The Internet and Non-Verbal Behavior

Does communicating over a screen impair our ability to interpret non-verbal behavior? And if so what impact will it have? https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01747/full   Transcript: you're listening to psych with mike for more episodes or to connect with the show with comments ideas or to be a 0:06 guest go to www.cyclicmike.com follow the show on twitter at psych with 0:13 mike or like the facebook page with mike now here's psych with mike 0:22 welcome into the psych with mike library as mr brett newcomb prepares his headphones he's back uh it's not that we 0:28 really need the headphones but it does it does actually keep my head from exploding when i talk to you yeah 0:34 keeps my ears warm you have this capacity to just generate distress that becomes 0:40 i do yeah yeah and and uh if your head exploded that would probably be a mess 0:47 that i would not want to clean up if you could see what was in my head yeah i've said that to my wife many 0:53 times she says hey what are you thinking about i'm like man you don't want to be in my head that's a scary place to be 0:59 yeah yeah so uh i saw a thing on facebook that a cartoon 1:05 and a meme man and woman laying in bed at night both way facing away from each other 1:11 yeah and she's thinking i wonder if he's thinking about other women and he's thinking how will gonzaga win 1:18 the tournament yeah yeah yeah yeah well and she's wondering and and i don't want to this to be a social 1:24 commentary but she's wondering if he's thinking about other women yeah but she's not offering 1:31 will we to be with him we don't know any more than that we don't know any more than that they're together alone yeah which is not 1:37 an uncommon circumstance it is not an uncommon circumstance no it is not that is true 1:42 so uh i have struggled mightily 1:48 uh in my career i don't know if you feel this 1:53 much connection to this specific subject because you spent more time 1:59 before the internets than i do i'm older yeah you're here a little bit it didn't have the option 2:06 so while i grew up without the internets the internets were around by the time i started practicing by the time i had 2:12 books still have books yeah well uh and so 2:18 in another version of our lives we worked at a group practice and in that 2:23 group practice we did a lot of collaboration with the parochial schools 2:30 and a lot of what i did there in that group practice was presentations on 2:36 how the schools could bring technology into the schools safely and effectively 2:42 and how parents could manage the their children's technological lives 2:49 in a way that would be beneficial and healthy for them you know back in the early days 2:56 we were talking about you know things like keystroke loggers where you could actually see the kinds of websites that 3:03 your children visited and things like that and i mean that's like now out the window i mean the technology now has 3:10 advanced to the point where i guess you could still have keystroke loggers but i'm not sure how effective that they are 3:16 anymore but one of the things that was profoundly 3:22 memorable for me was i walked into my son's room one night and he was hiding a screen so he had aol 3:31 if you don't know what that is he had aim which was aol instant messenger 3:37 and so aol was a service at the time the biggest internet service on the planet 3:42 and they had started an internet messaging service an instant messaging service even before that was a thing on 3:49 texting for phones right and i walked in and he was doing he was he was doing his homework but he was 3:55 also going back and forth between doing his homework and looking at this so he 4:01 can figure it out and set up a hotkey so that somebody came in exactly hit the key and yeah but i saw it 4:07 and so i had introduced this idea but i had never really had an extensive conversation so i said 4:15 okay we're going to have an extensive conversation and i said you know i need to know 4:21 that all of the people that you are interacting with are actually legitimate 4:27 people and that you know them and he said well i know everybody on my 4:32 aim and i so we pulled it up and i mean at the time i think he had 104 4:39 connections right which compared to today is minuscule right i mean you'd be embarrassed to say you had 104 4:46 connections today but i said okay i need you to justify to me that all 104 of 4:52 these people are real people where do they live where what classes do you share with them and he could only do 4:58 that with a handful this girl's name is candy does it in dallas yeah who is she yeah yeah 5:04 how do you know her she's in my fifth hour calculus class yeah right um and so i had a rule 5:12 when my kids were growing up that they couldn't communicate with anybody that they couldn't verify the identity of 5:19 i don't even know if you could do that today but what i do know is that 5:24 