Chicago Booth Review Podcast Why Is Everyone So Bad at Communicating? (And How Can We All Get Better?)

Hal Weitzman: Communication is not only a fascinating subject of academic research, it’s also one of the most obvious areas where all of us can apply those findings in our personal and professional lives.

We would probably all agree that effective communication makes teams work more efficiently, motivates employees, and helps relations with customers and partners. But many organizations seem to have almost institutionalized poor communication practices. So what lessons can we take from academic research to improve how we communicate at work?

Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I’m Hal Weitzman, and this topic is very close to my heart: I teach a class on effective business communication here at Chicago Booth. In 2017, I was lucky enough to discuss the issue with three behavioral scientists: Booth professors Ayelet Fishbach and Nick Epley, and Heather Caruso, who taught at Booth at the time and has since moved to UCLA. The discussion was filmed as part of our Big Question video series. I started by asking Nick Epley whether his research suggests that we should use email less and talk on the phone more or just arrange to chat to people in person.

Nicholas Epley: So of course it depends a little bit on what it is that you’re trying to communicate, and the problem with communication media is that they’re simply tools for conveying ideas in my head to yours, things that I know to you. You can use those tools effectively or you can use them ineffectively.

The big difference between these different kinds of media that we communicate through is whether they include certain kinds of cues. So email, for instance, only includes text, right, only includes semantic content. And so what it’s lacking is a lot of the tools that we have in interpersonal interactions for communicating thoughts and beliefs and attitudes and feelings, namely paralinguistic cues. The problem is that those cues—

Hal Weitzman: What do you mean by paralinguistic cues?

Nicholas Epley: Sorry, so things like intonation, so my voice goes up and down. Variants in pace. It speeds up and slows down. You know I’m excited about an idea because my voice kind of flutters up and down, and I speak louder or softer, right.

So there’s a lot that’s communicated, not just in what we say, but in how we say it. Text-based communication only includes what we say, only the semantic content, the very specific words. And so a lot is missing.

The problem, I think, in communication is that when you are the person who is sending information, you have a hard time recognizing what’s missing on the recipient’s side.

So when I’m thinking of a joke to send to you, this is going to be so so funny! Hal is going to love this. I can hear the intonation in my head as I’m saying it. I can hear the sarcasm in my voice when I’m sending you that funny note about your last Big Question video, right. So I can imagine all that. I know I’m intending to your joke.

You don’t have that information, right, and that can lead to a reliable bias, where I think I’ve communicated to you more effectively over information-poor communication media than I actually have. That’s a big problem: not recognizing when you’ve been clear and when you’ve been unclear.

Information-rich environments—when I’m talking to you, and I’m sitting with you face-to-face—allows for a bunch of things. More information is exchanged. You can ask me questions back. Those mediums enable understanding, mostly of what’s on another person’s mind.

Text-based communication, however, in other ways is great. If you’re going to send a spreadsheet, right? So it’s good for that kind of core content that doesn’t require communicating intentions or motives or desires. But it’s awful in these other cases where you really want interpersonal understanding.

Hal Weitzman: And you’ve actually done some research on the . . . on how, you know, using your voice, whether by phone or in person, makes a difference.

Nicholas Epley: It turns out the voice, we’re finding, communicates more than you might imagine. So as I mentioned, there are paralinguistic cues present in a voice. Your voice goes up and down. Most of this has to do with variance in these cues, not just the core content of what you’re saying.

And these communicate, we find, kind of core elements of humanity, what it means to be a person, so your capacity to think or to reason or to analyze something carefully. How do I know that you’re actually thoughtful? That you’re a rational person? That you thought carefully about this issue. I can’t see your thinking. I can’t see you engaging in rationality.

We find, though, that you can hear it, and you could hear it in a person’s voice such that when you remove it—so if we have people listening to somebody who’s on the opposing side of the political spectrum from them explaining why they voted for a particular candidate, people judge the person to be more reasonable, more rational, more—

Hal Weitzman: Just by hearing their voice?

Nicholas Epley: When they hear what they have to say compared to when they read the very same content or when they read a written explanation that the person has put together that lacks those semantic cues, essentially, to mental life.

