Speaking of Psychology - Technology is changing how we talk to each other, with Jeff Hancock, PhD

Episode Date: May 19, 2021

Zoom, Facebook, group text messages: This past year, technology has sometimes felt like the glue that’s kept many of our relationships alive. More and more, we talk to each other with technology in between us. Jeff Hancock, PhD, director of the Social Media Lab at Stanford University, discusses how this is affecting human communication, including whether people are more likely to lie online, whether the versions of ourselves that we present on social media are authentic, how artificial intelligence infiltrates our text messages, why video calls exhaust us more than in-person conversations, and more. Are you enjoying Speaking of Psychology? We’d love to know what you think of the podcast, what you would change about it, and what you’d like to hear more of. Please take our listener survey at www.apa.org/podcastsurvey. Links Jeff Hancock, PhD   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This past year, technology has been the glue that's kept many of our relationships alive. Birthday parties and business meetings moved to Zoom, and we kept up with friends and acquaintances who we could no longer see in person with Facebook updates, FaceTime, and group text messages. Now, even as life begins to return to normal, technology-mediated communication is here to stay. Although offices are starting to reopen, many workplaces plan to allow teleworking to continue, which will mean those dreaded Zoom meetings are not. going away. But even before the pandemic, we were already relying heavily on social media to

keep us connected. Facebook alone has 2.8 billion monthly active users, and 85% of Americans now own a smartphone. More and more, when we talk to each other, we do it with some kind of technology between us. So what does this mean for human communication? Is the version of ourselves that we present on social media, authentic and truthful? Are people more likely to lie online or in a text message than they are in person, to video calls exhaust us more than in-person conversations do, and perhaps more broadly, is all of this technology-driven communication good for our mental health and well-being or not? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life.

I'm Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. Jeff Hancock, a psychologist and professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. where he founded and directs the Stanford social media lab. Dr. Hancock is an expert in social media behavior and the psychology of online interaction. He is well known for his research on how people lie and whether we can detect deception in texts, emails, or in online reviews. His TED talk on deception has been viewed more than one million times. He's also studied how social media affects well-being and how artificial intelligence is changing the way we talk to one another. Thank you for joining us, Dr. Hancock.

Thanks, Kim. I'm excited to be here. So as I said, the name of your research group is the Stanford Social Media Lab. For a lot of people, when they think of social media, they think about Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram. You study those. But you also have a broader definition of what social media is. Can you explain that? Right, yeah. In fact, I had a social media lab at Cornell before there was social media, so speak. Because for me, social media is any technology that we use to be social with one another.

So I'm really interested in human-to-human communication when there's some technology between us. But even more broadly, you know, if you're talking to a robot in a way, I think of that as social media. When you're interacting with your car, that's a form of social media. And you and I here on a video conference, to me, is social media as well. So let's talk about something that falls under that broader umbrella, which is video chat. Your research into Zoom fatigue has gotten quite a bit of recent media coverage. What exactly is Zoom fatigue and why should we find it so exhausting to just sit in front of a computer screen and talk to other people? Well, that's exactly the question that my colleague Jeremy Bounce and I had when the pandemic first started and us faculty members had all this extra time because we didn't have to commute.

We weren't going into the lab. Meetings were getting canceled left and right, but everything went to Zoom. And we found ourselves having these conversations, but why would this be so tiring? You know, we're here, relaxed. you know, we're in our homes. And so what we started to look at were the kind of differences between Zoom conferences and face-to-face. And looking back, there was, you know, a lot of work in the 90s. My colleague here at Stanford, Pam Hines had done work on video conferencing and why they might be more fatiguing.

But it sort of research died out to some degree because it wasn't, you know, a huge deal. People weren't using video conferences all the time. It was there if you wanted it, but most people didn't use it. So what we started to talk about was this general feeling of kind of exhaustion or tiredness. Sometimes afterwards, you know, Jeremy would say, I just don't feel like doing anything afterwards. Or I would say, I don't want to talk to anybody after that. So we found some sort of consensus on this idea that maybe Zoom meetings aren't necessarily more fatiguing than face-to-face, but have some unique fatigue. we think it's related to some of the nonverbal dynamics.

