Email, Slack, Zoom and text: How to master virtual communication, with Andrew Brodsky, PhD

Between email, Zoom, Slack, and just walking down the hall, workplaces these days offer people more ways than ever to communicate with their virtual -- and in-person -- colleagues. Andrew Brodsky, PhD, author of “Ping: The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication,” discusses the best ways to use all these modes of communication; the advantages and disadvantages of “video on” vs. “video off” meetings; whether you should use emojis in your emails; and how to develop authentic, strong work relationships with virtual colleagues – and with those you see in person. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:32Speaker 01

  Somebody asked me how I'd define myself, and I didn't know what to say. Because how can someone be defined when we're always evolving? I've been so many things. I'll be so many others.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Because identity is not a performance, it's an exploration. Never the same, but always myself. That's the paradox. Paradox intense, and the new sweet chemistry by Prada.

• 1:00Kim Mills?

  Between email, Zoom, text messages, Slack, and just walking down the hall, workplaces these days offer people more ways than ever to communicate with colleagues. But with these new choices come confusion. You've probably wondered yourself, does my boss need to know about this problem right away? Is it worth bothering her with a text message, or can it wait until she checks her email? Does this smiley face emoji make my email look more friendly, or less professional? Or both? How can I get to know the new hire in my office when he lives two time zones away? And of course, the classic question, could that meeting have been an email? As workers try to decipher new workplace norms and rules, behavioral scientists are

• 1:43Kim Mills?

  studying virtual communication as well. Their work is offering insight into questions such as, how can you decide what's the right mode of communication for a particular work conversation? How can you craft emails that are both authentic and professional? What's the best way to keep your remote boss updated on your work? And what's the best way to develop authentic, strong work relationships with virtual colleagues and with those you see in person? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

• 2:23Kim Mills?

  My guest today is Dr. Andrew Brodsky. Dr. Brodsky is a professor of management at the Macomb School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studies workplace communication challenges and the impact of technology on people at work. He has conducted research, led trainings, and consulted with organizations around the world, such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, Amazon, and Dell Technologies. His research has been covered in media outlets, including The Economist, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and NPR. And he's the author of a new book, published in February, called Ping: The Secrets of Successful Virtual Communication. Dr. Brodsky, thank you for joining me today.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me on the show.

• 3:04Kim Mills?

  We're having this conversation at a time when there's a lot of discussion and turmoil around remote work and return-to-office directives. Are the issues that you write about in this book mostly of concern to people who work from home, or is this something that affects most workers, even those who work in person?

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Part of the reason I wrote this book is I saw so many conversations happening in the media, between executives, is remote work good, is it bad? And the thing they're all missing is that regardless of whether you work from the office, from home, anywhere in between, we are now all virtual communicators. The old way of interacting in the office was whenever you had a question, you'd go over to your coworker's cubicle, or you'd knock on their office door, and you'd ask them. Now, instead, people send instant messages, or Slack messages, even when they're only a couple feet away from someone else. And it's not all bad, because now, instead of always interrupting others every time we had a question, people can now respond at their ease.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  So, the key takeaway here is, it's not so important about where you work, but the idea that we're all using this technology and understanding how we can use it better is something that can improve outcomes for everyone.

• 4:19Kim Mills?

  With all these modes of communication that are now available, how can people decide what's the right method for the right time? How do you know whether a particular question would be best addressed by email or Slack or Zoom or by calling an in-person meeting?

