Todd Rogers on Concise Writing - Think Better Speaker Series

welcome everybody good evening good afternoon good morning whatever time it happens to be where you're joining us tonight this is our third instantiation of our think better series in this virtual world uh back in april first when we did our first one i confidently predicted that by this time we would be meeting back together in person down at the gleacher center for a regular speaker series and i could not possibly have been more wrong about that oh my gosh what uh how naive i was if you've been a visitor to uh to us at the university of chicago or participated in a few of these talks before as an audience member you can probably list a half dozen biases that that overconfident prediction exemplified that said i'm confident that we're going to continue doing these speaker series uh as part of the center for decision uh research going forward um and i'm certain you're gonna enjoy these talks as well this virtual format has been uh a good way for us to get a lot more people involved in these talks and we could have otherwise we have had over 4000 registrations for this talk tonight alone i'm also confident that we're going to be having uh additional online uh events this winter and spring coming up on february 17th as our very own ayla fishbach who's going to talk to us about self-control and motivation she's working on a book as well and hopefully she'll talk to us a bit about that and then katie milkman from wharton is going to be joining us on may 20th 2021 i'm not sure what she's going to talk about then that is to be decided yet i'm not making predictions about that for sure um at this point we're probably going to continue some version of these virtual events going forward uh even once we're back in person we're not quite sure what that's going to look like yet i can promise though and i'm certain that you're going to enjoy what you're going to hear tonight because we're lucky to have todd rogers with us who is just uh a super fun and interesting person to talk with i've loved getting ready for this event because it's meant that we've had time to talk with each other and plan for this uh for this talk this evening the goal of these presentations in this think better series is to try to highlight how behavioral science is being used out in the world to make a difference and there's no better person in the field to talk about this than todd rogers based on his research over the years i first got to know todd in 2003 when he joined as a phd student in social psychology at harvard todd stood out among our phd students very early as being different in the interest that he had compared to other our other phd students in psychology we really spent a lot of time getting lost in the mind's weeds trying to figure out exactly how this or that process works to shape this or that decision but todd really wanted to know how it is the world works and how we can use our understanding of the mind to really make a meaningful difference out there in the world we want to understand what really works out there what has big impact and i'll sadly acknowledge that interest is not exactly a great career path in psychology because doing that kind of impactful work to figure out what actually works out in the world is really hard and painstaking work but todd got to work on this really early in his career after getting his phd at harvard in 2008 he started a consulting group called the analyst institute meant to improve voter communication and encourage more civic participation after working in that for a few years and creating a successful business that conducted literally hundreds of behavioral science experiments in the field at the time if not more than that he returned to academia on the faculty at the harvard kennedy school where he's now a tenured faculty member he now studies things like how to help families improve student performance in school where he started another venture called in class today to reduce student absenteeism that's amazingly effective he also studies how to improve democracy by increasing election participation and openness to opposing viewpoints exactly the kinds of things that we need more of in the world right now todd could give us an amazing talk i think pretty much every week for a year if we asked him to but we only have him for one night and what he's going to talk about tonight is really a brand new line of research for him that he has not spent a lot of time talking about so i'm really excited to hear about this work and i think you're going to be really excited to hear about it this work is focusing on how to help people communicate better and more effectively one of the key insights that he's going to share with us is the importance of shutting up and saying less to communicate more so i will shut up now and let todd take over todd thanks so much for joining us tonight we're so grateful for having you here thank you nick uh it is a real pleasure and honor to be a part of this uh i i'm not gonna make any predictions