So Jeremy laid this out in one of his articles really nicely. The fact that your face right now is really close to mine. It's almost like at an intimate level. And that's sort of physiologically arousing. Either we're going to be, you know, come to blows or we're going to have a kiss, right? Like it's just, it's very unusual for us to be this close. When we're on with lots of people, even if I'm not speaking, it feels like a lot of people are staring at us, something that we've called hypergays. And to me, then, one of the biggest ones psychologically

is the mirror. So right now I'm speaking to you. I can see myself. In fact, my image is as big as yours. And while we've seen ourselves in the mirror before, we've never really seen ourselves socially behaving. When we go into the bathroom and check ourselves out, it's usually just for appearance, but not for how we behave. This has a huge impact on us, I think, and is very tiring. And I've been trying to track myself just how much time I look at my image versus yours. And so it's hard to do this kind of introspection. But I'm guessing it's about half the time.

My attention is drawn back to my image. So these are some of the examples of why Zoom can be so fatiguing. Let's turn for a moment to your research on deception and lying. Your TED talk that I mentioned a moment ago is called The Future of Lying. What is the future of lying? How will it be different from its past?

That is a really great question. For me, I was interested in how technology could change how often we lie, and then how we sort of end up trusting other people. Kind of two sides of the same coin in a way. When we first started looking at it, we would ask people like, where do they think people would lie the most? And what we found was this sort of folk theory that as soon as you couldn't see the other person, as soon as you couldn't hear the other person, line would go up. And it's sort of this nonverbal cue idea that if I, if I can't see them, then they can lie more easily and therefore they will. And it's wrong, it turns out, on a whole bunch of levels. And I think the most recent work that I think is the best on deception detection in general is Tim Levine's and it's summarized in his book, duped. And what we find when it comes to technology is his ideas from duped work perfectly. So the first is that most of the time, most people don't want to lie, right?

the best option usually is to tell the truth. And sometimes we're in positions where that's uncomfortable or awkward or could be harmful for us. And that doesn't really change when we go into technology. And I should also clarify that I'm not talking about the Russian spies or the scam artist, you know, the Prince from Nigeria or any of those folks. Instead, I'm talking about people that we know, people that we have a tie with. And in that case, it looks like the psychology really drives line, not

the technology. So we found that people will be just as likely to lie in technologically needed places as others, except there was one big difference, and that is when the technology left a record. So in some of our earliest work, we found that people would lie the least in emails. And emails are one of these, like, really recorded ones. So if I send you an email, not only do you have a copy of the lie I just sent you, but there's also ones on servers and everything. So most of the time, psychology is what's going to drive whether someone lies or not, not the technology, but there are some features. So if there's a record, people tend to think about that a little bit. Another one is whether we're synchronous or not. So when I'm face to face with you,

there's only so much I can pause. Like if I pause more than a second, it gets kind of weird and you start to worry that maybe I'm having a stroke or something. And so we have to think of things really fast and so line occurs more often synchronously. Technology can give us a bit of a break on that and sometimes we even see that people are more honest in those places. So I think the future of lying is one that will be driven primarily by psychology. So do we have the need to lies or other options? Also by some of these affordances of technology like will there be a record of this or not. And so that will just continue to evolve. Now in our latest work, what we're seeing is, is that people are getting really good at lying, even in recorded media.

And there, you just choose the kind of lies you can do. So, for example, a student could say to me, you know, Professor Hancock, my printer's not working. And that's an okay lie in an email, because the chance of me going to his place and checking out his printer is almost zero. But if he were to lie and say something about when he submitted something, right? And then there's a record that can check that, then he's going to be in trouble. Are there, have you done comparisons among various media?

