There is one media trend that might be responsible for our global dysfunction
How the transition from speech to text turns us all into temporary psychopaths
One of the problems we have in these times is that global empathy is on the decline.
A study by Sara Konrath shows the downward trend in empathy is measurably the case, and there are certainly quite a few variables contributing to this phenomenon.
Let’s focus on one — one that we can measure, and one that a professor of Behavioral Science at Berkeley named Dr. Juliana Schroeder has measured.
Could the global transition of communication from speech to short-form text decrease our global empathy?
The answer to this is yes, it could — and Dr. Schroeder’s data all but proves it.
But first, let’s take a look at how much short-form text we’re generating in these times — because it’s quite a bit.
We are making and consuming a lot of small-dose text
A 2017 Portio study showed that the world sent 8.3 trillion texts in that year — that’s 23 billion per day, and 16 million per minute.
And it’s not just texts. We’re producing and consuming a lot of news articles as well.
A study showed the numbers — The Huffington Post publishes 1,665 posts per week, The New York Times publishes 1,660, and CNN publishes 2,884.
And comments? On Facebook alone, there are 317,000 status updates per minute, and each of those status updates holds their own suite of comments below, so that is —
Just enormous.
There is an absolute deluge of short-form text coming at us every day.
And a study by Dr. Juliana Schroeder suggests that this deluge might be quite problematic indeed.
Dr. Schroeder compared political opinions expressed verbally vs. through a transcript, and there were striking results
Dr. Schroeder made a study with sets of two participants. One would record their thoughts, and those thoughts were conveyed to another participant whom they would never meet.
Those thoughts were conveyed in a number of ways — audiovisually, just audio, and just a transcript.
The results were published in a paper — The Humanizing Voice: Speech Reveals, and Text Conceals, a More Thoughtful Mind in the Midst of Disagreement.
And in this paper, perhaps the most interesting results occurred when the speaker recorded their political opinions, and Dr. Schroeder split those listening up by their own political leanings.
She then played just the audio, or just the transcripts, and had the listeners evaluate the speakers for Human Uniqueness (rationality and intellect), and Human Nature (capacity for emotion, including responsiveness and warmth).
And the results were striking.
As you can see in the graph above, though there is a bias for those with whom the evaluator agrees, when the evaluator disagrees with the speaker and they are just shown text, any sense of the speaker’s humanity falls off a cliff.
The transcript-only speaker with opposite political views is considered to have no rationality, no intellect, no capacity for emotion, no responsiveness, and no warmth.
In short, the text-only version of the speakers’ thoughts dehumanizes them in the mind of those with whom they disagree.
Dr. Juliana showed the dehumanizing nature of text in an experiment, and we can also see this every day on Social Media
In the Social Media discourse of our daily lives, this experiment might go even further.
We’re not in a controlled experiment where we see one thing — we often post and comment when we’re upset or otherwise distraught.
Everything is ok when the commenters are agreeing with you, but if a commenter disagrees?
And if you don’t know the commenter?
Then it can get really upsetting, really quickly.
What’s more, the disagreeing party often has an avatar instead of a profile pic, and often times their message feels directed at you.
Imagine you are on Social Media, and you post an article about a study. You get ten comments, and one of them is from someone you have never met —
It is really, really hard to see the humanity in the commenter above.
For all we know the commenter might actually have no humanity, in the sense that they are a bot.
But they might be a real person trying to add to the debate, and they might even agree with you.
They might just be making a joke.
But all you can see is a transcript and some words — and the impulse is to bite back.
Now imagine if you were in the same room with the commenter above, and they expressed the same sentiment in this way —
The feeling reverses, and it is all but impossible to be angry at this person — because they are a human.
Of course, we’re rarely in the same room as the commenters, and for the most part — we don’t even hear their voice. We see text, often without so much as a profile pic.
So when we see a comment like this —
At best we ignore it, and at worst we react.
And most of the time we dehumanize whoever is behind the comment.
So, perhaps our main mode of expression strips people of their humanity — what does this mean?
We don’t know, because this is unprecedented.
No media expert, from Johannes Gutenberg to Marshall McLuhan, ever predicted a future of texts and comments.
Not even Steve Jobs gave this that much thought. He certainly brought text messaging to the next level with the iPhone, but his role — like that of most tech leaders — was just to open the floodgates of communication, not to predict the impact of that flood, or even to deal with its aftermath.
But we have to take Dr. Schroeder’s insights into consideration, and we have to explore what it means.
When our primary mode of communication can dehumanize those with whom we are communicating, bad things can, and will happen.
And that may explain our current state of tribalistic discourse.
Let’s leave with one action to counteract dehumanization through text
To solve this on a global scale —
TBD on that.
But here is one thing you can try, and it might just salvage a relationship or two.
If the commenter is someone you know, and their comment is rubbing you the wrong way —
Right before you respond with a nasty comment —
Give them a call.
Call them on the phone, or through your Social Media messaging.
It might be awkward, or it might not. But in both cases, as soon as you hear their voice, your instinct to shout them down vanishes.
Why? Because you can hear that they are a human.
And that is a start.
Jonathan Maas has diverted a few comment fights with a well-timed call, and in the future hopes to call more and comment less in general.
He has a few books on Amazon, and can be reached through Medium or Goodreads.com/JMaas.