about the future but what i can look backwards and say that i have here a mug from the self and social judgment lab which was nick apple's lab as of 2003 17 years ago uh and it still works so what i'm going to start with uh so the i the talk is called fewer words please uh it i think it makes most sense through biography to begin with uh it started with this organization that uh nick was describing called the analyst institute where we translated behavioral science insights in a political strategy for the left and i co-founded it and one of our we ran hundreds of large field experiments and one of our like big challenges was getting organizations to work with us so whether it's a political campaign or a 501c3 or c4 or pac or any other kind of political or civic entity and i quickly learned that in these organizations no one's job is to reply to my emails and ever get back to me and so we shifted so i realized that like my job was to get people to reply and uh and hopefully collaborate so we started a rule at the analysts institute which was that uh no email should be more than five sentences and then uh and then when i moved back to to harvard i started a lab where we work with school districts around the country uh dozens or even hundreds of school districts including at a time chicago public schools in new york and la and lots of other philly lots of other districts and similarly to my surprise no one in those districts had it as part of their job description to reply to my emails and so it we went from a rule at the analyst institute of five sentences max we went down to three no email could be more than three cents long that means anything else needs to be below the signature uh here's what the point of this email is we're asking for this more information below or an attachment um and then i started everyday labs which is the new name for in-class today which is a company that helps districts around the country reduce student absenteeism uh at scale and similarly the a big challenge is to get people to reply to our emails uh and so this sort of this and i am not advocating three cents max email cap that is not the takeaway of this talk but it was sort of an internal heuristic so that we could become more effective communicators but this whole like just in intuitive process that we developed to try to get people to respond and seem to have some evidence for became more central as the coronavirus came around and i started receiving hilarious slash tragically long emails from every organization i have any association with whether it's as an advisor an employee a customer a friend a member or an ally every organization was sending lots of emails that were extraordinarily long and i tried really hard to read them but i just i could probably count on one hand and maybe less than one hand the number of those emails i made it all the way through and they were all extremely well intended and i think i agreed with most of the things that they were saying so i wrote an op-ed why no one was reading your coronavirus emails and then started doing more research in school districts on this uh and recently wrote an op-ed write less to say more for schools and developed this program of work over the last couple of years and the coronavirus really crystallized it um so one of the things that i asked this group on the webinar right now to do was send me some absurdly long emails you have received and i am not going to name this person to protect him or her but this is one email that they received i pasted it into mine so you could see the format and uh and it is from a chair of a group that this person is a part of clearly to a big group uh and it proceeds to this is about a third of the email and it's unclear i was telling the team before this meeting that it took me maybe 10 or 12 minutes to read the email then i had to decompose it to figure out what the point of it was uh and then and then i tried to write it better and i ended up giving up on the effort but i think i want to use this as an example of like it's worth being clear what's the point of your of the words in your communications is it to entertain to be leisure or amusement or entertaining reading in college i used i could not understand my really smart and sophisticated friends reading the new yorker because i would

read it i would try to read it and then i would feel like they didn't respect my time and it was just like i could summarize it in a 150 word abstract and i didn't understand why it was so many pages but i realized now that the purpose of that communication was not efficiently translating information from them from the author to me it was it's entertainment and information conveyance is it to document or record some kind of past event just so we have records of it is it symbolic to show that you care i realize now that a lot of the emails that we received um were long like deep really thoughtful essays that were i think mostly symbolic because i think the way it was written conveys they did not expect us to actually read it was written in extremely careful beautiful prose but if the goal was for the hundreds or thousands of people who were receiving it to understand it they would have written it as if it was to be understood and by people who are hurried and out of time um or is it to communicate something are you commute are you are you sending texts or emails to say something maybe even prompt a specific action or two so that's the purpose that i'm going to focus on so if we're trying to actually communicate something to someone and we want them maybe even to take an action how do we most effectively do that that's what the focus here is and so a question that i frequently get is why don't i read my email and i always intend to and if you and i know there are people on right now whose emails are in my inbox and i'm sorry i i'm trying uh but i know i'm not the only person uh and people get angry at for not getting through their emails and so i just wanna this is the only slide that looks like an academic slide uh i'm just gonna list some of the reasons why me and maybe the small fraction of you that probably represents the majority