Are we more likely to lie via text or in person or over the phone? I mean, how do we lie differently in different situations? Right, great question. So we've done a number of these different kinds of studies. We use diary studies where we get people to record them. We've looked at log records, lots of different ways. And what we end up finding is that text and email typically have fewer lies than, say, phone calls. And it's because of that record.

It's because we're not forced to say things really quickly. And it's sort of been hard to talk about it lately because with disinformation, everybody just thinks that once you're on the internet, everything is a lie. And it's true that there is a lot of deception online, but I try to differentiate between what I call the known network, so people that we have a tie with, and the unknown network. So that could be, anyway, from the Russian spy to just somebody who's just somebody who's a known network. trying to troll me to someone trying to scam me. And it's difficult sometimes to differentiate those. So is there a lot of disinformation online? Yes, it's a real major problem. But is that happening

between, say, Jeff and Kim, who have a professional relationship? No, very unlikely. In those kind of situations, we see line is more likely to be done on the phone, so vocally, or face-to-face, than it will be in an email or text message. What's been most surprising to you, you while studying the impact of technology online? Well, it was definitely the fact that people were lying the least in email, for example, one of our first studies. I remember just I don't, you know, it was really strange. And then when we started thinking about it and thinking about this idea of the record,

once you think of that, it's just, it's so obvious. But I think a lot of deception detection research up until the 2000s were really focused on nonverbal cues. You know, this is the influence of Paul Ekman. and his colleagues and students that we really focused on nonverbal things and it made it into the pop culture now it's pretty clear that there aren't any really strong pinocchio noses there's no one cue that will always tell you somebody's line so the fact that it happens you know online versus face-to-face the nonverbals are just less important and instead it's some of these affordances of online like the record that we leave behind

There's this idea that we're all envious of each other these days, not because people necessarily lie on social media, but because they present the best, most idealized vision of themselves with touched-up selfies or elegant dinners or beautiful vacation photos rather than the day-to-day drudgery. Is the way that people present themselves on social media authentic, or is that not authentic? Is that a big lie? This is one of the biggest complaints people have about social media that it's all just like people showing their greatest stuff. And I guess I have two big responses to that. One is that when we talk to people that we've just gotten to know or we see on the street or we see, you know, back in the pre-air in the hallway, we would not talk about all the crappy things or boring things that happened about us. We would say, hey, I just went skiing this weekend or I did that. that is we're always presenting a version of ourselves. And I don't think that's inauthentic.

Instead, I think people are saying, here's what I want to project, here's what I value, here's me with my friends, or here's me traveling. And so, okay, is it a better part of themselves? Is it them looking the best of the 50 photos they took? Yeah. But this is also like a sweater that I'm wearing that I like. I think I look good in.

I'm not here in my like underwear. I can attest to that. So is this authentic? This is an audio podcast, but he's telling the truth. I am clothed. And, you know, sure, in the Zoom area, maybe we're coming more often in pajamas, but we still think about our presentation. So I think that we're able to do more kinds of optimized presentation online,

but I don't think it's necessarily authentic. And my colleague, Sandra Mats, has done some really nice recent work showing that some people can present really authentically online. and it turns out online behavior and being engaged a lot can be really healthy for them, high well-being. Other people report behaving online in a sort of inauthentic way where they're saying, oh, I did post that, but that's not really who I am or that's not, you know, I only did that once.

And that can make them actually feel bad afterwards. So I also think we can move away from, you know, social media being all one thing or the other for everyone and start to understand that, you know, if I behave in an inauthentic way, That can have some negative ramifications for me. But if I'm behaving authentically online, it can be really powerful. There's been a lot of worry and articles about whether smartphones and social media are addictive and whether they cause depression or anxiety, especially when we're talking about kids and teens. Are these worries justified?