as the internet becomes more ubiquitous as communication goes more online 5:31 i'm very very concerned with what we are doing to ourselves 5:39 specifically for me the concern is in the area of the 5:45 lack of skills for reading nonverbal human behavior 5:52 so there's a term called mediated communications 5:57 mediated communications use some type of technology as a go-between or an 6:03 interface so it can be your phone it can be your computer it can be a tele it can be a 6:10 teletype or a typewriter or something so that you are not face to face reading 6:17 non-verbals as you exchange communications 6:22 cooper and arabian two social scientists who studied all this early in the early years 6:28 used to talk about nonverbal communications that were not mediated so person to 6:34 person looking at you reading all the different messages that are coming from you you say something orally 6:41 and i hear it and those words that i hear compose about seven percent of the 6:46 message the rest of the message comes from your nonverbals your tone your facial expression your volume your 6:54 rhythm uh your body language of various kinds are you stiff are you relaxed are 6:59 you hyperagitated and all of that factors into the communication and 7:05 children learned this growing up i remember learning how to say 7:10 yes ma'am to my mother and it meant a hundred different things depending on how i said it i said the 7:16 same two words yes ma'am but many times it meant oh enthusiastically yes you know yeah i'd like to have a piece of 7:22 cake yes ma'am but sometimes it meant no way in hell get out of here or sometimes it meant 7:27 just try and make me yeah exactly yeah uh and she always knew which way i meant it because but i would hide behind 7:33 saying but i said yes ma'am you know how can you punish me for that and um 7:39 so when you use a mediated communication device you lose 7:44 that capacity and you develop a certain level of anonymity so if i am communicating with 7:52 you over an ipad screen on the internet and you're a thousand miles away or your 7:57 next door or in the next room it doesn't matter uh i can say something that i might not 8:03 say if we were face to face right because i don't have to deal with your 8:09 misunderstanding or your non-verbal reaction if you roll your eyes you know how many times do you remember being told don't 8:17 roll your eyes at me yeah if they can see them they can say wow you just did that bam if they can't see 8:24 them then they can't see them right right so that affects the communication right and 8:32 the way in which this has been most impactful for me in my professional 8:39 career is the extent to which a client will come into the office and will say to me 8:46 i want to read you some texts yeah and they'll read me a text chain and they will have the they will have 8:53 concluded that this other person is angry with them or hates them or whatever and i will say 8:59 there's nothing in that communication that suggests that and so people are 9:06 projecting onto these written communications and 9:11 an assumption of emotional context that they just can't get which is what you 9:16 just said just in different words and i'm worried that a we do that first off 9:23 so we're projecting so let me just say very clearly 9:28 i cannot assign emotional context 9:34 to a printed communication and i'm really good at nonverbal 9:40 behavior and empathy nobody can do that if you think you can 9:45 do that you are mistaken no one can do that and then they'll say to me but look 9:51 at the emojis and i'm like an emoji is not a substitute for 9:58 non-verbal behavior and people just don't seem to be able to understand that there's so much of this 10:05 message that is missing but the internet offers opportunities for 10:11 even more egregious abuse of that reality oh absolutely 10:16 i may live in your neighborhood i may see you at the grocery store i may see you at church on sunday i am not going 10:23 to have a conversation with you ever under any of those circumstances to talk about how much i obsess about sexually 10:30 abusing a child but i can find a chat room on the internet with everybody else who's found that 10:36 room that does want to talk about that in brutal specifics and i can find a group that i can be in touch with and we 10:43 can share all of this stuff back and forth that we get off on 10:49 that i could not ever share with anybody in my community that knows me as a real 10:54 person that sees me it's secretive it's destructive it's poisonous uh you do the same thing with 11:01 political agendas i mean there's so much out there right now about how divided america is politically 11:08 in part because of the news media are you extreme left are you extreme right 11:14 yeah uh are you on these different websites the q and on whatever that 11:19 promote specific uh political agendas to an extreme level right 11:26 or religion we're about to have an election here in