How do I know that you, that the lights are on inside? I can’t see it. The paralinguistic cues and voice, we find, help to communicate some of that.

So there’s both the understanding element, but they are also the inferences that I form about you over these different medium. And we find that people tend to think that others are a little less mindful, a little more mindless when they communicate over text or over voice.

Hal Weitzman: So voice is better. It doesn’t matter if it’s in person or by phone?

Nicholas Epley: Well, for these, we . . . So our research on this is limited at this point. So what we do is we compare context where I have audio-visual cues. I can see and hear you. Audio cues only, where I’m just hearing the content of what you’re having to say. You’re giving an elevator pitch as an MBA student, or you’re explaining why you hold a belief that’s different from mine. Or I just get the content in text.

So that’s what we’ve done so far. What we haven’t done so far is had these repeated interactions where you’re actually face-to-face. That’s harder to do for us as scientists because you can’t control the content as well. But that’s where we’re moving. So at this point, it would be premature to suggest stuff about face-to-face interaction because we’re not quite there yet.

Hal Weitzman: OK. Heather Caruso, Nick Epley talked about people on different sides of the political spectrum. I know you’re interested in this idea of why we might avoid certain kinds of conversations and gravitate toward others. So to tell us about that.

Heather Caruso: Yeah, so I think it’s really interesting what you, just building on this last question, what you miss when you are communicating over these sort of more impoverished media, and one of the things that you miss is any context for why it is you’re talking.

Sometimes people just launch into the middle of the conversation and state whatever it is they have on their mind, and it’s not clear that you know why, like, what the motivation is for sharing that. And so people lack a sort of sense of the goals of the conversation. They can lack a sense of the criteria for sort of introducing relevant information into the conversation. And that can make that conversation kind of—

Hal Weitzman: But is that more about the form? I mean whether it’s a voice or an email. Or is it more about how you introduce the subject? Because if you gave all that context in writing, you might be able to set the conversation up better—

Heather Caruso: You can do a better job of this, but again, you run into some of these egocentrism or sort of self-centered problems that Nick is talking about, where even as you’re describing the context, the words that you use make reference in your mind to certain meanings, to certain other conversations, to a certain history. If you’re not elaborating all of that, it’s not clear that other people are necessarily going to get that.

And that of course is exacerbated when the people that you’re talking to are from a different background, if they have an actual different experiential history from you, if they come from a context where those words, those goals, those criteria are by default different than those that you are familiar with. Then the assumptions they’re going to make based on the fact that you’re having a conversation based on the articulation is just a few kind of keywords, if those words are articulated at all about you know what we’re here to do, those assumptions that they’re going to come to the conversation with aren’t necessarily going to be the same as yours.

So when we try to talk to people or advise or teach people about group decision-making, one of the things that’s really important is to set goals clearly upfront, consensually, so you’re all there together. You have this time and face-to-face context to go back and forth and to discuss exactly what that means. And then to step forward with explicitly checked, confirmed consensus on why we’re meeting, what we’re supposed to be communicating, and what is helpful information to introduce into the conversation.

So I think that Nick will probably want to speak a little bit more to this in depth because I think this is some of the work that his lab is going toward exploring. But I think the center in general is interested in promoting more of this kind of research and inquiry into: What are the conditions under which people are going to actually launch into a face-to-face conversation with people, especially when you are coming from different backgrounds? That can be a difficult thing to do when the only option available is a face-to-face conversation, when you anticipate that you’re going to be coming from at least an unfamiliar background, if not a kind of a historically antagonistic background to the other person. You might shy away from those kinds of conversations because you anticipate that there’s basically going to be a fight, right, or that there’s going to be some moment of embarrassment.

And so we’re trying to move toward understanding what the conditions are under which you would be willing to risk that kind of thing, maybe for the sake of learning something across those boundaries or collaborating and eventually coming to some shared kind of better consensual reality.

Hal Weitzman: Is the sense there that these conversations often turn out to be less awkward than we had thought they were going to be?

Nicholas Epley: Yeah, we find that in our research. And you can make an important distinction between two parts of a conversation: you can think first about engagement. So do I actually sit down to talk with Ayelet about an issue that we’re having among our faculty, for instance. How do I choose to engage with somebody in the conversation?