Let me start by saying these are really prevalent worries. Any parent group I talk to, any professional group like educators, friends and family with kids, This is a serious concern because I think everyone sees kids, especially with the pandemic, on a lot of screen time. And even before the pandemic, my colleague Nicole Ells and I were going to have a book proposal about why we wanted to bring down the anxiety. One reason is there's not a lot of great evidence that using social media is automatically good or bad for you.

Instead, our survey of the literature is that it depends much more on what you're doing. So if you spend an hour connecting with an old friend or interacting with buddies on a video game or whatever you're doing on your phone, that can be really psychologically healthy. If you're doing something that's not like, say, stalking an X or obsessing on something and using social media to do that, then that can be psychologically unhealthy. So in our review of the literature, this is with my colleagues at the Stanford Social Media Lab, we looked at over 200 studies, over 200,000 particular. dispense in all these studies. And we can basically meta-analyze it so that you say how much social

media use a person was having in the study and then whatever measure of well-being. And there's many types. We tracked six things from like depression and loneliness, but also social connectedness and life satisfaction. When we did that huge giant study, the effect size was R equals 0.01, which is essentially zero. It's a very precise estimate of zero. So does that mean for all the parents out there like, hey, don't worry about it? You know, Professor Hancock says it's not a problem. I don't think that's exactly what I would be saying, but I would say there isn't evidence for you to be really anxious and worried. Instead, what I would think about is for your child and your family, how is this person's use of technology working?

And so I have some friends that kids are doing really well. They're thriving in the pandemic. They're learning all these computer skills and their friends are working with them to do better at homework. and to stay connected. Others have really struggled and I think this is another place we're getting where we need to move away from averages and start looking at individuals and there's really great work coming out of Europe in this sort of it's called the awesome well-being project where they're taking an end of one approach where they're finding that some young people indeed about it is about 10

percent find that using social media can make them more anxious for example and there's another group about the same size that using social media can be really really valuable for them, right, from a point like creativity, co-to-connectedness. And there's a whole bunch of people in the middle that it has no effect at all. There's zero correlation. And so I think this is another thing where we need to start thinking about the individuals, what they're doing and how it's working psychologically in their life. And I think for parents, that's an important way to start thinking about.

Instead of just how much time, right, or how frequently they're using it, which is a kind of addiction model, instead thinking about how functional is it? Is it working? What are they doing? What skills are they getting? Are they, you know, staying connected? And I think that's a more healthy approach to tech use. So it sounds like you're looking at what people are doing when they're online. Are you looking at attention span? It seems that one of the things that's happening to us is that we're all over the place because we're distracted. You know, you look at one thing. There's that you got an article. It's got five links in it. Pretty soon you've gone down some rabbit hole and you don't know how you got there. Right. Kim, I fully get that. I sense my attention changing as well. And that is a concern. But I kind of try to think of the longer arc of, say, psychological history. And, you know, a good story to Anchores is Socrates. And he was really adamant about a technology of that time because he was worried about its effect on human memory, which to him was very much about the human soul. And that was the alphabet. He really believed that by writing things down, we would no longer remember them in the same way. And back there you'd have poets that would be trained to, you know, remember multi-hundred-line poems. We don't get our kids to do that anymore, but I don't

think anybody would say, well, let's get rid of the alphabet because we can't do 900-line poems. So, yes, I do, I would strongly believe that the way we are using technology, our media environment is changing our brain, it's changing our neuropsychology. And one negative outcome, I think, for me especially, is I feel like I'm pretty easily distracted. Like doing 20 minutes of writing on one of my papers, I put a timer down now. So I just stay focused on that for 20 minutes. And then I want to change it up.

But perhaps that's allowing me to deal with a whole bunch of other kinds of information in our new kind of media environment. Perhaps there's some cost, but we're adapting and we have benefits there. Are there other ways that we can incorporate social media into our lives that will maximize the benefits and minimize the harms? Well, I love the way you put that. I think that is the exact way to be thinking about it. And I don't have really high-level advice other than for each person, each family, to think about the degree to which this is beneficial for me and costly.

