Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques - 27. Psychology Trumps Technology: How to Be a Better Communicator on Social Media

Episode Date: January 28, 2021

“Psychology trumps technology,” says Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford.“If you want to understand what's going on in social media, the first place to start is with what's going on psychologically.”On the latest episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, lecturer and podcast host Matt Abrahams sits down with Professor Hancock, to talk about the communication tendencies, styles, and mistakes of social media users. “Whenever there's a new kind of technology ... our focus is on what it's doing,” Professor Hancock says. “But I think over time what we end up realizing is that it's still people using it to accomplish things. And I think when we start to when we step back … we can get a sense of what really is changing.” Connect:Premium Signup >>>> Think Fast Talk Smart PremiumEmail Questions & Feedback >>> [e-mail] Transcripts >>> Think Fast Talk Smart WebsiteNewsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>> FasterSmarter.ioThink Fast Talk Smart >>> LinkedIn,  Instagram, YouTubeMatt Abrahams >>> LinkedIn ********Thank you to our sponsors.  These partnerships support the ongoing production of the podcast, allowing us to bring it to you at no cost.Strawberry.me. Get 50% off your first coaching session today at Strawberry.me/smartJoin our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community and become the communicator you want to be. 

Hi, Matt here. We have two days left before we close our listener viewer survey. A big thank you to all of you who have already provided feedback. Please take a few minutes to share your input on the show. We still have a few prizes left to give to lucky respondents. Go to FasterSmarter.com.com. To give us your input. That's FasterSmartter.com.io slash survey. And now a word from one of our sponsors.

Their support allows us to bring you quality content free of charge. If you've ever thought, I know I can do more, but something's holding me back. You're not alone. Whether you're navigating career growth, seeking better balance, or wanting to communicate with more confidence, coaching can help you bridge the gap between intention and action. At strawberry.comme, you'll get matched with a professional coach who's trained to help you clarify your goals, build lasting confidence, and make intentional choices professionally and personally. This is not therapy. It's not consult. It's a thought partnership designed to help you take action with more clarity and purpose. I strongly believe in the value of coaching. All of us can benefit from the help of a coach.

Visit strawberry.me slash smart to get matched up with your coach today. That's strawberry.combe slash smart and get 50% off your first coaching session. It's the most affordable time ever to see if coaching is right for you. When it comes to social media, we all have to manage multiple identities, just like superheroes. Crafting our communication and online personas can foster collaboration and connection with a multitude of others. Yet it can also lead to increased stress, feelings of inadequacy, and distraction. I'm Matt Abraham's, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.

Today I look forward to my conversation with Jeff Hancock. Jeff is the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and a professor in the Department of Communication. His research and teaching seek to understand psychological and interpersonal processes in social media, like trust, deception, relationships, and emotion. Welcome, Jeff. Hi, Matt. Really looking forward to talking with you today. Great. I look forward to learning from you as well. Let's get started.

social media allows us to communicate so much about ourselves our beliefs our ideas desires hopes fears and most importantly our identities what insights has your lab found regarding how we disclose information about ourselves well i love the way you start that question out with all of the different things that we that we need to do when we talk about ourselves we need to express ourselves and share our identity and identify with other people. And all of those things that we've been studying in psychology and communication for decades, they still apply in social media.

So the one big thing I would say I would take away after maybe 15 years of doing work on this is that psychology trumps technology. If you want to understand what's going on in social media, the first place to start is with what's going on psychologically. Most of what we see online is people, you know, accomplishing their goals, trying to carry out their motivations. Some of those things get changed and the scale is like nothing we've ever seen.

