CLASSROOMCONNECTIONRESEARCH
On the Disappearing Art of Rich Communication: Are DMs Contributing to a Lonely World?
Today’s post comes from Steve Joordens, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Director of the Advanced Learning Technologies Lab, and Scientific Advisor at GenWell. In this article, Steve speaks to the understanding of what connection is for a teen.
This post was originally published on Psinossa, a Turkish student journal, and is republished here with permission.
My name is Steve Joordens and, for many years now, I have taught the very large Introduction to Psychology class at the University of Toronto Scarborough. This class connects me with students who are about 18 to 20 years old, and I have noticed a dramatic change in these students over the last three to five years. Increasingly they report feeling lonely, isolated and generally disconnected from the communities they are part of. They also feel very anxious, socially anxious.
I wanted to know why. It seemed sensical that those who are socially anxious might have difficulties becoming connected to others, so yes the anxiety may explain the disconnection and isolation, but what explains the higher level of social anxiety? As I continued to investigate this issue I believe I have found a major reason that I have not seen anyone highlighted elsewhere and in telling you this story I hope to motivate you to become more mindful in terms of how you choose to interact with others.
The story begins around age 13. Typically, somewhere around the age, children get their first smartphone and they discover asynchronous communication. Of course, when we grew up people of my generation did not have emails or texts. The only form of asynchronous communication was writing letters, and only some people did that. Instead, almost all of our communication was in person, face to face, or maybe a phone call. Why does that matter?
Communication experts suggest that when we have face to face, real time interactions, less than 10% of the information being exchanged is through the words we use. This “channel” carries the content of the message, and that content is controlled mostly by our frontal lobes, the newest part of our brain. The other 90% of information is transmitted through our nonverbal actions. It’s about how we say the words, the tone of our voice, the way we move our face muscles, the way we hold our bodies as we speak, the way we move our arms or hands, etc. This “channel” carries the emotional aspects of the message and it comes from the oldest part of our brain called the limbic system. The limbic system does not lie well, unless an individual has worked hard to control their emotional expression (e.g., poker players), the body tends to reveal their emotional state. So, for example, someone may say something, but their body suggests they are somewhat unsure of what they are saying and we can sense that. We might not know exactly why we sense that, the transmission and reception of nonverbals is largely driving by more primitive unconscious processes, but with experience interacting with others in this way we learn to read their nonverbals, allowing us to sense what they are feeling as they speak. My generation did this a lot, and in the process we gained a lot of practice understanding both the intellectual and the emotional information that is part of synchronous communications.
The ability to see and be able to read the nonverbal communication of others is critical for forming deep trusting relationships, the sort of relationships that has been shown to support physical health, mental health, success and happiness. In fact, there may be no more important factor in your life than the number and depth of deep meaningful relationships you have, or don’t have. When we lack social connection we feel lonely and mental health issues like anxiety and depression can take over. These trust-based connections are formed via a fairly simply psychological formula. When two or more people communicate and, in the process, share the same emotional state and know they are sharing the same emotional state, a neurotransmitter named oxytoxin is released. The result is that we end up trusting those people more once we emotionally resonated with them. Thus, by being able to experience and appreciate nonverbal signals we can detect this emotional resonance which allows us to form those important relationships.
OK, let’s now return to the modern teenager. Since they were 13 years old the predominant way this teenager has communicated is via asynchronous means like text messages, email, etc. There are two aspects of text messaging that are now critical to our story. First, they do not truly contain an emotional channel. The words one chooses are chosen by their frontal lobes and are presented as words. No emotional tone, no contortions of the body available. Sure, we might include emoticons to try and transmit emotion, but we choose the emoticon consciously to project the emotion we want to be received, which is very different from our limbic system projecting the emotions we are actually feeling. So the transmission of emotions is at best muted and at worse completely inaccurate. This is why there can be so much confusion over what a person really intended, confusion that true nonverbals would have cleared up. Second, asynchronous messages are, by definition, not occurring in real time. The sender has all the time in the world to think about, or even ruminate about, what to say and how to say it. They also have all the time in the world to think about the responses they receive and what those responses actually mean. This can give a sense of safety and control, though it can also support an over-analysis at a micro level of the communication experience.
Let’s imagine our teenager is now entering my class as an 18 year old. There are two distinct ways this teenager would differ from the teenager that I, and many of my generation, were at the same age. First, of all, they simply have had less practice in synchronous face-to-face interactions. In fact, for reasons I will highlight in a bit, they likely have been avoiding them, favoring an asynchronous approach. Many modern teenagers do not even like synchronous phone calls, far preferring direct messages. Second, they will have developed habits, and in fact desires, focused on communication happening slowly with a strong ability to micro-control it.
And now we see the ingredients of their social anxiety. Take this now 18 year old student and put them in a context where they might choose to speak, in real time, to the student sitting next to them. Will they choose to do so? Most do not, and if you ask them why they will say something like “It would not go well. That person will likely not like me or will otherwise judge me negatively. They may even tell others what they think about me. It’s better to not try.” In Psychology we call this the Fear of Negative Evaluation. Why do they hold this fear? In part it is justified, their inability to read nonverbal signals well, and their inability to micro-manage communication, leaves them feeling incompetent. They feel they lack the skills needed to converse in real time and that’s why they think it will not go well.
Research suggests, they are wrong. In an interesting paper entitled “Mistakenly seeking solitude” Epley and Schroeder (2014) asked people sitting in a train station how things would go if they walked over and spoke to a random stranger. Most of the participants predicted it would not go well at all, in line with all I have suggested here. Epley then convinced them to do it, to go talk to that stranger. After they did, both the participant and the stranger reported that things went well, very well in most cases.
So many of us are looking for social connection, and we do not expect our conversation partners to be master communicators. We are happy when someone tries, and while negotiating conversation can be challenging, typically the connection we feel overshadows and momentary discomforts of conversation. So, our Fear of Negative Evaluation is largely unjustified.
The moral of all this is as follows. If you feel lonely, think of that feeling as you might think of hunger or thirst. It is a signal from your body that it craves something, in this case what it craves is social connection. Opportunities for social connection are all around you, and each time you practice connecting you will be improving your conversational abilities and reducing your anxiety, so make the effort to practice! Put away your phone and try talking to someone, even complete strangers, in real time. Your brain will warn you of the danger of rejection, but if you approach the person with respect and friendliness, being willing to say sorry and goodbye if you sense a desire not to talk, then chances are that the vast majority of times you try, things will go well. You will meet new people, form new friendships, get access to new opportunities, and you will feel better. You’ll also be investing in a skill that will pay you back many times over.
