Don't trust me, I'm an influencer! (Patreon)

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

On this channel I talk a lot. Guess you’ve noticed that. So in this video, I want to talk about how we talk, or how we communicate information on social media in general. Why is it so difficult to communicate on social media? What’s a parasocial relationship, and should you trust me? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

Scientists have many theories about why humans ended up dominating this planet. Maybe it’s the opposing thumb that let us use tools. Or the invention of cooking that improved nutrition. Or maybe it’s one or the other part of our magnificent brains, like the Hyperactive Imagination Lobe, the Can’t-Quite-Remember-Why-I-Came-Here Cortex, or the Someone-Else’s-Problem Nucleus.

Well, *I think the reason that humans came to be the dominant species on this planet, for better or worse, is that we’re really good with communicating information and learning from new information. And the major reason we run into trouble is communication failure. Worse still, a communication failure that we don’t notice.

Unfortunately, social media has made those communication failures more likely. That’s because communication on social media is more difficult than in-person communication for a number of reasons. One is that it’s often text-only and that’s lacking cues we take from expression and body language.

Take the statement “oh my god”. This could be “oh my god” or “oh my god” or “oh my god” and you’d immediately know that each of those means something completely difference. If all you have to work with is “omg” that’s really not much.

You may have heard about the so-called seven percent rule. This rule says that in oral communication only seven percent is verbal and the rest non-verbal, where the non-verbal part includes both body language and differences in vocal expression like intonation, pace, volume, emphasis and so on. If this was true, it’d mean that we convey more information with non-verbal cues than with words. This can’t possibly be correct, you might say, and indeed it isn’t.

The seven percent rule is also known as the Mehrabian Rule. It’s named after Albert Mehrabian, a professor of psychology who published his findings in the early 1970s. He indeed found this 7 percent share, but the context matters. Mehrabian wasn’t studying in-person communication in general, he was studying specifically how we communicate emotion. It’s in that case, when we try to convey emotion, that words account for only 7%.  Well, that’s what he said. But as I keep preaching, never trust a number without an uncertainty estimate. Especially not if it’s psychology.

But leaving aside that the 7 percent is neither meaningful nor accurate, it broadly speaking that in case of conflicting emotional messages, we tend to give more weight to behaviour than to words. Simply put, if you shout “I’m not angry” we totally get the message.

What this means is that with written words it’s particularly difficult to communicate emotion. Isn’t this what emojis are there for? Yes, in principle. In practice, interpreting emojis is its own art. First of all, there’s the issue that they look somewhat differently on different platforms and that might slightly change your interpretation. This, for example, is what Apple calls the “relieved face”. This is what it looks like on skype. I don’t know about you, but to me it looks hungry.

Then, there are some with ambiguous meaning. First time I saw the emoji that’s called “face with steam from nose,” I thought it’s someone with cauliflower in their nostrils. I also had to be told this one is a person gesturing okay.

A study from last year found that one of the most ambiguous emojis is this one which no one has any idea what it means. I asked my followers on the platform formerly known as twitter, what they think it means. Some of my favorite answers are a waiter who lost his tray, “Is it raining?” “I’m a little teapot” “The kid who mugged me was this tall, officer”  and the international symbol for the Heaviside function.

Or how about this? Even if you can figure out it’s a shaking face, what does it mean? According to the emojipedia, it can express “fear” as well as “disbelief,” “dizziness,” and “excitement,” among other things like, for example “shaking from external forces like dinosaurs walking nearby”. I guess that clears it up then.

Even leaving aside those emojis whose meaning is unclear to begin with, several studies have shown that people might interpret the emotional message different from your intention, depending on age, gender, and nationality.  To be fair, these aren’t huge differences, but on top of that are community interpretations.

For example, in the community that I am part of, the nerd face is generally a positive image. But in other groups, maybe it’s an insult. Generally, I find that I learn the meaning of emojis from the context in which other people use it. The steam from the nose, apparently, is a snort.

And then my own usage depends on whom I’ve learned it from. So emojis do help if you’re staying within a group of people, you’re familiar with, but the larger the community gap, the bigger the problem. Not to mention that some people might find you weird for even using them.

Now, doing videos actually solves a lot of these problems, because you get all your non-verbal cues, but there’s another issue. It’s that while you can stop and rewind me, you can’t interrupt me to ask a question.

Communication can broadly be classified into two types, synchronous and asynchronous. In synchronous communication, the interaction occurs in real-time, like in face-to-face conversations and phone calls but also live chat or instant messaging. In asynchronous communication you must wait until the other party responds. Examples include letters, email, scientific publications, attempts to communicate with aliens, and, yes, also YouTube videos.

In the past decade or so, the boundaries between those two types of communication have blurred. This is because on most platforms you find some people who are there with you at the same time, so you might have synchronous or almost synchronous communication. But then people might reply to that conversation for weeks or years.

You also have video replies and in recent years, reaction videos. Reaction videos are weird because they’re asynchronous records of a synchronous response. A lot of you have asked me to do reaction videos, but I can’t quite see the point given that I’m about as expressive as a brick.

Asynchronous conversation is more difficult than synchronous conversation for a number of reasons. In synchronous conversation, like when we’re talking, we can instantly repair problems. A “repair” is a clarification to something we said or typed. There are different types of repair, depending on whether you initiate it yourself or the person you are communicating with does, and whether you do the repair yourself, or whether the other person does it.