But it still comes back to this idea of there's no need to throw out the book of psychology or the book of communication when we go online. I see. So leveraging what we already know can help us just in this different medium to accomplish our goals. Right. I think whenever there's a new kind of technology, especially one that takes over. dominantly and so quickly as something like social media, our focus is on the technology and what it's doing. But I think over time what we end up realizing is that it's people that

matter and we're using it to accomplish things. And I think when we step back from kind of some of the moral panic about what's happening with social media, we can get a sense of what really is changing. So I think we are communicating with far more people, more kinds of people can get access to us. That's sort of one of the economic outcomes, is that, you know, somebody in Russia can pay a small amount of money to get their information in front of me in social media. So there are real changes, but we as humans, our goals, our motivations, our needs and desires, they have not. I see. Yeah. So how does social media affect our well-being. And do you have any suggestions on how we can maximize the positive impact?

This is such a huge question. And when we see, you know, movies like the social dilemma come out and become really popular, I think it reflects how much people care about this. And anytime I'm at a dinner party, you know, back when we could do that before the pandemic, right? Parents, you know, genuinely, you know, would pull me over and just say, hey, can you tell me like, what do I do with my kids. I'm all the years. I've got two kids myself. Yes. Yeah, it is a, it is a huge question. So let me do a couple of things. One is my research group has looked at all the research over the last 12 years going back to 2006 and done what's called a meta-analysis where we look at, you know, every study that's been done and put them together and sort of statistically blend them up.

And what we end up finding is really very small effects. So the more you use social we counted me by a number of times or how many hours a day is at best only weekly correlated with things like depression or anxiety or even on the positive side like life satisfaction or social connectedness. And so the first thing to say is that we're not seeing overall any huge massive effects. And this is the same with, say, TV, which was the last big thing people were really worried about. There were many, many hundreds of studies, yeah, showing like, oh my gosh, we're going to to destroy our kids, their brains are being melted and nobody's really worried about that now.

So I think something similar is here is, yeah, social media matters. It is related to our well-being, but there's not massive effects. And how is it related? I think our data shows that if you use social media a lot, you might get a little bit more depressed, small effects, a little bit more anxious, but you also get a little bit of a larger increase in social well-being, so how connected you feel. So that's the first step is just like, okay, we can, sort of curb the fear a little bit. There may be some effects, but they're not very big. The other is it's not clear that it's all, say, social media doing it to us.

Some of the data we see is that when we're feeling bad, for example, it might be more likely to go on social media and connect with people. And so I love the way you ask the question because it's neither good nor bad in my view. I think much like you and I talking, if you said, well, Jeff, these ideas are just stupid, that wouldn't be great for my well-being. I'd probably feel a little bit sad. I would never do that, Jeff. I know. You're such a nice guy.

But when you say things like that that are positive and supportive, then I feel really good. And so social media, again, is not necessarily unique and it's not going to affect us in one direction only. I think that it can increase how connected we feel. And because we know more information about what's going on in our social world, it might increase our anxiety. And we have to sort of balance those tradeoffs. So I have to say a big sigh of relief that my worry about my kids getting sucked into this never-ending vortex of social media is perhaps misplaced. So thank you for that. And it sounds like we can leverage social media to help us, to help us connect, to help us manage when we feel down.

and we just have to be mindful that it could potentially also exacerbate some things like depression and anxiety. I think that's the right way to put it. It's really a learning curve, and we're at the very beginning of it, but we see young people learning really fast. And yes, are they going to make mistakes? Are they going to have bad experiences? Yes, they will. It's part of growing, and it's especially part of being adolescents. Adults are going to have this experience, too, where we make.

make an error. We've all probably done that. I don't know what you're talking about. But the core point there is that we are learning. We do get better. We adapt. And I think that we'll be increasingly better at and using this as a tool to accomplish our goals rather than letting it drive what we're doing. I think I'd make one other point. And this is especially important for parents is it's really easy for us to focus on time because it's something that we can and we can measure. And as hard as this is, I'd like us to move away from time, if possible, to start thinking about what we're doing, what our kids are doing, and who they're doing it with.