uh are not on top of your inboxes uh according to mckinsey the average person gets over 120 emails per day uh and spends about 28 of our work day doing emails hey todd we can't see your screen were you intending to share it yeah i thought i was showing great slides your perspective is different from ours there you go nope oh god there we are oh well okay well i guess it wasn't that this is what the opening slide looked like fewer words please it was in the prayer gesture uh i said that i coronavirus and then here's an example of the email that i was talking about and then we're all caught up here's the example that one of you generously shared and i appreciate it i would not name you because if we revisit it uh it is a really you succeeded in getting a really terrible email to me um and so why don't you read your email is a question that people will ask reason for and this is a sort of just the only slide that's going to look academic-ish the average person gets 120 plus per day they spend about a quarter of their work day responding to emails um time 48 of us adults report not having enough time in the day uh basically there's this time poverty uh and so we are all the majority of people are extremely busy and running out of time uh here's another one that i think we need to be attentive to english literacy according to the department of education the institute for educational science uh 14 of american adults or heads of households actually are below basic literacy in reading and so what that means is uh they can read out they can read a form but they can't comfortably read out loud or comprehend uh reading when reading out loud uh 21 of americans speak non-english language at home uh so why do people not read their emails we get a lot of it we don't have enough time a lot of people struggle with literacy and english and we have limited attention extremely bounded attention uh we the amount of attention that we have is constrained and it gets allocated across lots of different things and we're easily distractible and when we focus we focus systematically selectively on things so we are drawn our attention is drawn to specific items as we sort of scan the visual field um and i think all of this everything i'm concerned about with our communications i happen to focus on communicating to families especially families in large urban school districts uh which are disproportionately uh under uh black or people of color which are disproportionately uh low income and uh the thing where the thing that i

am particularly concerned about is how do we help the most vulnerable families uh and under in the current environment and in all environments vulnerable families are under the most household stress and pressure and under those conditions people are especially their attention is especially narrowed uh this is research that senda mulanathan and anusha at chicago um pioneered about how attention gets focused under stress and time pressure so all of this is there are a lot of reasons people don't read their emails but then when we get to actually the emails that are badly written there's there are two problems with it emails that are like just sort of not effective at getting the information conveyed when it is prompting or calling for an action the first is often and this happens to me too often these communications aren't read or acted upon so eg see your own inbox and look at all the things the emails that you are feeling guilty about not responding to but if they are read and this is a little more subtle if you write a terrible communication to somebody that takes too much of their time uh if they are read and acted upon you're basically shifting your editing time to a recipient's reading time so if it if you could have cut 30 seconds of reading from the recipient's inbox and let's say you're communicating to a large group to a hundred people uh that would i'm gonna get the math i think that's 50 minutes you are you basically by not editing it down by 30 seconds you are imposing a 50 minute time tax on your recipients so it's unkind to write poor communications you know from a welfare standpoint the total welfare cost especially the larger your audience the more time tax you're shifting off to other people instead of yourself the more you're reducing social welfare um i am inspired often by this quote by blaise pascal and this is called french script i would not normally use it but he is a french scholar of multiple disciplines he wrote to a friend i am writing you a long letter because i don't have time to write a short one and i like that that's self-awareness that the editing process if he had more time he would have written a shorter one now i had more time so i wrote a shorter one with more time i would have written a shorter letter and so we cut his 17 words down to 10 words uh but the big picture is uh with more time we would write he would have written fewer words because it would have been clearer more effective and saved his reader time i'm going to show you now a bunch of experiments that illustrate the four principles that i'm going to try and pull out of how we can be more effective communicating and one is fewer words so here is a couple of months ago we ran an experiment where we emailed about 7 000 school board members basically members of local school boards often who are elected and i want to do a survey so i wrote this long what i thought was it was a pretty sensible message this was the best one that i could write at the time 127 words and i'm emailing them and i'm asking them to take this survey link right down here uh and then jessica