Human Communications Are Hard

Delays and technical issues bias us against others experiencing them.

This comes from "Why are you so slow? - Misattribution of transmission delay to attributes of the conversation partner at the far-end", a paper by Katrin Schoenenberg, Alexander Raake, and Judith Koeppe.

I found this paper while reading Digital Body Language by Erica Dhawan. So far the book is good but I paused to dig into this paper that lays out some of the base research behind it (This is a habit I picked up in college, reading the papers behind the books, getting closer to the primary material and seeing what the raw information says. I recommend it if your looking for a new study habit)

Back to the paper.

"Instead of perceiving a drop in quality, people misattribute the effects of delay to the person at the far-end." The implications of this for a remote work force are dramatic. Possibly more dramatic for the interview process. The paper mentions elsewhere that an increase in delay of 600 ms "was observed to [reduce the quality of the conversation]… about one mean opinion score point… without additional echo."

Just more than a half a second of additional delay lowers your opinion of the abilities of the person on the other end.

Things I am taking away from this include:

• Interview teams need to be extremely empathetic
• Interview teams must be aware of this bias
• Teams that work together need to be aware of this, especially with new members of the team when the relationship is new
• Making sure your team has access to the best internet possible is important

Things I need to think about more:

• What does this mean for onboarding in person/remote?
• How do you build team building/trust building activities that are remote and take this into account? If delays in them reinforce the bias that would be counter productive.

Related to this is "What Impossible Meant to Richard Feynman" by Paul J. Steinhardt where he tells the story of when Feynman told him something he was lecturing on was impossible. The unfolding story reveals some of the complexities of human communication.

"I also learned that 'impossible,' when used by Feynman, did not necessarily mean 'unachievable' or 'ridiculous.' Sometimes it meant, 'Wow! Here is something amazing that contradicts what we would normally expect to be true. This is worth understanding!' … The subject of my talk, a radically new form of matter known as 'quasicrystals,' conflicted with principles he thought were true. It was therefore interesting and worth understanding."

I know little about quasicrystals, but I love how the learned context of long term interactions allowed someone to better understand what a great scientist was saying to them. How many of our relationships are better because of this sort of shared context? How many things do we misunderstand because of a lack of it?

This was originally published in this issue of the newsletter

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