There's been a number of studies that show that, you know, people that are really showing kind of problematic internet use, say over using Facebook, they're often dealing with some other life stress, like they've lost a family member, they've lost a job, they're going through a divorce, or they're had some kind of financial issues. And so rather than thinking, like, what is social media doing to that person, it'd be more like, what is that, why is that person using it in that way? What are they trying to deal with? And for many people, It can be quite functional. It can be, I'm trying to deal with this.

I'm trying to get through it. There are a small number of people, a small part of the population, which it's problematic. And it could be social media. It could be video games where they've just doing it so much that it's interfering with other parts of their lives. And so I like that kind of approach that you just mentioned, which is how do you optimize?

How do you maximize the benefits and reduce the cost? I kind of think it was like driving cars. cars are far more deadly than social media way more and in the past we're even more so but we you know created new tech there's airbags we created regulations you have to wear seat belts you know that we created new norms you can't smoke in a car with your kids like you know but when i was growing up that's what every parent did it was not a problem now if somebody tried to do that that would be you know it would not be okay so our tech changes our our policy and regulation changes and our social behaviors change. And it makes cars much safer. Are they perfect? No, but we're optimizing. We're

creating the most benefit from the cars we can and minimizing the cost. And there's still work to be done. Most cars produce carbon and that's not good for our well-being in the long term either, and we're working on that. So I think it's an ongoing thing that people need to just focus on the way they're using their tech to think about how is this beneficial for them. So one of your more recent research interests is how artificial intelligence has begun to affect the conversations that people have with each other. This is a really interesting idea that I suspect a lot of people haven't really thought about. How is artificial intelligence injecting itself into our conversations and what effect does it have? Right. I think it's fascinating too, Kim, so I'm glad you do as well.

Most people think about when we talk with an Amazon machine or an Apple, Siri, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the way that we use AI to talk to each other. So AI sitting between humans. So when you and I were trying to figure out when we were going to have this conversation, my email would suggest, say, three things. If you had said, how about Monday at noon? It might say, sounds good. Talk to you then. or no, I can't. Very simple. When I look at them, they seem like, yeah, one of those would

fit the bill. It looks like there's about 16 billion of those messages sent every day just through Google's platform. Now we see places like Microsoft that have introduced auto-complete sentences in Word. We're seeing it in text messaging, auto-correct, auto-predict. And so what's happening is when I go to talk to you in a immediate environment, I'm giving suggestions on what to say. And those suggestions often feel really right. But what we know from the way human language is produced is that when I see language or hear language, it primes my semantic network space. So it actually activates some concepts.

So that's how we can speak so quickly back and forth is we kind of become aligned linguistically with what language we're reading or hearing. So when I'm shown sounds good or no problem, it might feel right. It might feel like what I would have said, but I can't know because my brain has been primed to think those are reasonable things to say. And what's even crazier is, let's say you're using some system that never uses AI, never allows AI to be part of it. You don't have the options. But I use Sounds Good Talk to You then and send that over to you.

Well, now you've been primed by AI, even though you have no knowledge of it. There's no representation of that, but your brain has been changed. Okay, so does it matter? Well, it's at scale, so we're getting $16 billion, and that's certainly a low estimate because that's just Google. What we've found is some work done at Cornell by Maltai Young and Just Holstein, and also we've replicated here at Stanford with Hannah Mitch Kowsky, finding that these AI systems tend to be overly positive.