• 4:34Speaker 03

  So in thinking about this, there's a few key pieces that I talk about in the book. This is one of the core ideas in the book, along with, okay, once we've chosen the mode, how can we best leverage it? But to answer this question, I offer a framework in the book. So the framework is the P framework. So it's easy to remember because it's the book title with P as perspective-taking, I as initiative, N as nonverbal, and G as goals. So with P, perspective-taking, you want to think about when you're interacting virtually, we often become much more self-focused because we're just looking at the text of an email or even on video, we're looking at a small square of someone else as opposed to them being right in front of us.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  So it's important to take a moment to take the perspective of the other person. What mode might they like? How might they interpret my choice of mode? How might they interpret my message? And actually going out of your way is even more important virtually. I is initiative. So the idea behind initiative is that you want to think about what is missing from any given mode or interaction and how can we add it back in? So for instance, small talk is often missing virtually because it just feels weird to do that in email. And so thinking about how can I add back in that human element can be incredibly important. N for nonverbal, it's understanding what nonverbal behavior exists within different modes of interaction. And there's a whole lot of different ones that happen virtually.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  So for video, should you be staring at the other person, staring at your webcam? In email and instant message, typos can relay emotion. Time of day can relay power that in terms of when you sent the message. There are so many different ones that understanding what exists in each one and how to leverage them can be really beneficial. And then lastly, arguably the most important dimension, G, goals. And this gets into the point about what mode will be best depends on your goal. So a common topic is cameras on or cameras off meetings. What's better, what's worse? And it depends on your goal. So if you're trying to show you're engaged, or if it's a new relationship and you want to build trust,

• 6:47Speaker 03

  having that camera on can be really handy. But if it's an existing team, you already know each other well. Cameras off have been shown to be useful because it gets rid of that Zoom fatigue or video conferencing fatigue that causes that extra stress on all of us. So it really depends on your goal, what's going to be best. So that Ping framework is what I use to tie together all the different recommendations of the book, so that they'll hopefully be more memorable and actionable for anyone who reads it.

• 7:14Kim Mills?

  Are there some kinds of communications or conversations that absolutely have to be done in person? Or can pretty much anything be done effectively remotely?

• 7:23Speaker 03

  I have a two-part answer for that one. The first is, yes, certain things are just better in person. It's just not as fun to share a meal with someone when they're on the screen. You can't really taste their food. It just doesn't have the same effect. That said, people heavily overestimate the importance of in-person interactions for a whole variety of things. For everyone who's had hours and hours of wasted meetings at work every week that should have just been email, you know what I'm talking about, where there's just this need, what I often call the in-person default, where we just compare everything to in-person and we think it's better. And in many cases, that's actually the wrong choice and other modes are a lot more effective.

• 8:08Kim Mills?

  Is the telephone as a mechanism of verbal communication dead?

• 8:13Speaker 03

  The telephone's an interesting one because it falls in this middle zone where it feels like no one wants to use it anymore. Although, people are using voice notes even more, which is kind of like telephone, although it's more asynchronous or not real time. It's really a cooler way to talk about voicemail, but it's effectively the same thing. But, research shows there's a lot of useful cases for telephone, or what I like to categorize more broadly as audio-only calls. So that's video calls with your cameras off is effectively just telephone. And for instance, those calls can help you, compared to video, can cause less fatigue because, and less stress, because you're not staring at yourself the whole time, one,

• 8:57Speaker 03

  worried about your nonverbal behavior, and which can really cause negative emotions. So, turning the camera off, choosing phone instead of video can be really useful for achieving greater focus. And on the other side, there's a lot of times when you're emailing and you're going back and forth and it's taking you like a week to resolve something that would be a lot quicker if you just tapped on a five-minute phone call. So if you said, "Hey, can we just switch this to phone for a quick minutes to resolve this?", you could save 20 back-and-forth emails sometimes. So, one of the things I'm seeing in my research, as well as that from many others, is that phone or audio can be a really beneficial mode, yet it's often underutilized.

• 9:38Kim Mills?

  What about crucial conversations like hiring and firing? Is there a better way to do that in the current situation we're living in?