You could imagine saying, well, you're only allowed to have an hour on social media. And that hour could be spent doing something like connecting with old friends at an old school or doing something creative on TikTok, like making cool new videos. Or it could spend stalking someone or, you know, paying attention, you know, being bullied. And so the same hour, right, can have very, very different well-being effects. And so I think we have to move away from just time and towards what you were saying, like, what are we doing? Who are we doing it with?

And what are we engaging with? And that's going to be much more important as we teach kids how to become better sort of social media users. Well, and I think it also can help us as adults to think about how we use our time too. one of the distinctions I'd like to make here is that, you know, we've talked a lot about what social media can be for us as users, but social media also opens us up to very large audiences, and that sometimes can bring with it immediate and vicious feedback. Do you have any insights on how we can avoid the potential venom and trolling that social media has brought to us? It's a great question because it's still just flabberg asked me how much negativity can be out there in toxic discourse. Now, it's not everywhere, and most of social media is very positive, but there is just still a shocking amount in weirdest places. I'll go on and look at, say, a hockey game review, and the comments will start getting into political things and people sharing each other.

It's really crazy. So how do you protect yourself? Well, the one reason that it's initially difficult is because we're really attuned to what other people say about us. And this is important. It's important about managing our reputations. We want to get a sense of how people are perceiving us and talking about us so that we can manage that. But it gets a little out of whack when these larger audiences can say things about us in ways that we can actually hear. So if Matt Abrams says, well, Jeff Hancock is really mean and never writes me back.

So that's something that I should care about because he's a colleague of mine at Stanford. And we have a working relationship and a reputation and, you know, and we like each other. Okay. If Starbore, Starboy 382 says that Jeff Hancock's a real jerk, right? And I have no idea who that is. I never have any expectation of interacting with them in the future. It's actually initially hard for me to react differently to Starboy 3, 4, 2 than it is to Matt Abrams. Even though, you know, theoretically, intellectually, we know, okay, well, you should care about Matt, didn't it?

But when we go online, especially places like Twitter, other public places where it's not, you know, it's not sort of our social networks alone, but anybody, we have a hard time doing that. And so one of the things I work with with clients is to think about who they want to know about. So if there's specific relationships, focusing on those. If you want to get overall sentiment, well, they're now computational tools that abound for aggregating across populations or segments. I see. So I think it's really, yeah, much more about stepping back and turning off that automatic reaction we have to when people talk about us. Interesting, yes.

In an earlier podcast episode, we had a conversation with Alison Kluger who talks about reputation management, and it feeds nicely into what you're talking about. It's being very purposeful in how you want to portray your reputation, but also how you want to assess it. So getting feedback is really important in forming a reputation, but you want to make sure that feedback's coming from a meaningful place and people that you support. So the importance of language and wording has come up several times on this podcast across multiple episodes. When we've discussed various topics like persuasion, power, and reputation, wording matters a lot.

What have you learned about language and word choice in social media? Are there any best practices? This is just such a rich area right now because, you know, for most of human history, everything that we said disappeared. And we had to work as scientists really hard to capture what people said to understand what matter. And now, so much of what we say gets captured. So we can study deception. We can study trust, emotion, presentation. So yeah, it turns out it does matter. I've been doing some work with my former PhD student, Dave Markowitz, who's now at University of Oregon,

and he's led up this huge project on authenticity. And I'll just tell you a little bit about his study to give you a sense. He measured authenticity. We can use this tool that measures it and includes things like self-reference and emotion and concreteness and language. Basically, it's this sort of way of computing authentic style. And in this amazing set of studies, I mean, this is what Dave is so amazing. I was finding kind of like naturally produced data. He looked at it in conversations, in TED talks, and then on Shark Tank, and found that, for example, on Shark Tank, people that present.

with an authentic style of language production, we're more likely to get funded. We find that with TED Talks, the more authentic the TED Talk language, the more comments and the more views. And then even when we do a study where we get people to talk to one another and then rate each other.

