expert and one of my good friends, the psychologist Ethan Cross. And Ethan and I will get real in this one. We'll talk about the things that happiness experts like us get wrong about happiness and what the rest of you can do to learn from our mistakes.
44:34
Speaker 2
Everyone here in our audience is a giant hypocrite. So turns out that this is the universal feature of the human condition. We can give great advice. We don't always follow it ourselves.
44:46
Speaker 1
That's all next time on the Happiness Lab live on stage with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.
The Host