in missouri 11:31 and the elections locally various elections locally for school board members are 11:37 being impacted by nationwide movement that's coming from the far right 11:43 saying uh we've got to worry about critical race theory we have to take certain books out of the curriculum 11:49 we've got to take them out of the library we can't let them you know these teachers are going to corrupt and ruin our children 11:54 if we don't limit them so we need to put cameras in the classrooms and if you elect me for the school board locally 12:00 then i can watch that on your behalf and that's what i'll do right so candidates 12:05 are running like that and they want to take books out of the library and burn books and say we can't expose our 12:10 children to these thoughts we don't want to teach accurate american history we don't want to teach 12:15 racial disparity or disharmony we want to 12:20 we'll teach reading and write we're going to teach arithmetic there's no other thing that should be taught we don't need these cultural biases and 12:26 propaganda happening from these school teachers but what you pointed out and i think is very apt 12:34 is that the internet can be a way 12:40 of exacerbating the pathology of an individual i like 12:45 what you said my wife calls that confirmation bias yeah yeah you look for the things that confirm the way you 12:51 already but i think i think those are actually two different things i think confirmation bias is a thing and the internet is really good at confirmation 12:58 bias but i think it also can exacerbate your own pathology because when you talk about going to you know 13:05 some kind of sub reddit and and finding a pornography or 13:10 a an abuse kind of forum i think that exactly killer chat right yeah where they all get off on 13:16 this this is what i do and how i do it and how i don't get caught and you know that's that's just really scary 13:22 to think of but in a less in a less extreme kind of way because people say 13:28 oh well you're just being hyperbolic brett newcomb but in a less hyperbolic way i had a client 13:34 and he was just obsessed with feedback from people on the 13:40 internet and he would post pictures of himself on these reddit sub forums and 13:45 he would just obsess about the responses and i would say to him all the time but ninety percent of 13:52 these responses are positive and he's like yeah but look at those those negative ones those are the real ones 13:57 those are the people who are telling it like it is i say how do you know that those aren't people who feel horrible about themselves and they get off on 14:04 just making other people feel bad i mean you don't know where this information is coming from why 14:10 would you assume well because that the minority is the only real part it has to do with our 14:16 personalities it's something to do with human nature i remember 14:21 back in the day giving speeches to four or five thousand uh in an audience 14:26 and then they would pass around or ask for speaker evaluation right so i get 5 000 14:32 speaker evaluation forms and 4 800 of them would just be raving oh 14:37 great speaker great speech wonderful job 150 200 of them would be like right 14:43 well 50 of them would be like the room is cold yeah cherries exactly i'm hungry and the other hundred would 14:49 be like this guy's a drip i don't know how do you let him even out those hundred would be the one 14:55 i would hear and feel and obsess about well i'm not saying that i'm not that i'm immune to that because i did the 15:01 same thing and the the most uh 15:07 the way that that that that affected me the most was when we would go out and do protecting god's children when we would do workshops on 15:13 you know child abuse for the archdiocese and you know that exact same thing would 15:18 happen where you'd get just one percent and they would just just rip you up and 15:24 most of the time it was probably because those were the people that didn't want to go there and hear the message right 15:30 and i'm i'm a coach don't kill the messenger coach yeah i love coaching right how can you tell me not to pat 15:35 these kids on the bus right or you know i'm telling you if you do you're get undressed and take a shower with them 15:41 yeah absolutely which is you know that's i i heard that more than one because so 15:46 people in the audience if you're saying oh my god no one ever said that i guarantee you 15:52 i heard exactly that statement more than once but what are you saying 15:57 immediately shower with these kids written documents yeah and then come and stand in front of your face and say it right yeah which 16:04 what we're talking about and it can stir you up i mean it's working you up right now yeah and and 16:10 there's not an individual in front of you whose nonverbals you can read a check messaging interact with and maybe 16:18 reach an accommodation where both of you can go oh that makes sense to me right okay so