And the other is enactment. Once we’re engaged, once Ayelet and I are talking about something, how do I choose to talk about it?

And psychologists study a lot the enactment part. How is it the conversation goes once you’re in it? But I think some of these bigger questions here really take us a step back in the conversation stream to how do we choose to enact? So if I’m anticipating having an awkward conversation with Ayelet, it would probably actually be better for us to work out some differences or some challenges we might be having if we actually talk to each other in an information-rich environment.

But if I’m anticipating an awkward conversation, I might choose an information-poor environment like email, which might actually Increase misunderstanding rather than reducing it.

So I think these issues of engagement: When do we choose to engage with somebody who thinks differently than we do, or who we anticipate an awkward conversation with, how do we overcome that is a really important thing for psychologists be working on.

Heather Caruso: Yeah, I think one of the things that we are hoping to explore in particular is: Is the preference for an information-poor environment because those environments are often more, kind of, tractable? I can write and pore over my word choice and I can prepare and I can kind of manage my anxiety and my uncertainty, is that part of what drives that choice for that, as opposed to a face-to-face interaction, where it’s a little bit more unpredictable?

So some of these questions have to do with, you know, when you are entering an engagement with somebody who’s familiar to you, one of the things that’s nice about that is that you atleast feel like you can predict their behavior a little bit better than you can predict the behavior of someone who’s very different from you. And so if that again is kind of a reflective of a tendency to want to script the interaction, maybe what we can do is to find conditions under which people are more more comfortable with unscripted interactions, more comfortable with risk-taking, can find that kind of energizing and exciting in a way that makes the awkwardness actually kind of part of the game, part of the fun. And that might lower the barrier.

Ayelet Fishbach: But let me defend that poor environments. Man, I love reading books. I really love reading books. And I think that being able to focus just on one medium and not being overwhelmed by the images and the sounds and just having this is often what creates art. So just, let’s keep this in mind.

Yes, there is less information. But sometimes less is more. This situation [inaudible].

But I want to move to something different, which is that what you’re referring so far to is we’re losing information. So yes, there is a noise. There is loss of information. But there is another problem that might be not less than even more serious, which are biases in communication. So we might also want to to keep in mind that when I listen to Nick, I might hear what I want to hear. OK.

This is one of the easiest-to-replicate biases. If I want Nick to say something, the likelihood of me hearing it is much higher than if I don’t want to hear about it or if I don’t care about it. In which case, it’s completely lost.

One of the classic—it’s neoclassic—demonstrations of that is with the gorilla in the room. OK, this experiment in which there is a group of people that are passing balls, and you need to count the number of times that the people with the white shirt as opposed to the people with the black shirts are passing balls, and then while you are doing this, someone is entering the room. It’s a new person dressed up like a gorilla and dancing in front of you.

I mean, I think that in the original experiment most of the people, more than 50 percent, didn’t see that. OK. Did not see a gorilla standing in front of them and dancing. Now, this is a very rich environment. OK. They are hearing the sound. They are seeing the picture. This is as rich as we can get: a gorilla can stand in front of you and you will not notice it because you’re busy counting balls.

So we might want to also think about what are the things, what are the biases, OK? It’s not just noise. There are certain things that are easier to see or hear than others.

Hal Weitzman: And people have . . . that’s interesting that you point that out. People have a tendency to think if I put it in writing, it cannot be missed. But would those same biases apply to reading?

Ayelet Fishbach: Oh absolutely. Yes, you can show it on every dimension. You can just use auditory stimuli. And actually Nick’s research is often using auditory stimuli where you hear what you want to hear. You don’t hear other things. You can just do it in images.

Basically visual illusions work on that. You see what you want to see there and you don’t see what I’m trying to hide or what you simply don’t expect to see.

So, yes, our expectations influence what we see in every medium.

Heather Caruso: This is sort of what we were talking about earlier with the problem in groups, and especially when they’re using these impoverished forms of communication where if you don’t tell people what it is you’re telling them this information for, the presumption that they’re getting all of the information is probably not a good one. And that can transfer over into in-person conversations as well, where people are listening to you but they may not be listening to everything that you’re saying because they start to get a sense maybe in the first part of your sentence or whatever it is you’re saying that oh, this is what they’re going for, and then they start to formulate a response.