lasky fink who's my collaborator on this project this bigger project on fewer words please she suggested maybe we should cut the words down i thought that was a great idea so she just got a pen and cut the words in half just eliminated the whole middle section uh and cut my 127 word email to 49 word email just removed words so then i we ran an online study where we asked a couple hundred participants which email they thought would generate more survey response like more people taking the survey we were asking them to take so more responses and 67 of people thought the longer email would be more effective okay so then thank you to the many um the hundreds of people in the think better community and people who registered for this we asked them we asked you all uh we gave you this email and we said how would you improve it how would you make this better we gave an open-ended box for you to write an email that would prompt a response using this is an anchor how would you improve this and 72 percent of think better participants registrants who registered for a talk called fewer words please added words to the email that this be email that was the more concise version

so it's about 20 wordier uh was the average length of the revised email based on the think better community so what i'm gonna show you now is the actual results we randomly assigned these uh 7 000 school board members to get different length emails remember that general public predicted the longer one will be more effective i originally wrote the longer one as the best i could write to be effective think better members or participants in this added words to my longer one thinking that it was too short and what we found was that the response rate of the long one the a version was 2. 7 percent of school board members responded and filled out the survey and then shortening it uh by about half almost doubled the response rate so just cutting remember it was the exact same text we just cut the entire middle part out um that is a an illustration of the sort of bigger point that is just fewer words i'm going to go through four of these sort of principles and then nick and i will take some of the questions that were submitted that's it that's a clean oh this is a clean illustration of just more words i did another project in california with uh kamala harris when she was the attorney general in california before she was a senator and hedy chang carly robinson and again jess golaski fink uh where school districts in california and around the country when a kid misses like three days of school or some number some standard number of days the district is required to send a letter to the family and often the state legislature mandates what that letter has to look like and so in california this notice of truancy which is what it's called was 350 words written at a college reading level uh and pretty sort of incomprehensible when you read it yeah i'll read the first sentence good attendance is important california education code section 48 260 provides that a pupil a child subject to compulsory full-time education or to compulsory contin like it is clearly not written for humans it was written only for lawyers by lawyers and it was sent in the school district that we work with uh it's sent to hundreds of thousands of families a year throughout california it sent a million or more families a year so with kamala harris and the reason we need the attorney general is because it's mandated what this needs to look like we rewrote it we cut the words we turned into a fifth grade reading level we cut the words by more than half we moved the mandatory language down here so we used formatting to make it really clear like what is your visual process as you look at this you see what's in the box and we went from seven point font to 14 point font we cut the words to 150 words and we wrote and we changed some of the content but the core of the content is the same uh you miss these specific days and you need to be in school and we found was that reducing it increased the impact of the notice of truancy by 40 that means changing rewriting this letter that goes out in this district 150 000 or 200 000 families we had 150 000 in the experiment and statewide it's a million or more rewriting it reduced absences in the subsequent 30 days by about half more effectively than the standard letter okay and the key here is we think it's both reducing words but also changing the reading level making sure that it's written at the grade level uh that is love that is lowest possible and that is not just because of literacy challenges because people are busy and what you want is skimmers to be able to understand what's trying to be said it is hard for a skimmer to understand what this is about whereas a skimmer can understand this so in addition to fewer words right at the lowest possible reading level and a reading level there if there's a there are lots of standards for it but flesh kincaid is a sort of standard uh scoring system and we lowered it to the fifth grade reading level so fewer words decrease reading level and formats reinforce purpose i think that's a really important and sort of often lost uh like element in these discussions i i focus more on cutting words because i think they're just way too many words and frankly it's unkind to use too many words to your reader um if your goal is to make sure they understand and take an action um but format's a reinforced purpose right so the formatting helped us get to directing attention to the key information about attendance um so i want to talk now a little bit about uh how to highlight which is a part of this process so we talk about