that's a good time to take a 16:24 break and i will cool down and we'll pick this up on the other side all right 16:30 you know if you've gotten this far into the show then obviously you find the 16:35 show to be worthwhile beneficial maybe even helpful and so i just wanted to say 16:41 if you've gotten this far into the show and you want to help us out even if you don't want to help us out just do it 16:47 anyway go to apple podcasts and rate us and leave a review that is super 16:54 helpful subscribe to the show on youtube and hit the bell icon so that you get 17:00 notifications when new shows drop that stuff is really really helpful for us 17:05 and i know that mr brett agrees absolutely reviews are positive uh positive reviews are more positive than 17:12 the negative ones are as well because it helps you decide what how to focus and how to how 17:18 whatever you're attending to say is being heard and the secret is the algorithm doesn't care whether the 17:24 review is positive or negative as our friend mike norton says regularly feedback is a gift 17:29 if it's friday it's psych with mike okay we're back and 17:34 in the uh the frontiers in psychology article that i sent you they are actually now on the verge of 17:42 creating an entire diagnosis around what we're talking about called internet communication disorder and i don't know 17:50 so specific sub domains yeah so it might be like for pornography you know abuse 17:56 level uh so yeah the internet communication disorder we just saw an example of it 18:02 in the the the brown jackson hearings yeah yeah so so 18:09 we're doing this and and they haven't voted yet we assume that she's going to be confirmed but katanji uh brown 18:14 jackson is has been nominated for the supreme court and in her hearings 18:21 um they were talking about you know that that even one uh download 18:26 or so the the the sensing protocols for pornography child pornography were 18:32 dependent on the number of digital images that could be retrieved off your computer 18:38 and so what the article that i read was saying is when 18:44 they were talking about the time frame they were talking about 100 you could only download 5 000. yeah yeah but now you can press a 18:51 button and get 500 000 in a single download they're just cascading into 18:57 your computer and so is it fair to judge someone off of what was going on 19:03 you know a hundred years ago or not a hundred years ago but so you're looking at technology from the technology or you're looking at the content of the 19:09 message right but the technology has evolved to a point now where it's 19:15 impossible to not have these kinds of communications we're all talking about you know we're 19:21 all walking around with you know essentially super computers in our 19:26 pockets we all engage in some form of digital communication and if i text you 19:34 and you don't answer me back in 10 minutes i'm wondering did something happen to 19:40 you yeah and is that something is that healthy i don't think that's healthy no 19:46 and i mean there's so many different sidebars to that you know corporations are now focusing on telling their 19:53 employees turn turn the thing off and go home we can tell if you check back in we can tell if you check your emails we 19:59 don't want you doing that we want you to have an evening with your family but that's new messaging 20 15 years ago 20:05 10 years ago they were saying we want you ready 24 7. if i call you you better answer the damn phone 20:11 so people are addicted to checking their cell phones at night they take them to bed 20:16 there are sleep problems that are diagnosed because you have blue light in your bedroom you have 20:21 the tv on you have your computer on you have your phone on and it impacts your sleeping uh so so 20:28 there are so many elements of this that could be focused on and say well let's 20:34 make an intervention here let's make an intervention here what they're doing with the jackson hearings 20:41 is trying to build an argument in support of a social 20:47 agenda that they have yeah about pornography or about uh race training 20:52 education crt i mean i saw a meme where they'd taken her three initials and 20:57 scratched them out and put crt next to him for critical race theory uh 21:03 they claim well she's on the board of a private elementary school in washington d.c 21:09 and so she represents critical every single teaching that the school does this elementary school level 21:15 well and the science is critical race is not taught as a theory 21:20 in elementary schools in junior high schools or in high schools it is taught at the university level for higher level 21:26 university training uh when and where it's sought but that doesn't pop in the media of course so if 21:33 we're gonna do it on the internet we gotta find something that makes it pop or we gotta make it pop right but you know i just am amazed at 21:42 the growth i said i was going to say proliferation