Chapter 2 - Wrong Channel
Imagine you are ten years old, and your mother tells you, “Get out of the house and don’t come back until dinner time.” As a child growing up in the 70s, that was my reality. On long, lazy Michigan summer days, my friends and I got “kicked out of the house.” I stepped out the front door into the hot, muggy Michigan summer day, hopped on my bike and took off to hang out with friends. No one knew where we were. We had no cell phones or tracking devices.
The smell of fresh cut grass and the bright green trees swaying in the gentle breeze were the backdrop for my time spent with my friends. I can’t remember what we talked about or the crazy stories we made up. We explored the neighborhood, made up challenges (trying to jump our bikes over ditches), and we talked. We would spend countless hours entertaining ourselves. I remember one time, I didn’t come home until the street lights came on. When I ran into the house, my dad yelled not at me, but to me, “Are you in for the night?” I shouted back, “Nope, just getting a flashlight!” His response? “Okay kid.” That is what it was like to be a kid in the Midwest in the 70s.
Starting in the late sixties and running through the 1980s, television stations ran a public service announcement that asked parents, “It’s 10 pm, do you know where your children are?” A friend of mine quipped, “Our parents had to be reminded they had children.”
While the concept of unsupervised fun, even late at night, might have lost its appeal, those times were also loaded with enormous amounts of face-to-face personal interaction. We learned how to converse with each other and, just as importantly, we learned how our behaviors affected others. As it would turn out, this would be an important life skill, because what we say and what we mean, and how we present ourselves, may not align with each other. Humans are naturally wonderful yet inconsistent communicators.
In 1967, UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian [2] set out to explore the differences between our words, tone, and expressions. It seemed obvious that these could be mismatched, but which element mattered more to the listener? Tone or content? Facial expression or tone?
Together with Morton Wiener, Mehrabian invited college students to listen to a series of individual words played from a tape recorder. They divided the students into three groups of ten. Mehrabian and Wiener gave each group different instructions - a classic control group test approach. They told the first group, “Pay attention only to the content.” They told the second group, “Pay attention only to the tone of voice.” They told the final group, “Pay attention to all information available.”
The students listened to nine different words. But each word was spoken in one of three ways. The scientists had hired two female speakers to read the nine different words in three manners. They used three positive words (dear, thanks, and honey), three neutral words (maybe, oh, and really), and three negative words (brute, don’t, and terrible.) Each word would be spoken three times but in three different ways - positive, negative, and neutral. As a result, the students might hear the word “Honey” spoken harshly, or the negative word “brute” spoken kindly. The researchers intentionally mixed the tonality and meaning of the words to see what meaning the listeners would derive. What mattered more? The word itself, or the tone it was spoken with?
Mehrabian discovered that most of his students put more emphasis on the tone of the speaker than the actual word itself. And I think we can all agree this makes sense and is consistent with our own experience. A “dear” spoken sarcastically does not mean the same thing as the word “dear” spoken tenderly and lovingly. In fact, it pretty much means the opposite.
Zig Ziglar [1] in his book Ziglar on Selling gives a great example of how meaning can vary with tone. Take the sentence, “I never said she stole the money.” This sentence has seven words. If you repeat this sentence, but put a strong emphasis on a different word each time, you get seven different meanings:
I never said she stole the money - someone else did.
I never said she stole the money - We are now conveying outrage at being accused of doing something. This brings up images of protestations like “I never”
I never said she stole the money - I didn’t say it, but I thought it, or wrote it.
You get the idea. Tone matters. And that’s what Mehrabian confirmed with his study. He then expanded his study by running a second experiment with Susan Ferris. They wanted to know how people judge the feelings of a speaker not only with tone, but by adding facial expressions into the mix. They minimized the content of the words by selecting a single, neutral word. They selected “maybe” as their word - thinking that the ambiguity of the word would make it easier for the listeners to focus on the meaning conveyed by tone and expression.
Again the professional speakers said the word three ways - (positive, neutral, and negative) and the researchers matched the recordings with pictures of female models who showed three types of facial expression (positive, neutral, and negative.) How did the students respond? Facial expressions affected the students’ perception of the speaker 1.5 times more than the tone.
What do you make of this finding? If you put the two studies together like Mehrabian and Ferris did, it would seem reasonable to conclude that facial expression was more impactful than tone, and tone more impactful than word meaning (content).
And that is exactly the conclusion that Mehrabian and Ferris did make, only they expressed it as the now famous 7-38-55 ratio. Over the last fifty years, the Mehrabian Ratio has been used and abused by a wide range of speakers and authors. Mehrabian never proved his hypothesis - he was trying to make sense of his limited experiments. However, what no one has contested is that tone and body language absolutely form channels of communication humans use to interpret others’ intended meaning. You may not agree with the ratio or the methodology, but it is very clear that word meaning is only one component of what we communicate.