• 9:47Speaker 03

  So, when it comes to these crucial conversations, hiring, firing, generally what I recommend is, richer is generally better. And what I mean by richer is, the more similar it is to face-to-face. So, for hiring, being able to show your enthusiastic excitement is better over video. Assuming you're actually excited. If you're not actually excited, then it's better to turn your camera off so they can't see it as much, and it's better to have a phone call then. So that can be really beneficial to do more richly. The other side of that is it's important to take the perspective of the other person. Because what you think is best may not be best for them.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  There was a story going around that went viral of some layoffs that happened in the last couple of years. Where a manager actually insisted that the person being laid off keep their camera on even though they didn't want to. And it makes sense to us, but on the other side, here's a manager who thinks this is the best choice. I want to be able to see them to express this. But on the other side, the recipient's like, I don't want to see my manager, my manager to see me crying. Like, I don't want them to see me this. So taking the other person's perspective as a means of understanding, well, what might be best for them? As opposed to what I think is best can be one of the most effective things you can do in those situations.

• 11:10Kim Mills?

  A major talking point for people who advocate bringing workers back into physical offices has been that in-person work promotes connections among coworkers and makes for better working relationships. Have you found that there is some truth to that? Or can you build relationships that are just as strong working remotely?

• 11:29Speaker 03

  The example I like to talk about with executives who view this in-person is the only way you could build culture. Is actually related to a comedy movie from the 90s, The Parent Trap. Where they basically forced divorcing parents into a basement together. The kids did this, hoping their parents would get back together. And of course, it's a movie, it worked. Um, but in reality, the, this doesn't happen in real life. If you know two divorcing people and you squeeze them into a room together, the outcome's not going to be so great. So this is the same logic that executives are applying to the workplace.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  We're going to put a bunch of people in the room together and then culture should magically appear. Suddenly they're all going to get along great. And the problem with that logic is that in reality, it just doesn't work so well. If you want to improve culture, where people are located is not one of the main driving factors. I can tell you that forcing people to go to a location that they don't want to, and them not feeling like they don't have a voice, is one of the worst things you could do for improving culture. So yes, maybe you do get some marginal benefits by having them together, but it doesn't offset the degree to which they feel like they've lost their voice in the organization, that the organization doesn't care about them anymore.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  So the big question is not so much, can we just bring them in person, it's magically fixed? It's, okay, we're virtual or in person, what can we do best to improve that culture?

• 13:10Kim Mills?

  What about creativity and innovation? Are people naturally more creative when they can bounce ideas around with their coworkers in person? I mean, how can remote workplaces promote the same level of innovation and creativity?

• 13:24Speaker 03

  It can feel really engaging when you've got a bunch of people in a conference room, and you've got a whiteboard, and you're jotting down ideas, and it just can feel really energizing. But the research on brainstorming actually shows that that is not the optimal approach to brainstorming. So the best brainstorming, and now I'm going to talk about the first stages of brainstorming, which is solely idea generation. That has been shown to be better done electronically and separately for a few reasons. The first is, and it's a pretty simple one, when you have a bunch of people in a room, only one person can talk at a time. So let's just say you have a group of 10.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  You'd ideally like each person to come up with 20 ideas. We're now talking about 200 ideas. In person, the amount of time it would take to talk about 200 ideas is very high. If everyone was just typing down 20 ideas by themselves, it's a lot more productive. The next problem is that when everyone's staring at you in a room, you're concerned they're going to judge your ideas more negatively. So you're less inclined to come up with more divergent or creative ideas that are outside the norm because you're concerned about that judgment. And so having this kind of ability to be on your own a little bit more,

• 14:49Speaker 03

  not having to wait for other people to finish can be really beneficial. And lastly, when someone else says an idea in a meeting, our brain attaches to that idea suddenly. So every idea you're thinking about is related to that previous idea you heard, as opposed to being something way different. So you don't have that anchoring effect happening in meetings. That happens in meetings when you do it virtually. So early stages of brainstorming are better done via text-based communication generally. But the latter stages where you're agreeing on an idea. So this is when a group needs to come together to figure out, okay, what idea do we want? How do we tweak it? That requires a lot of back and forth.

• 15:34Speaker 03

  And that's done better synchronously, whether that's a video meeting or an in-person meeting.