but i think it's more the growth of this phenomenon 21:50 you know one of the things that they talk about in this article is that the more 21:56 electronic communications that you have oftentimes the more lonely you feel so 22:02 you get driven to engage in a large 22:08 number of electronic communications because you're lonely but that doesn't actually satisfy that 22:15 loneliness we have done podcasts in the last two years uh different ones that focus on 22:21 research that shows that people are getting pregnant less often they're having sex less often 22:28 why would that be well the research supports that many of them are laying in bed next to their 22:33 partner each individually looking at a communication device showing some level 22:39 of pornography but not interacting with each other not having sex with each other so the research 22:44 shows that they lay there and masturbate looking at something on a video screen instead of having sex with their partner 22:51 and that the more that you do that the more that it desensitizes you but 22:56 the more that it desensitizes you to the stimulus input of the porn so the more that's how people get into crazy animal 23:03 porn and stuff yeah it's because they have to increase the level of stimulation to get that you build up a 23:09 tolerance how do you find a crazy animal i don't know you you just give them give them an mmpi 23:17 and rate their results and diagnosis yeah which is a previous conversation but the 23:22 point is that the more that you expose yourself to these digital formats the 23:28 less satisfying that they are and then the solution is to expose yourself to 23:33 more of the digital formats and at the same time you're losing your ability to really be connected to 23:41 real human beings and so this is a tangential thing but something that i wanted to bring up in 23:47 all of this i worked as a clinical director for an eap and employee assistance program for 23:53 about a decade and one of the things and this was a couple of years ago so i've been 23:59 i haven't been there for a couple of years but while i was there they were working with a company to 24:07 develop a mental health bot that would be essentially you would text 24:12 in and say i'm feeling lonely and the bot would talk to you rather than a therapist and the more so the pandemic 24:19 now has exacerbated this because there's a lot of research that's trying to lay the foundation for teletherapy as the 24:27 wave of the future and i'm telling you right now if you're a therapist and you think teletherapy is a good idea you are 24:35 putting yourself out of a job because the insurance companies don't want to pay you to do that therapy they want to 24:42 produce a bot that will do that therapy and they want you to be out of the equation i've seen 24:49 uh some of those programs and they're things like i call up and say i'm feeling depressed 24:56 and the robot says say more about that uh can you tell me more about that and 25:03 you go well yeah i'm depressed because you know my but listen to the way that you said that the way that you said that 25:10 was very warm and very engendering it made me want to say more to you but this 25:17 is what the robot said can you say no more no no it doesn't work that way well i'm 25:24 talking about if it's text now yes okay yes if if they're putting voice synthesized yeah overlays on the text i 25:32 have people read it but the point is this is that's not real therapy that's 25:38 not a real human connection right we are losing our ability to be genuinely 25:44 connected and to be able to understand the empathic responsiveness of ourselves 25:51 so if if if empathy is mapped on the left temporal lobe where your language centers are as it is 25:58 and you are never in the presence of another human being you don't learn how to be an empathic 26:05 person can you say more about that i can say a lot more about it because i am i'm 26:12 really worried that we are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy so 26:18 people are very interested in expanding telehealth and i'm not you know 26:24 if you live in you know some place outside of bozeman montana and it's 350 26:30 miles to a grocery store and you don't have access to a mental health professional do i believe that 26:36 telehealth is better than no health at all absolutely i absolutely do but in that's that's less than one 26:43 percent of the total population of the country most of us live in an area where we 26:48 could drive and get actual professional health help and i think that if we start 26:54 to convince ourselves that we don't need to be in the presence of other human beings that we're just going to be 27:01 exacerbating this slide down this spiral and where does that end 27:07 up if we if we actually educate out of ourselves the ability to 27:13 read nonverbal human behavior and we lose our capacity to be empathically 27:19 responsive to other human beings where are we