Further, Mehrabian’s findings are most relevant when ambiguity presents itself. When words are emotionally inconsistent with the tone and attitude of the speaker, we must interpret what the other person is trying to convey, and we do not weigh all channels of information equally.
Chris Voss [3] called this the Song, Music, and Dance of human communication. As far as I know, what we have not studied is what happens to our capacity to communicate when we lose access to our two most influential channels - how does losing tone and expression impact our ability to understand each other?
As someone who speaks in public, I can also tell you there is real feedback from the listeners. If you have ever spoken in front of a live audience, you feel their response to what you say, the tone you use, and the expressions you show. I’m not aware of any studies that have zeroed in on this feedback channel - how does your reaction to what I say affect my behavior?
It seems obvious that my words, tone, and behavior can impact you - unless I spend a lot of time staring at a piece of glass where I cannot see your facial expressions or hear the tone in your responses.
A very close friend and teacher dubbed this “Synthetic Autism” - when we lose our connection to the other during communication. It is a common trait among autistic people or those with Asperger’s that they treat people like objects. A famous study [4] used eye trackers to detect what healthy adults pay attention to during a tense moment in the play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” They then ran the same experiment with autistic viewers. The control group paid close attention to the actors’ faces, cuing into the emotionally charged situation which rewrote the meaning of the words being spoken. The autistic viewers, however, spent almost no time looking at the actors’ faces. They scanned objects of interest instead - a light switch, someone’s neck, the fabric on the couch.
When children grow up spending enormous amounts of time looking at screens instead of people, and they are actively engaged with those screens, they lose a crucial connection in human communication. They sense that their words, tone, and expressions affecting others diminishes, and they begin to treat people like things.
This is different from what psychologist Philip Zimbardo [5] coined as “megaphone plus anonymity equals mob behavior” - referring to flame wars and spotlighting people on social media. Using technology to mediate our interactions strips out the rich communication from two vital channels (tone and facial expression). We literally struggle to understand what the other person means and how to communicate what we mean. Further, tone and facial expression have been replaced by something else - a rating.
Everything we say can now be judged.
Overall, I aimed to tighten up some lengthy sentences, vary sentence structure for better flow, and smooth out a few transitions between ideas. I kept your engaging tone and passionate conviction intact. Let me know if you would like me to clarify or expand upon any sections further. Great start!
Making the Grade
I frequently quip my “chat time” personality is funnier than my real time personality. Why? Because I have time to think about my replies before I hit send. This is of course, the everyday person version of what happens in TV and film. Teams of writers work countless hours to craft “casual quips” which talented actors make look natural and effortless. My aunt dreamed about having a writing team to prompt her with cue cards so she could say the smartest things all the time.
Mediated communication creates the illusion that we can do this for ourselves. But it is not enough to be funny, I find myself constantly checking my “reach” - how many impressions did that post get? Did it generate engagement? How many likes did it receive?
It is not only social media that triggers this behavior. Nearly every communication platform offers some form of feedback mechanism from the audience. We get likes, voted up, or emojis in response to our posts.
I have to pause for a moment and go a little meta here. I wrote, “we get” - what would be more technically correct would be to write, “my posts get”, but that is not how it feels. It does not feel like the message or the text is being graded, it feels like I am being graded. We have this same kind of pronoun swapping with sports. When my team loses, I say, “they lost.” But when my team wins, I say, “We won.” This is not some abstract, oh look at what the technology is doing moment. We make our interactions with others online very, very personal. Those words are me.
So you had better bet I take a moment to craft my words. However, the people who give me feedback also have the chance to pause and reflect before hitting send.
We are engaged in this stilted, carefully crafted, technology mediated exchange. In-person conversation in contrast - and I mean real face to face, personal interaction - does not allow us the time to ruminate. We can’t pause before we hit send. Nor can we edit our reactions.
Most kids, and many young adults are not getting the countless hours of in-person training I got during my Michigan summers. I certainly never let my kids roam the neighborhood after dark unsupervised. Not to mention the fact that all the stupid, idiotic things I said and did during those summers is lost to the mists of time.
But our children’s words are now becoming part of their persistent online reputation. As if ratings were not enough, this reputation matters. Studies show that participation in social media affects our futures. A University of Pennsylvania study found that your online reputation affects your prospects of getting hired, and the University of California at Berkeley discovered that students active on social media are more likely to get admitted.