fewer words we talk about decreasing reading level and formatting to reinforce purpose so i um i searched online to find a paragraph i search most boring paragraph ever and i wanted to use this to illustrate how highlighting works so you can see here that i've highlighted everything and it resembles a draft of an email that someone sent me a couple of weeks ago where they highlighted i think about two-thirds of the content and what it drew my attention to is that if everything is highlighted nothing is highlighted and so the idea is formatting done well actually is like mindful of the user experience the sort of the recipient of your communications and we are reducing words we're reducing reading level and we're using formatting to reinforce the purpose of the communication so i'm going to show another experiment that i did this time with my the company we spun out of my lab that reduces student absenteeism around the country it sends millions of absence-reducing communications to families every year and we were working with a school district uh this past fall so this fall and the i guess during this is during the summer uh and they're saying thank you for participating in the summer program please answer this one minute survey to help us improve our program uh and then the survey monkey and so what we want to do here is we want to sort of think how do we maximize the likelihood that someone who is too busy to really read all 20 of these words and i know that may sound crazy but the idea is i know that i have text messages in my sms inbox uh when they are more than one little module i say i'll get to them later so how do we make it as easy as possible the purpose of this communication is purely to get people to fill out the survey so we do is we break out the survey separately and we send them out as separate active separate messages the goal here is to make it easier for someone who's skimming to understand the action that we're asking them to take and so we remove thank you for participating in the summer school make that a separate message and basically we let text message be the formatting and now the second message is its own sort of mental unit and we say please answer this one minute survey and so we find we have a 7. 9 response rate with the when it's all in one these are 7. 9 percent of people respond to the survey uh and then when there are two separate messages we increase response rate by about 15 percent so the same number of words all we're doing is we're splitting it out so that we are helping manage people's attention uh so the gist of this one is being really clear on what the purpose of the communication is what's the goal and if the goal is to get people to fill out the survey make sure that the formatting reinforces the purpose and that we are communicating clearly what our goal is so fewer words decrease reading level format to reinforce the purpose and then be clear regarding the purpose as clear as possible on what is the purpose of the message and so i think when nick and i have a discussion in a few minutes answering some of the questions that you all have proposed uh captioning not skimming a time available and wants to look and see the very beginning can be clear below i have these three things i need a volunteer for this and please respond about this date the very first three sentences could address what the purpose is even though the email itself is super long so the next the natural question is why don't we write better messages i asked why do people not read their emails and we talked about time we talked about literacy we talked about attention um and i uh i can't remember what the other one oh and the amount of email so why do people not respond the other is why don't we write more effective communications and really this is a question about how do we how good are we at taking other people's perspective i am writing this long thoughtful email uh where i have spent perhaps 20 30 40 minutes on it it's long it's 800 words i is grammatically correct some of the sentences are really beautiful like parentheticals and it's grammatically correct and it really flows and i'm thinking i spent so much time on this email you're probably going to spend that same amount of time reading it or at least read the whole thing or at least care about it and what it really is a misunderstanding of other people's lives and perspectives

and i'm not going to spend a ton of time on this because this is not really my expertise but if you want someone whose expertise it is my counterpart on this webinar nick eppley actually wrote a book exactly about this topic why we misunderstand what others think believe feel and want so there nick i've got a shout out to your book read it it's an award-winning really excellent book but it really addresses this question of why are we so bad at understanding the perspective of other people which i really think is the foundation of why we are so poor at communicating understanding the situation of other people if we're trying to convey information right now more than ever i work with school districts there's all this urgent information that needs to be passed out and too often it's buried deep in people's inboxes under paragraphs and paragraphs i have um i will say a friend of mine sent a kid to a school where the school had a parent liaison and apparently liaison spent a week every week sent a seven page newsletter about what was going on in the school uh and i went i mean this friend of mine went up to this person and said you know i worry that