going to be that's a scary place to be 27:26 yeah and i think that people are creating that reality i know that the 27:33 the insurance companies want that reality because i've been in rooms where insurance companies have 27:39 said exactly that and they're going to deny they're going to say oh no we just want to deliver good mental health 27:44 services to the most amount of people the company wants to make a profit they don't deliver services at all exactly 27:49 they want to deny services you don't need that you're not sick and that's not a real sickness because if i say it is 27:55 then i gotta pay for it the same school districts have been taught around the country tell the teachers not to 28:02 diagnose tell the school counselor oh yeah not to diagnose because if they diagnose if the counselor says to the 28:09 parent we think little johnny is adhd right then the school district becomes 28:14 responsible for paying for the treatment right but if the counselor says wonder if you had him assessed what they 28:21 would discover then they tell you take him out somewhere 28:27 or they say well i think he needs some help he's struggling and he said some 28:32 scary things so you need to get him some help and the parent says no we don't believe 28:38 in that stuff we'll we'll pray we'll we'll sit over the dinner table now we'll pray and that'll be better and then that afternoon because they didn't 28:44 take the kid out of the school and they didn't take him to the hospital after he'd already said i want to kill people he goes out and kills people then the 28:51 parents get arrested and charged and tried for not doing what 28:57 they need to do and you're talking about the guy who shot up it yeah in michigan yeah and and 29:02 uh i i as far as i know the trial of the parents is still ongoing is that correct 29:08 they haven't concluded that right that's right but you know the parents were apoplexic when they got arrested it's 29:16 not our fault and everybody said but the school told you not once not twice but three times that they had concerns they 29:24 not only asked at one point demanded that you take him home and that was the day that he had a gun 29:30 in his backpack and i just am i'm amazed 29:35 when i was young you as a parent you expected that it was 29:41 your responsibility to raise your children and i'm not sure that that is the expectation today 29:50 it's such a loaded statement it is it is okay i'm a little fired up right now yeah 29:56 because this is a topic that really uh is something that i am concerned 30:01 about i'm concerned about it from a professional perspective i'm also concerned about it from a social 30:08 psychology perspective and the the reason why i'm so concerned 30:13 about it is it wasn't like we couldn't see this coming 30:18 and yet we don't do anything until we're in crisis and it's just a shame why can't we 30:26 recognize something might be a problem before it becomes a problem 30:34 so carried to extremes they are developing these 30:39 artificial reality games where you wear equipment and you feel like you're in a room with other people yeah you can have 30:46 a conversation you can see them you can move you can read the non-verbals you can sword fight you can interact 30:51 you can have sex all you need is this pair of glasses and earphones and you go away from where you 30:58 are there's a disney cartoon movie out several years ago i'm blanking on the name of it but uh 31:07 these this robot the earth has been destroyed and this robot's looking around and it has a personality and the 31:14 survivors of earth are floating around in space somewhere for another place to go eva evo yeah yeah yeah and 31:21 it's uh like cartoons used to be when we were growing up a lot of social messages in 31:28 there under the disguise of an entertainment about the internet about 31:34 the way we use our time about the interface with mechanics mechanical systems 31:41 so this kind of stuff is potentially deadly for our culture as 31:48 well as for individuals but it's also potentially rewarding and expansive and we can grow and 31:55 be places we've never been and be places we'll never go and that's fair and it's not yeah 32:01 so you're right i shouldn't make it all about doom and gloom because there has been a lot of benefit and a lot of 32:07 positivity that's come out of the our access to electronic media but 32:12 it just you know i i see the writing on the wall touch the nerve yeah 32:17 yeah so hopefully that was beneficial for people as always the music that appears inside with mike is written and 32:23 performed by mr benjamin the clue we are begging you to go to the internets find us on the youtubes psych with mike and 32:31 subscribe to us there that would be really helpful you can go on apple podcast and find a psych with mike rate 32:37 us and leave us a comment we would really appreciate that as well and as always if it's friday it's psych with my 32:46 [Music] 32:56 [Music]