Communicating with each other has never been more high risk than it is right now. Clinical Psychologist and Sociology professor Sherry Turkle has written about this phenomena extensively in her books Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation. The more we move into screens, the more we seem to struggle with the basics of talking to each other. What’s more, the rating systems baked into our communication channels (likes and emojis) is driving people away from open and honest conversation. Small wonder Brené Brown’s work on Vulnerability is touching a nerve. How can you be vulnerable and authentic when every single thing you say can be stripped of tone and context, archived forever, graded, and then used to determine our future? American activist Alfie Kohn wrote about the perverse effects of grading systems as far back as 1993 when he published his book Punished By Rewards.
This might sound alarmist, and that only a small number of young people are having this experience. However, I can tell you that it is beginning to show up in the workforce.
A friend of mine, Chad who runs a successful electrical service company told me the story of a 19-year old electrician who ran away from a job site when his supervisor told him he had to talk to the customer. Another service industry veteran relayed the story of a technician who resigned when he learned he would have to talk to customers on the phone. These are not hypothetical situations.
Perhaps talking to customers sounds terrifying, but can we even talk to each other?
In the fall of 1999, as game studio president I looked forward to our team meetings. They were so different from the stilted, eternally boring, and soul deadening meetings I’d participated in at Motorola. I thought about our meetings as energetic. They were completely different from the overly formal corporate meetings that drove me out of the semiconductor industry. In our meetings we debated difficult issues about the design of our flagship video game, Motocross Madness, published by Microsoft.
One such meeting, our producer from Microsoft pulled me aside. Shannon, the self-dubbed, ‘Queen of Madness’ (she had all the madness titles in her department), said, “Hey look, we are very worried that your team is about to blow up.”
“Blow up how?” I asked, a little confused.
“Well, look at your meeting. You have people screaming at each other.” I took a mental step back. “Okay, I think I see what you’re concerned about. But let me assure you, we are in no danger of imploding.” She looked at me skeptically.
I held up my hands in my dingy little office beneath the stairs that smelled funny because it was next to the bathroom that always seemed to find a way to flood during a milestone crunch.
“I get it, you’re seeing people screaming at each other and it doesn’t look good right?”
She nodded.
“Now, from my perspective, these meetings are fantastic. Why? Because the team cares. Now let me ask you a question,” I said, “Did you see anyone attack anyone personally?” Shannon had to think about it for a moment. She shook her head. “No.”
I nodded. “They’re attacking the issues, not each other.” I watched the expression change on her face as it dawned on her what I was talking about. “In fact, think about the last exchange before the meeting ended. Adam and Robb were going at it right?”
“Were they ever,” Shannon agreed. The dynamic of these two employees were the ones that concerned her the most.
“Now think of the words. Adam accused Robb of intentionally forgetting a design decision they had already made a few weeks ago.”
“Yeah, Adam was pissed,” Shannon remembered the argument.
“And do you remember Robb’s response?”
She shook her head.
“He said, ‘I believe you when you tell me that I know, but I honestly can’t remember it.’”
Shannon and I met eyes. “They don’t have to like each other, but they do respect each other. Robb wasn’t defending his ego, and Adam wasn’t attacking Robb personally. Adam was frustrated by what felt like an unexpected and sudden change in direction. Did they not quickly get back to the original direction after that?” Shannon agreed.
I don’t remember exactly what I said to Shannon after that, but it is something I still believe to this day - that it was the team’s passion for the game that made the game a bestseller. She wanted people who cared about games like that if she wanted to publish games that would be popular.
When I think back on those exchanges, heated, intense, and face-to-face, I honestly wonder if that environment can be recreated in today’s workforce. Perhaps we don’t want to recreate it in total, but I do believe if we can’t argue with each other respectively, how are we going to learn from each other?
Perhaps it seems like people are too sensitive to public perception. You might be thinking, “What’s the big deal?” I’ve heard people from my generation describe people who are afraid to talk as, “snowflakes.” I find it funny, until it is directed at someone I care about. The changes in how we communicate contribute to another stressor – the terror of making an error.
That’s right – it’s all about mistakes. Or to put it more accurately – it is all about avoiding mistakes at all costs.
Summary
In this chapter, we’ve discussed how changing interpersonal communication, specifically our increasing reliance on digital communication, is actually isolating us more and interfering with our ability to conduct healthy meaningful face-to-face conversations. We are getting sucked into a popularity contest at every level.
To put it simply, our channels of communication have changed in profound ways that affect our ability to work together. Face-to-face, ephemeral, impermanent, multi-level channels have been supplanted with mediated, permanent, digital communications that are constantly rated. Momentary personal interactions are being replaced with permanent, judged exchanges that can affect our long-term future.
The high risk of making a mistake undermines performance and human connection. In particular, there are two core variables which can trigger our fear of mistakes, as we’ll explore in more depth in the next chapter.
Let me know if this revised version captures your vision and voice for the chapter! I’m happy to discuss any remaining areas that could use polishing.