So as your podcast has found many times, language matters. And especially in social media, because unlike here where it sort of disappears, unless you know hit rewind your language and social media sits as a testament to who you are it stands in for for you and so yeah it really really matters and i think people being thoughtful about their style and and communicating in a way that they feel really honest about it's hard to tell people to change the way they talk because we're so natural and i think it's easy to pick up on that but um wow you can really tell the difference between someone who's in natural and who's not. For instance, I find communicating and social media kind of stressful and I'm not, I don't think I'm very talented, whereas other people I know it comes very naturally.

So it's something we can work on, but ultimately we have to be true to how we sound and how we think. So the fact that authenticity reigns supreme in social media, just like it does in other types and other forms of communication is to me really inspiring and it brings great comfort that there isn't some new, unique way of having to communicate. It's really finding what works for you and authentically conveying it. And that means all of the practices that have been around for years and years and years can come to bear to be helpful.

So that's good to know. Good to know. Yeah, it goes back to, you know, psychology trumps technology. Yes, yes, yes. People that are authentic or self-aware, they behave in ways that match their needs. They communicate openly. And that doesn't go away just because we're in social media. Right.

And as you've said, it stays around a long time because it's captured. Any last best practices or advice to being better at communicating via social media? I'd say there's three main things that I share when I'm working with clients. The first is back to this authenticity thing. So you need to communicate a way that is trustworthy for you. That when other people see that, they're like, okay, this person is trustworthy. They're reliable. They're going to do, for instance, what they say they're going to do in the way they say they're going to do it.

That's one. The second is to come from a place of competence. Influencers are successful, typically because they have some competency. So we've been looking a lot at beauty influencers. And these women, typically women, just know so much. It's amazing. And they often are kind of niche, and they just have this, like, exquisite expertise in an area. And that's why people are attracted to various channels and influencers is that confidence.

The third is timing. This is especially true for traditional companies, brick and mortar places, banks and insurance companies, everybody, that wants to become more digital. is they often have a real focus on customer service. We're going to get back to our customers quickly, like within a day. And that's probably a day too late. And when we move into online and social media settings, time just operates at a different scale. And so I think for clients, it's communicating in an authentic, trustworthy way.

It's about coming from a place of competence and then time. Responsiveness is so much faster in social media. if you don't scale up to that, then you're going to run into disappointment. All right. So I've got an acronym for you. A-C-T, authenticity, competence, and timing. And those are the key ingredients to help you act more effectively in social media. So great tips.

Thank you. Right on. Trademark that. It's going up on my Twitter right now. We'll be right back to finish our conversation. But first, a quick word from one of our spots. Their support allows us to bring you this show free of charge. If you've ever felt like you're trying to do everything yourself, especially when the stakes are high, you're not alone.

One of the biggest shifts I see in effective leaders growing their organizations comes from focusing on the right things. But that's hard to do when you're stretched thin. You need to be able to delegate some tasks to competent professionals. That's where Upwork can really help. Upwork is a one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancer. across areas like marketing, development, data and analytics, and more. It gives you fast access to specialized talent so you can move quickly, fill key gaps, and scale your work without taking on full-time overhead.

You can browse profiles, review past work, and get support scoping your project so you can hire with confidence. It's a simple way to focus your time where it matters most. Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent, ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-r-k-com. Upwork.com.

And now, back to our conversation. Before we end, I'd like to ask you the same three questions I ask everyone. Sound okay? Sounds good. Okay. If you were to capture the best communication advice you have ever received as a five-to-seven-word presentation slide title, what would it be? Well, is it okay if I do less than a?

five you can do that hey that's great you're talking you're talking good social media uh make sure it's it's concise and clear concisely yeah well this comes from you know elementary school high school my phd advisor um everybody that i've seen that gives great talks you know and that's tell a story tell a story and and i you know i think about this with my grad students when we're writing science papers too it's it doesn't have to be like a narrative like well i woke up today and this is right or anything clever, but it has to be a story for people to be able to, you know, connect with it and grasp it. And so that skill of taking almost anything that you have and turning it into a story

is one that really works well in social media. It just, it engages, it allows you to stand out from, you know, the bluster that's out there. But stories are what work, and they can be short. So that would be my advice, just tell a story. I love it, and I think it's wonderful. Most of us or many of us have fallen victim to capturing things as bullet points and lists, and it just doesn't resonate the same way, and stories can be very powerful. I'll be curious to hear how you answer the second question.