So one of the interesting sets of dynamics that we’re moving toward looking at has to do with that kind of dynamic and in-person interaction. We’re actually doing this in partnership with The Second City through a new initiative.

Hal Weitzman: That’s the improv group here in Chicago.

Heather Caruso: Yes, exactly. So this improvisational powerhouse that they’ve historically used improvisational exercises to generate comedy for their theater show, but now they’re partnering up with us to look at the improvisational elements of everyday life, the things that you can’t predict or script but nevertheless need to go well. And interpersonal understanding is one of those things where I don’t know exactly what’s going to come out of the mouth of many of the speakers I’m going to interact with over the course of the day, so I need to kind of figure that out as they’re talking.

And often that means I’m going to sort of, I’m listening, I’m listening, as soon as I’ve got a hook and I understand, ah! I think I know where they’re going. At least in practice at The Second City, they find that people start to formulate a response, right. They want to form a response sort of halfway through a person speaking to them.

And so they run these exercises where they have people listen basically all the way to the end of a person’s sentence or statement. And people find that that’s harder than they expect, but that when you do that, you become much more conscious of that kind of interdependence between people who are speaking to one another. And it suggests that there’s room for developing listening skills that allow for a fuller understanding of everything that a person is trying to get out.

And then we can do a lot of research to figure out, you know, does that meaningfully improve the understanding that people are developing of one another? Does it improve empathy and the kind of smoothness of conversational back and forth and all that? All that’s yet to be discovered.

Hal Weitzman: Ayelet, you mentioned biases that, you know, regardless of the form, there are biases that play into the interaction. What are some of the, for people who are not familiar with these behavioral science biases, what are some of the big ones that hamper communication or come into play?

Ayelet Fishbach: Yeah, so we have briefly mentioned the confirmation bias, or seeing information which you expect to see, not seeing other information.

Related to it is seeing things that fit within your schema or scripts, or you know what is the normal course of events. To give you an example. This is something that I do in class every year. I present to people a list of words, and I put words like tired and night, bed and cushion. And then I ask them after reading the list: Did I mention the word sleep? And most of them say that I did. Although I never mentioned it, it’s fitting that it will be there.

So this is an example of scripted schema that is activated. It influences what you see, what you hear.

Another big one is what we call the omission of neglect, not noticing what’s missing. We know that most of the deception in communication is not in what you said. It’s in what you kind of forgot to mention. You kind of let me go with some assumptions. And so even though we know lies often go through omission, people often make the mistake to listen very carefully to what you did say to see whether you were giving some information there, and not noticing what’s missing.

Hal Weitzman: So ven listening well isn’t enough. You’ve got to listen for what isn’t there?

Ayelet Fishbach: Yes. You should have been listening to what should have been said.

What else are the big ones, Nick?

Nicholas Epley: Well, so those are the big ones. The big ones in communication are perspective gaps. So I know something that you don’t. I’m attending to something that you’re not attending to. And some of these we’ve studied across different media. And we know how they respond differently across media.

So take the one that you suggested about omission neglect. So here you can go from say an information-poor context like email. So I’m sending Ayelet something over email versus I’m talking to her face-to-face, where I’ve got an information-rich kind of environment.

It’s going to be hard for Ayelet—for any of us—to notice what’s missing in the text that might be present in the voice. So in one of our studies from many years ago, we had people communicate sarcasm or sincerity, which of course depends on the tone you’re communicating. Because people weren’t sensitive to what was missing in text, they were just as confident that they had interpreted it correctly as when they actually heard what the person said, even though they were much better at interpreting it accurately when they heard what the person said than when they read what the person said.

So some of these biases we know how they vary across medium, and in these cases, they’re bigger when you’ve got text-based information because there’s more more stuff to miss. There are more things you have to fill in with your expectations.

Stereotypes, for instance, guide judgment more. Your expectancies guide judgment more. When you are reading what somebody has to say than when you are hear them, just because it’s more poor, there are more gaps that need to be filled in.

But other biases, like the attentional biases, right. Looking at something or attending to something. Those often rely on visual information. So, you know, you’re more likely to look at a weapon in a room, for instance. But you’re probably not more likely to pay attention to the word gun in text, right. That’s a visual kind of bias.