people aren't reading a seven page weekly newsletter and i have skimmed it and it's really it looks like it's really nice why don't you on the sixth paragraph of the fifth page put this sentence if you re if you are reading this come to my office on monday and i will give you fifty dollars uh just because i wanted this friend of mine wanted to free this woman up to spend her time on things that might be more productive in a seven page weekly newsletter even if there's urgent things buried in it not the most effective so in some fewer words please this is not and we receive questions on this is not to say that an email needs to be three four or five sentences but the idea is every additional word is a tax you are imposing on your reader it is unkind to not edit out to protect people's time uh two decrease reading level same logic uh one especially for the communities i work with like we care the most about the most vulnerable families in our in a lot of our communications so we want to make it as accessible as possible but for everybody even university of chicago graduates who can read it you know at college and beyond uh decreasing the reading level is just makes it more accessible easier to people for people to process under the various stresses of time and whatnot that we have format to reinforce purpose with more time we would talk about how to use bullet points and uh and the logic of different set different structures of highlighting but the high level is really the psychology of it is people are skimming and you want to manage where their attention goes the same reason i do reveal when i do power points i want you to look at the thing i'm showing you right now so now i'm showing decreased reading level and now format's a reinforced purpose you want to manage the flow of their attention and finally be clear regarding purpose uh it is what you don't want is to have a question buried in paragraph three a different four and then a different question in paragraph nine and someone who read opens it the first two paragraphs are what a great time we all had the last time we got together there's just no unless you are comfortable with people not being very responsive uh if the goal is to get people to respond it's important to be very clear up front could be in the subject line opening paragraph and with that uh thank you i do want to make one request please send me mass emails that you get from your deans from your bosses from organizations you're a part of that are like terrible or if you need a rationale for why you shared it they're not optimal and you're looking for improvement because uh i i'm always interested in great examples of terrible emails and with that thank you wonderful todd uh you can stop sharing your screen and then we'll talk for a little bit and we can go back and forth uh as needed um so one thing that just uh sticks out for me is that we communicate all the time like we are constantly communicating with other people and one of the things that psychologists often hear about economists is from economists is that uh it's surprising that sort of people's erroneous perceptions continue and are sort of stubborn it's hard to get rid of if we're doing these things so often and it's important communicating well is important we do it every day and yet we don't seem to learn how to do better why don't we learn from this to do better

i i the the one immediate answer is this perspective taking like i spent a lot of time editing the email to make sure the sentences are right uh and then i'm shifting the burden to you it's your encounter what's the word recalcitrance is that the word uh for not responding so the bird i've shifted in addition to shifting time burdens onto you by my not cutting words i've also shifted responsibility for responsiveness onto you that's that's one thought another is emails do serve lots of different i mean emails or text messages i hear them focus on digital communications they serve lots of purposes and we talked about in the beginning one is like to entertain when you have time another is to put a flag in the ground to say this is a topic i'm i care about and i want you i want to cover my ass when it eventually becomes uh like if there's any future follow-up um but if the goal is to prompt people to take action then we should especially focus on how do we make it as easy for people as possible to do it your question of why we're not getting but maybe we are getting better that would be interesting i mean i think another challenge is we do we don't often get a lot of feedback like you don't know when you send out that terrible email that you would have gotten a 100 better response rate had you cut it in half you just don't i mean we can learn that from conducting experiments but in your daily life your own you live one condition so you don't see what the other conditions are in your life and you so you don't get a chance to learn you don't get good feedback that's interesting i was going to say we do get good feedback in that the phone not ringing is the person not responding but we don't know why they're not responding so you're right it uh it i i've been working with a um we'll say a large uh political consulting organization that sends fundraising emails for candidates uh and we're about to run an experiment where they write a multi-paragraph email that they normally write and then i randomly cut a paragraph for different people just like just we've even talked about randomly cutting sentences so the sentences no longer flow together and they also share the prediction that maybe that would be more effective