Who is a communicator that you admire and why? Well, I was curious about that, too. So I've been thinking about it for a last couple of days. And I've got a number of people, so I'm going to cheat a little bit. Okay. I'm going to start with somebody who I think is a really great social media communicator, but also a good community in general. And that's my brother, my younger brother, Darcy Hancock.

His Instagram thing is darcy.j.j.combe. And he calls himself retired guitar player. He's, you know, a rock star up in Canada, also a barber. But he's one of those people that just communicates in social media so easily, so authentically. humorous, funny, but also can be serious. You know, when he sees things that are wrong, he calls it out. But most of the time, it's just fun and supportive and joyous.

So he's just a really amazing guy. You know, as a barber, he's obviously a very skilled communicator as well, but just fantastic. But then I was thinking, well, I should probably also have an academic in there. So I was going to suggest another podcaster of yours. are as Laurie Santos. She's the happiness podcast person and a friend of mine. And I just love the way she talks. I could listen to her talk nonstop.

I don't have a good reason why other than she's smart, straightforward, symbol, tells lovely stories. And then the last is one thing in my lab we've been trying to work on is diversity of perspectives. So in my field and in social media research in general, there are very few black scientists, very few. scholars of color. And so I want to highlight a colleague I just did a panel with. I think she's amazing. The name is Courtney Cogburn. She's a professor at Columbia. And she's done this

amazing piece with my colleague here, Jeremy Bounson, in VR, called A Thousand Cuts. You go inside and you get to experience what racism is like when you're a young male black man, from, you know, being a boy, growing up to being a teenager, these sort of three episodes. And so she's just an amazing communicator in a sense of both the way she presents her work and how important race is is a central thing. But if your audience has time, if they could find a version of a thousand cuts, which I think you can see online now, it's really quite an amazing story and very impactful. So those would be the three that came to my mind. Sorry to cheat on you a little bit.

No, you did a great job on being very concise on questions. question one, so we'll give you a little bit on question two there. So we'll see how you do on this third question. So question three, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe from your perspective? Right. So first is structure. I think that that's really important. The second is story, which is sort of related. And the third is your audience. We too often forget, as we were talking about earlier, that the audience matters. We are not islands in the stream, despite Dolly and Rogers' great song. But we communicate together.

Everything we do is a collaboration and a joint action. And so we have to think about our audience as kind of collaborators, the structure of what it is we want to do. I think that's where I spend most of my work time when I'm doing talks. and then like I said before time the story. That's great. And I think all of those are actually building blocks. If you start with your audience, that can lead you to the structure you have, which can ultimately lead you to the story that you need to tell for that audience. So thank you for that.

And thank you, Jeff, for sharing your work, your passion for social media. And it's been fascinating to better understand how social media is impacting us and our communication. And thank you also for the best practices and guidance that you provided. Thank you, Matt. Really enjoyed it. Thank you for listening to Think Fast, Talk Smart, The Podcast, a production of Stanford Graduate School of Business. To learn more, go to gsb.stamford.edu. Please download other episodes wherever you find your podcasts.

Before we wrap up, I just want to say thank you for listening. It really means a lot to hear how people all over the world are using these ideas in their own lives. It inspires me and the whole team, that brings you this show. If you want more episodes and resources, feel free to follow, subscribe, and explore past conversations. We're grateful for your support of Think Fast Talk Smart.