• 15:40Speaker 00

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• 16:12Speaker 01

  Somebody asked me how I define myself, and I didn't know what to say. Because how can someone be defined when we're always evolving? I've been so many things. I'll be so many others.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Because identity is not a performance. It's an exploration. Never the same, but always myself. That's the paradox. Paradox Intense and the New Sweet Chemistry by Prada.

• 16:40Kim Mills?

  Let's talk about Zoom and other video meetings. First, you mentioned Zoom fatigue a moment ago. Is that a real thing? Are video meetings inherently more exhausting than other methods of communication?

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Yes, so there are a variety of studies on Zoom or video conferencing fatigue, and they consistently show that it is more exhausting to be on camera than not. When we're in person, we're not staring at ourselves. And when our camera's off, we're not staring at ourselves. And there's also other research that has highlighted that the amount of time you spend staring at yourself during a meeting is correlated with your negative emotion following the meeting. And that set of studies actually did something really funny. They were curious if giving participants alcohol might help improve this effect. And the key thinking was, well, if we drink, we're more social, so maybe we'll be less focused.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  And what I see as good news from my offering advice to people who are listening or reading the book, alcohol did not help, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it. So, you know, I wouldn't recommend having a glass of Chardonnay with your meeting because it doesn't make you feel any better. And then you might accidentally say some things you didn't intend in the process. But yes, Zoom fatigue, video conferencing fatigue more broadly is a real effect.

• 18:04Kim Mills?

  So what's the best way to make a good impression on Zoom? How important is it to turn your camera on?

• 18:11Speaker 03

  When it comes to making a good impression and the importance of camera on, there's a research theory known as channel expansion theory. And the idea behind channel expansion theory is that when you are talking to a stranger, mode matters a lot more than it does when you're talking to someone you're very familiar with or topics you're really familiar about. So in plain language, if I get a text message or an email from a complete stranger or someone who's barely in Queens. There's a strong likelihood I'm going to misinterpret their message because I don't understand how they normally communicate.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  But if I get a text message or email from my partner or my best friend, I know exactly what they're saying. I know how to fill in all those little gaps between the lack of information because I know them, there's no misinterpretation. And the same effect happens with video, if versus no video on. It's better to have those extra cues in new relationships. It's better to show your new boss or a new client, "Hey, I'm engaged, I'm really excited. You can see me looking here at what appears to be you on the camera." And that's really important. But if it's someone you've been working with a really long time and they know your level of engagement, they know you, they trust you already, then cameras are less important

• 19:35Speaker 03

  in those situations.

• 19:37Kim Mills?

  Does background matter? Does using your real background or a blur or a fake screen communicate different things to the person you're talking to?

• 19:47Speaker 03

  There's two perspectives when it comes to backgrounds in terms of the research that's been out. So this is still a pretty new area, but one perspective looks at professionalism. And it finds that backgrounds with books or plants tend to be seen as the most professional. The ones that are blurred somewhere in the middle and the novelty backgrounds. And the example in this study was a walrus sitting on an iceberg, the least professional. The other perspective is about building relationships. And what those studies found is that when you have something in your background like a number one dad mug, if someone else is a parent, they'll feel like they can relate to you more and trust you more because they understand you and you've got some connection.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  We like people who are similar to ourselves. And so having those cues into who you are as a human being while still remaining professional can be useful if you're looking to build trust. I have pictures of my dogs in the background as a potential conversation starter sometimes, but overall it's still professional with books and some shelves. So the idea is I try and do a little bit of mix of the professional aspect, but giving some windows into who I am as a human to remind the other person that, "Hey, it's a human being on the other side. You're not just interacting with your computer screen."

• 21:09Kim Mills?

  But those goofy backgrounds are not a good idea.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  In work situations, no. In social situations, obviously, the story changes a bit because professionalism just doesn't matter as much.

• 21:21Kim Mills?

  Well, let's switch gears and talk about email. You've looked at how people respond to typos in emails. What have you found if you accidentally send an email with a typo, how are your colleagues going to react?