A self-initiated self-repair is a statement of the sort “Sorry, what I meant is, there are four different types of repair…” and so on. You have those in recordings of synchronous conversations, but you rarely get them in crafted writing or scripted text like this.

Then there is the self-initiated other-repair. That’s a situation when I ask myself “What’s his name?”, and you say “Musk, Elon Musk.” There’s also the other-initiated other-repair, which is when you interrupt me to say “X? Oh, you mean twitter!”

But the most relevant repair is that initiated by the person you are trying to convey information to. It’s usually a statement of the sort “What do you mean?” Or “I didn’t understand that.” And in asynchronous conversation, like the one we’re having right now, other-initiated repair doesn’t work.

Studies have found that we have to “repair” spoken conversation every one to two minutes, and this frequency seems to be pretty much independent of the language. That’s a lot, and it’s something we can’t do in asynchronous conversation. This means, it’s, unfortunately, highly likely that when you watch my videos, many of you are left with unanswered questions. I am trying to make up for this by answering questions in the comments here and on patreon, but there’s limits to how much this can achieve.

That it’s difficult to repair mistakes in asynchronous conversation is of course not a new problem, you have the same problem with letters. But social media has made this issue more pressing because it’s added a new dimension to the issue, the parasocial relationship.

A parasocial relationship is loosely speaking a one-way relationship. It’s a bond you have with someone who doesn’t return that relation, often that’s a public figure or, well, a YouTuber.

Pretty much everyone who has grown up in the developed world has parasocial relationships. Research has found that children as young as 18 months form parasocial relationships with cartoon characters.

I have a lot of parasocial relationships with other YouTubers, for example Aly from Papa English. Aly has been teaching me invaluable lessons such the many uses of the word “shit”, I shit you not. I always look forward to watching his videos because he’s become part of my life. Yet he doesn’t know anything about my existence. Aly, in case you end up watching this, thanks for everything, more swearwords please.

And I have parasocial relationships with many of you, but the other way round. I don’t like it. I would much prefer being able to talk to each of you and find out what brings you here and what you do and what your interests are and what do and don’t like about this channel. But I can’t.

So we have to work with it, somehow, and here the issue with the conversation repair comes back. Putting out a video that will be watched by some hundred thousand people is not like sending a letter to your love in New York. I don’t get one reply. I get thousands. More often than not, they contradict each other. I can’t repair all of that, it’s just not possible.

And that’s not the only problem with parasocial relationships. One particularly weird aspect of them is that’s a relationship with what psychologists call a public “persona” not a real person. What you know of me, isn’t me, it’s what I choose to share with you, that’s my public persona.

Now, I think my friends would all confirm that in real life I’m pretty much the same as on this YouTube channel, what with impromptu lectures and sarcastic jokes, but then of course that’s exactly what I would say, wouldn’t I.

The issue is, parasocial relationships are easy to exploit for the sake of making money, and you see this a lot on social media. The thing is that in the present times, attention means money. And influencers have attention which they can, and do, convert into money.

A study from 2018 looked for the most important factor that helped YouTubers to affect their viewers’ attitude, both to the video as well as the brand they’re promoting. What do you think it is? It’s trust. Trust scored well higher than expertise, and, likability, interestingly enough, had pretty much no influence on attitude to the content. You don’t have to like me guys, just trust me, I’m a physicist!

But of course, this trust can be abused. A prominent example is the infamous Liver King, who claimed he was growing spectacular muscles by eating insane amounts of raw meat, but actually spent upwards of ten thousand dollars a month on muscle enhancing drugs [Source (31)]. I can promise that my German accent is real.

Now you’re all smart people and I believe you’re not easily influenced, but there’s one thing you should watch out for. Parasocial relationships can be both positive and negative. Some people are fans, some people are haters. For some public personas, the polarization between the two groups is dramatic, think Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or JK Rowling.

The thing is now this. Since it’s rare for a fan or hater to have an interaction with the persona they’re interested in, they mostly communicate among each other. This leads to extreme in-group and out-group behavior. If you find yourself in a situation like this, be careful, because you might psychologically maneuver yourself into a corner where you have defended someone you barely know, or attack someone you barely know, to remain welcome by that group you want to be part of.

Now, let me be honest, if I see that someone is attacking me in an unreasonable way, I certainly wish someone would come to my defense. However, if you see that happening, for your own benefit, I recommend you just ignore it.

I say this partly because some people pick on me just to draw attention to themselves. But more importantly, in-group behavior is a huge cognitive bias and I’d much prefer it if you protected your rationality rather than me. I’ll be fine, don’t worry. Just let them talk.

In summary. Communication on social media is difficult, because communication is difficult, period. It requires that we get some neural signals converted into words and motion and hope that the other person decodes it correctly. It frequently goes wrong.

In person-to-person communication, non-verbal cues and the possibility to repair are essential to convey meaning, but they’re difficult on social media, especially for asynchronous conversation. And parasocial relationships bring in additional psychological problems.

I find it helps to know a little about all those things, to reflect on what’s going on and to keep a clear head. So I hope you find this video useful. If you have other tips that help you stay levelheaded on social media, let us know in the comments.