So I mean we’re at the early stages of understanding the richness of how these biases play out across different media of communication.

Hal Weitzman: Let’s turn to a workplace environment. What are some basic things that managers could do to improve? So listening would be one, Heather, you mentioned. What are some of the other more basic things you could do? We all know we should listen, and it’s hard to do, as you say, to listen to the end of somebody’s thought.

Ayelet Fishbach: Yeah, I would say . . . yeah. Perspective taking.

Hal Weitzman: OK. So how would you do—

Ayelet Fishbach: Well, at least try. OK. Often . . . even though you cannot do it, well, you can at least engage in an exercise of, let’s predict, what would be my view on this topic if I was managing this department, by the other department?

And often just by doing this exercise, you can pretty much generate the arguments they are going to be facing by thinking, what would I have said if I was that person. So it’s not perfect, but it gets you something.

Other than perspective taking, one thing that we often advise people is to just to have a very structured way of collecting information. You need to know what are the questions that you’re going to ask. You need to document the information that you are getting. You need to know what’s missing, which often you can get if you follow a very structured way of collecting information. If you just go with the conversation, it’s easy to lose stuff.

Nicholas Epley: I can give one concrete example of how to do this in an interaction, which is used in couples therapy. It’s used in conflict negotiation. It’s known as the speaker-listener technique, and it just encourages active listening.

So you can contrast, say, perspective taking, where I imagine what you’re thinking or feeling or believing to perspective getting: I actually get it from you directly. And you can use the speaker-listener technique to do that. It’s very simple. I ask you a question, right? How did you think the latest Big Think video went, right? And you can tell me. So I ask you a question. You then respond to that. I then reiterate what I think you said. Well, I think you thought it went well in this way and not in that way. Is that right? And then you confirm whether that was right or not.

Now, that helps to avoid a couple of the biases that Ayelet mentioned already. No. 1, I’m not inferring what you’re thinking. I’ve asked you and you’re telling me in response. Then I’m not misunderstanding what you’re telling me because I have to reiterate it to you in a way that you can either confirm or deny.

It’s also not perfect because sometimes I ask you bad questions that you can’t answer, or we ask people things that they don’t know, right? So it’s not perfect. But what we try to do as psychologists, let’s say in the domain of communication, you can’t make people perfect, but by identifying some of the places where they make mistakes, we can help people do a little bit better. Speaker-listener technique is one example of how you might get better, perspective taking in certain domains is one way which you might get a little better—not perfect, but better.

Hal Weitzman: And Heather, I know you just started your improv collaboration, but do you have any thoughts about that flexibility that you talked about, the ability to kind of think on your feet?

Heather Caruso: Yeah, no, I think part of that actually has to do again with this sort of recognizing what can be left out or sometimes what’s inserted into a conversation that doesn’t need to be there. So sometimes just starting with asking people rather than thinking about what you need to communicate. And when we think about communication, often we think about what we need to tell other people.

And there’s some work that’s also coming out of the center now on feedback and how sometimes feedback is unwanted and it produces defensive reactions because you’re telling people stuff that they kind of already know, especially if you’re talking about negative performance feedback, and you don’t anticipate that the person . . . they know that they screwed up and they know that they’ve got to fix it. When you come in and you tell them that they screwed up and they’ve got to fix it, and they’re kind of feeling berated because they’re already kind of beating themselves up about it, right.

So that suggests there might be some benefits of walking in and just asking sort of where they stand, how they think things are going. If you find that out and you’re sort of more humble about the communication episode, you can say what needs to be said. You can partner with that person in the conversation to communicate what would actually help them move forward more effectively rather than presuming you know.

Hal Weitzman: Does that just entail getting the other person to start the conversation?

Heather Caruso: Yeah, I mean, and that’s an invitation. You have to start by asking sometimes to figure out what might be useful to tell, right?

Hal Weitzman: Ayelet, you’ve actually, that was a beautiful segue because you’ve actually done some research on feedback. Tell us about what you found.

Ayelet Fishbach: So we were looking at how much people include positive versus negative—but negative constructive—feedback. So we always look at feedback that is informative, OK? Not feedback that you actually don’t need because you have the information.