• 21:34Speaker 03

  I did some research with Haley Blunden from American University on this topic of typos. And we had three key findings that we found in the study. The first one was that typos make you look less intelligent. That's kind of obvious. No one's surprised there. The second effect that we found is that typos can actually make messages seem more emotional when there's emotion present in the message. So they can make angry emails seem angrier or happy emails seem happier. And the underlying theory of this is that when people see the typos, they say, oh, this person's so emotional. They weren't focused on writing this properly, basically.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  And the third effect that we found is that in the presence of emotion, typos result in a lower intelligence penalty to the sender. So in other language, basically, if you have a typo in a neutral message, it's going to make you look less intelligent than if you have a typo in an emotional message. Because people say, oh, it's emotion that's the cause of the typo as opposed to the person's lack of intelligence. And this relates to a whole lot of other studies on typos as well. So research shows that when you have sent from my iPhone at the bottom of your email and your signature, typos also are penalized less in terms of perceptions of the sender because people are thinking,

• 22:59Speaker 03

  oh, it's because they're sent from their iPhone. And then there's another set of studies that shows that when people realize the email sender is from a different culture or different, they, typos are penalized less or grammar errors are penalized less because people are thinking, oh, it's because English may not be their first language. And the core takeaway of all this is that in virtual communication, there's often a lot of ambiguity. So people are searching for reasons for your behavior. And when it's typos, they're saying, well, is it intelligence or is it emotion? Or is it the mobile device they use or their culture? And if you have these potential issues, making sure you provide the reasoning can really

• 23:42Speaker 03

  help to make sure that you're not penalized for those issues. So for instance, if you send an email with typos to a colleague and you realize it, and you're concerned it's going to make you look really bad, you could do a quick follow-up saying, "Hey, I just got to my desk. I saw there were a bunch of typos in my last message. I was on the go and I wanted to let you know this as soon as possible because I realized it was important." So then you're giving them the reason. It's because you wanted to let them know something as soon as possible for their benefit. It's not about you being lazy, or not caring, or not intelligent. So you want to make sure to fill in those gaps in those virtual interactions. That's about taking that initiative there.

• 24:21Kim Mills?

  What about the use of emojis or abbreviations like LOL, or FWIW, or IRL?

• 24:30Speaker 03

  One of the most common questions I probably get is about emojis, and it's both from like undergraduate students all the way up to C-suite executives. Should I put that smiley face in there? Will that help me? Should I use exclamation marks? What should I do in those situations? And the research on this is fairly mixed. There are some benefits. In certain cases, it may make you look more competent. In other cases, it may make you look warmer, or it may make you look less competent. It really depends. But what a key takeaway from all this research is, is that the best strategy is something called language mimicry. So this is the idea that you take your cues from the other person. If they use emojis,

• 25:14Speaker 03

  you should use them too. If they use lots of exclamation marks, consider doing the same. If they use abbreviations like LOL, then consider doing something similar. And the reason this works so well is that, one, we trust people who are more similar to us because we feel like we get them. So when someone communicates like us, we trust them. And two, we all think we're great communicators. So when someone else communicates like us, we think, wow, they're a great communicator, too. The one note with this is you don't want to go way overboard, where you're copying everything they do and it becomes a game of Simon Says almost, because that has been shown to backfire. So you don't want to go crazy with it.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  But the lesson here is, again, not just deciding, okay, this is the absolute best approach. It's looking at the context, seeing what the other person does, and then mirroring that kind of behavior.

• 26:10Kim Mills?

  We have kind of a standing joke at APA. I am not a fan of exclamation points, having been a reporter and editor for a long time. And I tell people, you only use an exclamation point if the sentence is help or fire. And so the joke is, everybody sends me a million exclamation points and, you know, they're yanking my chain. So I guess you get a little bit of that if you're a little hidebound about how your emails should look.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  Bringing back some fun into virtual interactions can be really useful for helping to build that bonding, for helping lighten the mood a little bit. So of course, when I send you a thank you email later, I'll have to decide, do I throw in 50 exclamation marks or do I hold off there?