What I mean there is that sounds. good, sounds great. Those are much more common in the AI suggested messages than what humans would use. And we've done these in experiments, we've looked at the actual Google messages themselves. And it makes sense. If you're a corporation, you want to screw up that asymmetry of effect one way. You want to overdo the positive, right? And not more often say, no, you're an idiot. So that's smart on the but when you have more positivity being injected into language at the scale of Google, it raises real questions about what does that mean to our emotional tone? Is it appropriate? Is it

going to change the way we're thinking? And then there's other big questions like what what kind of discourse are those systems being trained on? If it's around trust, for example, then you know, we know that older white male discourse, right? The old Walter Cron kind type style of discourse is the most trusted in our society. If the AI is being trained on that kind of language, then it's going to prioritize, you know, white male discourse. And so there's real big ethical questions here as well when we're using AI to inject into human to human communication. And I think it's a fascinating area. You know, it has a lot of potential for good, but I'm frankly a little alarmed at how invisible it is and

how at scale it is. Like putting Prozac in the water, right? Right. Oh, that's good. That'll be the title of our next paper. So obviously, as we've been chatting here, it's clear that technology changes really quickly. Is there anything that people aren't thinking about much now

that you think will be the next big question? I think the two things I've been thinking a lot about for the future is exactly what we were just talking about, this idea of AI, media communication, AI being used to help humans talk to other humans. There's new tech out that technologists know a lot about, but I think most folks don't, which is called GPT3. This is a natural language generation system. And it is truly impressive on the kinds of language it can write.

So you train it up on whatever area, content area you're interested in, and then it produces new content. I think it raises questions for disinformation. Now you have to pay people a little bit to get a bunch of disinformation out there. With something like GPT3, you're looking at essentially infinite amount of disinformation for really low cost. So there's these kind of things. Also, if you're a young student and you're interested in marketing, for example,

you know, GPD3 will be used to create, you know, massive amounts of marketing for a much lower price. And so, you know, if you're into brand management graduating right now and you don't know about how AI can create language, you're going to be in trouble, I think. So those are things that are right at the cusp. And there's lots of things to be worried about, lots of things to be excited. The other brings us back to the Zoom fatigue that we were talking about earlier. it's pretty clear that most large companies that we've been talking to are interested in a hybrid model going forward. And there's lots of reasons for it from, you know, costs to reducing carbon, you know, all these things. But companies are worried about culture, their kind of corporate

culture. They're worried about bringing young people in and having them, you know, get known within an organization. So I think video is here to stay. And one question is, how do we move from just this video where you're seen into my living room? I'm seen into your office. There's no real organization. If you were to come into my office at Stanford, you would see bookshelf and there'd be a desk and we would kind of know how things are going there.

We've just sort of opened our homes into business. And so I think there's a lot of things to be done here around VR. So how will virtuality help us incorporate culture at a distance? We'll see changes in the way that Zoom conferences or video conferences are done. So I think we'll see big improvements in technology. And also kind of institutional changes. Let's not have Zoom or video conferences as a default all the time. Let's use it when it's important or necessary.

And I think there's going to be more of a sense of, what's the right word, more of a sense of investment in people and their places if we're going to ask people to stay home. And so, you know, we'll start seeing corporations, I think, invest in people's home offices and do it in a ways that will help support that that culture that they're very interested in keeping. So I'm, yeah, I'm excited for the future. I think we've opened up a new kind of way of working together and connecting that could be healthier for the planet, healthier for us individually. But it just is a doesn't have to be video conference all the time.

I'm trying to figure out how we're going to come up with some sort of a hybrid model that works, you know, so that when some people are in the office and some people are not, like what's happening with kids in school right now, right, where the teacher is so busy dealing with the Zoom kids that she's not dealing with the kids who are in the room. Right. And are we going to experience something like that when we go back to work? Those hybrid situations where there's some people in person and some people not are the most difficult for sure because the ones that aren't there are a little less visible.

And I think that's where we might see some good advances in technology. You know, there's likely to be changes where I can put some glasses on and see another person who's not here right now, but the glasses make sort of visible or at least salient, not perfectly, but at least will remind me that they're here. They're part of this conversation. Well, this has all been really interesting. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us, Dr. Hancock. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.

Thanks, Kimberly. I really enjoyed the conversation. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology at www. www. speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. That's Speaking of Psychology, all one way.

Word at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Our sound editor is Chris Kondyian. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.