And what we find is that you need to ask yourself whether the recipient of this feedback is an expert versus a novice, whether your relationship is close, is deeper versus distant. And the more the person is an expert, the more they feel confident about something, the more the relationship is established, the more negative feedback will be effective.

Now, it’s not just that people will be more open to negative feedback. It’s that it will be more effective. That is, it will motivate action. Basically, we often look at feedback in a very simple format because we want to study it in our experiments. Should I tell you what you’ve done so far? Great. Your videos so far were amazing. Or, here are all the videos that you can still do and haven’t done yet, OK?

So what’s going on? Should I highlight the completed or the missing part? And the missing part works better with experts with deeper relationships. The completed part makes the novices feel that, oh, I can do this. This is working. I feel confident enough to develop farther.

Hal Weitzman: OK, but what if you have to give unwelcome feedback to the people in the first group, the novices?

Ayelet Fishbach: Well, so you always have both. Yo the extent that you are telling me something about my performance, there’s always the good and the bad. And to the extent that you decide to only mention one of them, I know you are hiding some information, OK?

Hal Weitzman: I see.

Ayelet Fishbah: So the question is how much to emphasize strength versus weaknesses.

Hal Weitzman: So if someone’s a novice, I would say, you’re doing a great job? You could be even better if you did—

Ayelet Fishbach: Yes, uh, no, think about it just for the sake of the metaphor with a child, OK, like a child that is learning to, say, ride a bike. OK? You are not going to tell them that their balance is not great because, whatever, OK. But, wow, look at you! You can already do like 10 feet. That’s amazing! OK, and now there’s more confidence.

Now take the expert, a professional biker. Well, here’s what’s missing. Here’s how you can get even better.

So yes, there’s always both. But you know that one of them will motivate action.

Hal Weitzman: Right. what about the other side, though. The person who’s receiving the feedback also has that bias that you talked about earlier where they’re hearing presumably that they’re fantastic and may be missing the other part.

Ayelet Fishbach: (laughing) So that’s interesting. Well, I would say that for the receiver there is the same effect, which we document, such that receivers would like to get more positive feedback if they are novices and ask for more ways to improve as they gain expertise.

Also in close relationships, people are asking for more negative feedback than in distant relationships.

So receivers follow the same thing. You know, receivers might want to hear positive things to feel great about themselves, but that’s off the point.

Nicholas Epley: Do you know whether those who are giving feedback anticipate these reactions correctly? Because I would imagine, could hypothesize that if I’m giving you feedback, I might anticipate you’ll respond really well to positive feedback, and you’ll just crumble or be angry in response to negative feedback, when in fact that’s often not how people take negative, particularly constructive feedback. People are wanting to improve.

So if I tell you how to get better at something or you tell me how to get better at something, and I’m really trying to get better, that’s a positive thing not a negative thing. But I’m wondering if feedback givers recognize that?

Ayelet Fishbach: Yes, so there is definitely some calibration in the sense that the receiver and the giver know that experience or relationship depth works in a certain direction. So to the extent that we agree that our relationship is deep, as I hope we do,

Nicholas Epley: (laughing) Uh huh.

Ayelet Fishbach: OK, then feel free to tell me everything—

Nicholas Epley: I say a 7 on the 10 point-scale.

Ayelet Fishbach: Yeah, so this is a problem now. OK, because I feel our relationship is a 10.

Nicholas Epley: Hm. Alright.

Ayelet Fisbach: So I don’t have any problem criticizing you.

Nicholas Epley: (winking and laughing) Nevermind. A 10.

Ayelet Fishbach: But you say, hey, we are only at a 7. Why are you saying that?

Now back to being serious, where we find that there’s often a miscalibration is in, now, I might think that you are the expert, but you feel more like a novice. So I feel that the relationship is—apparently with Nick and I—I feel the relationship is deeper than it is, and so—

Hal Weitzman: So like all relationships, it’s complicated.

Hal Weitzman: You can find a lot more insights from behavioral science on Chicago Booth Review’s website at https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review.

When you’re there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research. That’s it for this episode, which was produced by Andy Graham and Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and please do leave us a 5-star review.

Until next time, I’m Hal Weitzman, and thanks for listening to the Chicago Booth Review podcast.