but like they've run because they run a b tests on everything they run i'd say 10 000 experiments over the last 10 years or five years uh but because they have an isolated the short long there's no reason they would migrate to the efficiency front the optimal frontier on length they're testing like do i say hey in the subject line or uh you know the president obama wants whatever so uh they i they can learn but they're not gonna like get to that migrate to the optimal frontier without explicitly testing his hypothesis a b testing works as long as you're manipulating the right a's and b's and if you're not you don't learn you don't necessarily learn right but you may accidentally stumble into yeah like something that approaches optimality uh but you won't even know why because you you're sort of migrating in that direction a theoretically yeah yeah so i don't know i'm sorry i said a theoretically nick i'm sorry i don't want to pretend for a second this is particularly theoretical other psychologists will work on that so uh we received i will just say to the audience members here on the talk we receive no less than 19 single-spaced pages of questions for you todd so uh i'm not asking you 19 single-spaced questions and i want to apologize for all of the people who submitted questions that we're not going to be able to get to please don't engage in conspiracy theories about why we're not answering your question it's just we got a lot of questions so i tried to bucket them into a few different buckets uh there were consistent themes that we saw in the questions one was this why are we not getting this right you already touched on that but there were a lot of questions about how to do better like how do i write better um and you asked uh if we could have some of the audience members send in examples of terrible uh emails communications that they receive or other communications um and i know you looked at some of them and i wonder if you could give us just some practical guidance on how to put the principles you highlighted into practice with some of these i so i there are just heuristical rules if people are interested in leaving uh with like a shorthand the shorthand is try to cut a third of the words and see if you lose any substance at all uh and so that my feedback will often be which i you know i've people in my lab probably on either on this now or will see this and i hope that they're not offended but like my feedback for something will often be just cut half the words like so it looks good is there no guide no guidance on how and they could probably be random cuts too yeah but like because like

like we're desperate to get people to respond to us like and i assume i mean you work with outside collaborators too like no one's job is to get back to us so that they're like one heuristically is like just cut just ruthlessly try to see if you can cut words and not lose meaning but then um then it's really the this and we'll go through it as an exercise but the it's really about uh trying to take the perspective of the recipient like what are they when they open this what are they going to be seeing so i'll we'll show it now well we'll here's the terrible email sent from to someone in this uh in this in attendance right now i will not name you from nobody's listening everybody's trying to read four pages of text yeah we'll go do it together we'll do it together exactly it's 853 words um and it took me 10 minutes to read and here you don't have to read it we're going to go paragraph there this paragraph is just saying that this per the leader the sender of the email had a great time whenever they all met so whole paragraph on that the next is the least important thing in the whole parish i think is really in the whole email which is hilarious it's a list of gifts and it's bullet pointed as if it's important a list of all the gifts that were given to the new members of their group uh and then the packaging for it and then here's a request that this person makes for people to use a specific app a private group uh here is just something nice about a dinner they had here is a report back on official business from the board and then here is an official business item followed by a request for someone to volunteer somewhere in here you don't have to read it took me a while to figure out they're asking for a volunteer and then here's the most important piece of information in there the let the i it was pre let it let the leader know whether this date works for the following uh meeting you don't have to read it we don't have time for that but if nick if this showed up in your inbox but remember if it shows it's only going to be like the you're only going to see a list of gifts given to new members what are you what do you like how are you likely to respond pushing the down arrow key to the next one yeah i'll get back to it later and then if it disappears on your inbox visible inbox it's lost for eternity i worry right yeah and there is one piece of urgent information here which is like scheduling the next meeting and it does look like they're looking for a new so i try i didn't try to cut words because i think that there is some content like i don't understand what the real goal of the sender is whether it's like to send kind like enthusiasm and his or her own tone so what i instead just did was i just wrote i organized it by uh three actions needed from you please promote on the facebook group can someone please volunteer to leave the system please let me know if those dates work below i discuss these three items and then i just organize them and i move the