A couple of weeks ago I discussed a couple of experiments by Nicholas Epley on the positive impact compliments have on people. But Epley’s research uncovers other gems as well. In 2017, he published a paper together with Juliana Schroeder and Michael Kardas on the perception of people’s perception of someones’s intelligence and thoughtfulness depending on the form of communication. Specifically, they asked random people to give speech on one of three divisive topics: The US war in Afghanistan, abortion rights, or a preference for rap music over country music.
Then they let other people judge the person who gave the speech on a series of metrics. The dimension they call “human uniqueness” essentially covers evaluations of the intelligence and thoughtfulness of the person who gave the speech. It was measured along assessments of how rational and logical a speaker was, whether he lacked self-restraint or seemed unsophisticated or acted like an adult, not a child. The second dimension they call “human nature” measures evaluations of emotional warmth based on assessments of the speaker as being open-minded, emotional responsiveness, appearing superficial and lacking depth or even appearing like robot.
The trick in the experiment was that the person who judged was provided the speech in three different forms. Either the evaluator had to read a transcript of the speech (simulating an email with the opinion of the person to be judged), or the evaluator listened to the speech (simulating a phone call), or the evaluator saw and heard the person (simulating an in person conversation).
The chart below shows the evaluation of a person based on the two dimensions of human uniqueness and human nature and whether the person who evaluated the speaker agreed with the viewpoint or not.
Perception of people when expressing divisive opinions
Source: Schroeder et al. (2017).
Note how the evaluation of a person falls off a cliff if the evaluator disagrees with the expressed opinion and the opinion is transmitted via text or audio only. What happens is that if someone expresses an opinion we disagree with we tend to dismiss these people as “stupid”, “superficial” and even “inhuman”. And the more distant the mode of communication becomes, the easier it is for us to “dehumanise” people with a different opinion. But when we talk about these topics with a real person, we get many more clues about the emotional and intellectual state of the person expressing the opinion and we tend to hold that person in higher esteem. In fact, by talking to someone in person, there is no difference in the evaluation of someone’s intellectual and emotional capacities if we disagree with the person or if we agree.
In the era of work from home, these results have become dramatically more important. As more people work from home, the mode of communication switches increasingly to phone calls and written communication (email, chat, slack, etc.). Yes, there is Zoom and Teams, but if we think back to the days of lockdown, we will remember that these video calls are quite a bit worse than in person chats, mostly because we only see a small part of the person and the person appears “remote” and slightly “unreal” on a screen vs. in person. The result of this move to away from in-person communication is that people are more likely to dismiss opinions they disagree with and more likely to seek out opinions that confirm their views. In other words, work from home foster group think and reduces interactions with people that have diverse opinions. Furthermore, people who communicate mostly via text and phone calls are perceived as less intelligent and competent than people who communicate in person. And I wonder what that does to someone’s chances of being promoted in the job or getting a raise. As some seasoned fund manager once told me: “If they want to get a promotion, they better come to the office”.
People tell me I'm wrong to my face, but they rarely tell me I'm wrong by email or text (or perhaps they do and I just dismiss them as silly/inhuman/superficial and carry on regardless and forget the whole incident).