• 26:49Kim Mills?

  Well, let me ask, as a remote worker, which I am, what's the right way to keep bosses and coworkers updated on your work? How can you let them know how productive you're being when they can't see you every day? And can you make that backfire by over-communicating?

• 27:04Speaker 03

  This is one of the biggest issues that I see with remote work and managers evaluating the work. There's a really interesting effect in psychology called the input bias, which is that we tend to gauge how good something is based on how much effort it seems someone puts into it. So in the initial set of research studies that researchers had conducted on the topic, they had managers evaluate a presentation or a set of presentations. In one condition, they were told the person who did the presentation spent over eight hours creating the presentation. In the other condition, they were told the participants spent 20 or 30 minutes preparing.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  And if you think about which one managers rated better, they ended up rating the eight hour presentation better than the one that was 20 or 30 minutes. But here's the thing, participants saw the same presentations across conditions. The only thing that was changed was amount of time they were told the person was doing it. The problem that comes in here is which employee would you want? The one who takes eight hours to do the same task or the one that takes 30 minutes? Of course, you want the one that takes 30 minutes, but that's not the one who's being rewarded. If I had written a book for managers and purely leaders, I'd be talking about how to fix evaluations. But this is a book for everyone. So I talk about how do you work in those situations?

• 28:30Speaker 03

  If you're a remote worker, how do you make sure that your effort is seen? And one of the easiest ways to do this is to make sure that you communicate with a reasonable degree of frequency. If we were comparing two employees, one who emails their manager on Friday, a five paragraph update about what they did for the week. And then another one who emails their manager or sends a quick instant message each day with just a few short sentences about what happened that day. The thing about these two employees is they sent the exact same amount of communication. One did five paragraphs on Friday, one spread it throughout the week. But that one that's spread it throughout the week is going to seem more present, like they were doing something each day. So interacting with a reasonable but higher degree of frequency can be really useful.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  And then you ask this question about can you over communicate? So when it comes to over versus under communication, the research shows that it's best to obviously get the ideal amount of communication. But the problem is it's hard to tell in any given situation what the ideal amount is. So then the question becomes, do I over communicate? Do I under communicate? What side should I err on? And it's been shown that under communication is penalized a lot more than over communication. If you are someone who's been on any dates recently and you send a text message and maybe there's not a question, but the other person doesn't respond. You're wondering, did they? Read it. Do they not like me? Do they not care?

• 29:59Speaker 03

  And it's the same thing with managers, but just say, or bosses, we send them an update. And there's no question in there, but they never responded that they received it. They never sent a thank you. As an employee, you're kind of anxious. Like, do they not, do they hate it? Or did they not even look at it? Do they not care about my work? So just sending a quick response like, thank you, received, or I got it. I'll get back to you in a few days. Can be incredibly helpful because it removes that ambiguity. But you don't want to go to the extremes. The closer you are to the ideal amount of communication, the better. But if you're going to err on one side or the other, over-communication is better because it shows you're present. It shows you're engaged.

• 30:39Kim Mills?

  What about using the function that enables you to see whether someone has opened your email? I mean, I personally hate that, but I don't know. Am I in the minority here?

• 30:49Speaker 03

  Red receipts basically signal to the other person you don't trust them. And this matches the studies on the topic. So I generally do not recommend them unless it's a situation where it's completely normal to do so. Or the other person would very much expect that you sent a red receipt. There aren't too many situations that fall into that kind of scenario. Two lawyers on opposite sides of a court case, that may be something you would do to show the other person got it. But generally, I recommend avoiding them. Instead, if it's a situation where you can indicate to the other person saying something like, "Hey, it'd be great if you could get me a response within X days."

• 31:29Speaker 03

  Can be useful because then it creates a situation where it's clear when you expect a response from them. And as an added benefit, that extra line in there about when you expect a response has been shown to decrease stress for the email recipient. One of the problems with email is that we get it, and there's something called the email urgency bias. Which is, let's just say you sent me an email. As a recipient, I'm thinking, oh, here's this really important person, you know, big podcast. They probably want a response really quickly. But on your end, you're like, I'm a busy person. I don't care if they get back to me for another three days. And this effect is true especially for after-hours communication,

• 32:14Speaker 03

  where it turns out that people who receive messages think the recipient wants a response a lot quicker than they do. So when you explicitly say, hey, it's fine if you get back to me tomorrow or three days, it removes that stress of needing to respond right then, right there, drop whatever you're doing. So it has that nice benefit there. And again, removing this ambiguity, taking the initiative to provide that extra information can really help to improve not just your outcomes, but the well-being of the other person you're interacting with.

• 32:44Kim Mills?

  One of the very newest tools in the workplace is artificial intelligence. And many workers are trying to figure out, how do I incorporate AI into my work? And should I be experimenting with letting AI answer my emails, for example? Is that a good idea? Should we all be considering outsourcing some of our communication to AI?

• 33:04Speaker 03

  Obviously, AI is a new area for research, so it's a continually developing landscape. But based on the research, some of which is my own on authenticity, if you were to ask me, should I let AI do all my communication? So you know, you get something from ChatGPT or Perplexity or Gemini, and copy and paste into email, or maybe come up with scripts for you to read during video calls to make sure what you're saying is really on point, my advice is no. My perspective is that there will always be value to a human component of communication. And my own research on authenticity shows that the greater effort someone is perceived as putting into an interaction, the more authentic it comes off.

• 33:49Speaker 03

  Think about it this way, let's just say you send someone an email that you used AI for. Most times, they're not going to realize it, but once they might. Maybe the AI used a word that you don't normally use. Or maybe you and your coworker talked about something that happened that past weekend. Maybe they talk about how like their whole family had a stomach bug. And then you send them an email that says, I hope you had a great weekend, exclamation mark. And the thing is, the AI tools don't know everything that's in your head. So then, one of these times, something sneaks through. The person who gets that will realize, okay, they used AI here. But then they're going to question

• 34:30Speaker 03

  Every single interaction they've had with you and wonder, have they always just been using AI? And then they're going to be questioning, well, why am I interacting with this person in the first place? If all they're doing is giving me AI communication? And that's not to say that AI isn't useful. It's great for editing, brainstorming, helping you when you get stuck. And for low stakes, repeated interactions, sure, use it. But for those important, high stakes ones, you do want to make sure that the words are yours in your communication.

• 35:01Kim Mills?

  Last question, now that you've completed the book and you've done all the research behind it. What are the big questions that you weren't able to answer?

• 35:09Speaker 03

  There's a lot of different questions that are happening now. Some of the interesting ones are about new technologies that are emerging. So for instance, augmented reality, these glasses that you can now get where notifications can pop up right in front of you. So what does that mean? We all know we're now attached to our smartphones and it, you know, a light comes on or it makes a noise and we're checking it. What happens now when we're literally seeing everything in all those notifications in real time? The moment they come in. For me, seeing how all these new technologies are going to change the way we interact, our wellbeing. To me is one of the coolest questions out there at the moment.

• 35:49Kim Mills?

  Dr. Brodsky, I want to thank you for joining me. This has been very interesting and you've given me something to think about regarding how I communicate.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  Thank you. It's been a great conversation.

• 35:58Kim Mills?

  You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please follow us and leave a review. For those of you who want to know more about psychology and the work of APA, you can join us as a supporter. You don't have to be a psychologist. The benefits include a subscription to our award winning magazine, Monitor on Psychology, as well as discounts on our books and other publications. So if psychology is your passion, or if you just want to know more about the science, you can become a supporter by visiting at.apa.org/speaking. That's at.apa.org/speaking.

• 36:41Kim Mills?

  If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at [email protected].

• 36:49Kim Mills?

  Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Thanks for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.

• 37:42Speaker 00

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