least input oh and then my the thing that i actually think that took the last thing i came up with was there's no reason you need to bullet point each gift each item of the 22 items given to new members needed bullet points because the bullet point draws attention to it and so like it just takes up too much space so we just turn it into a sentence that no one will read and but then if there's a disclosure requirement i don't know that's but i didn't cut words which i think is really the most important part but here i really just like when someone opens it at least want them to know what we want them to do i think that's an important example to highlight because a lot of the questions we also got we'll get to this in a minute or about whether there are trade-offs here and i think we can all empathize with an email like this um because there are a lot of nice things you want to say you wanna i mean you wanna reach out and communicate with people and talk with them and share news and but here's an example of how to just make what you're doing much clearer in a way that will be more effective and it contains all of the sort of social stuff that's included as well all the warmth that comes from just being nice and communicate yeah i think that there is i mean you're not wrong to imagine there's a ruthlessness to cutting words and that some of the kind the warmth you described could be lost but it doesn't have to be yeah no i think that's a great example it doesn't have to be a zero-sum situation you can keep it there you're just making the content much easier to grasp or a psychologist will often refer to it as fluent just make it easier to process you can do that in lots of ways you did it by organizing it there so sort of back to our initial question about how we do this better um

so you you've suggested some basic tips some some things that people can think about sort of heuristics people can keep top of mind but um it occurred to me it's still going to be hard to take the reader's perspective because you're not in it and you can't be in it like you can do better but you ultimately can't understand how your email is going to be read by somebody who's not in your perspective which i think is one reason why just having somebody proofread is important and even edit for clarity is important which is what you do when your students send you emails you say cut it by half or whatever to get the perspective of what a recipient of this email would actually experience when they see it yeah i think that's right so the the high level what you're saying is we're not very good even if we try to take people's perspectives we can still make mistakes even when you're trying to do it yeah and i actually think that we can get a lot of the way there by just trying i don't think we're trying which is like i hope that all the people listening to this and who encounter this research in the coming years or next time here's a queue next time you go in your inbox and you look at an email that's clearly something you need to read but you move on to the next one like take a second to like figure out why you didn't just read it and like and yet you still know you have to it's because it was like it was gonna take it was just not clear what the purpose was and you know but you know you need to find out what the purpose is they basically bur they shifted the time burden onto you uh by not making it clear but so you asked like how do we do this and perspective taking can be flawed but like here's a heuristic uh your recipient is going to be very busy and have other emails that he or she will be competing with yours they're like i don't you don't need to do that much perspective taking to know that's the case yeah and so you're competing with other things so uh um gives you a perspective to consider your listener has is lying on the floor suffering from zoom fatigue get that person to pay attention to this email you probably do better right and i i just want to preempt not every communication has this goal but a lot of our communications are trying to get people to respond and are soliciting something and if that's the goal then a good first take is take their perspective and and realize that the odds are pretty good that they're going to be busy racing through their emails and that your email is competing with lots of other worthy communications or even better time with loved ones or things that are more fulfilling than reading your email but actually it strikes me as a very interesting hypothesis that you may not yet have data for about whether longer wordier emails actually do convey more kindness or warmth or gratitude or whatever it el whatever it else it is we're trying to communicate it's not obvious to me that's right like your more fluent email that you reorganized and showed us just a moment ago also seems like it would achieve a lot of those other goals potentially more effectively as well you a lot of those other goals you mean of warmth and yeah the other things we're trying to do in communication or even convey that we care about something or putting a stake in the ground these other things that you mentioned um yeah i guess that's right one other way that it could the way we would study it you and i if we were to do lab study is we'd put these in front of people have them read it the problem is it's a two-stage problem it's can you capture and maintain attention long enough to get the gist across and then if you do and if they are engaged do they read the whole thing yeah and it's possible that even at the second stage a better more concise or email will convey that i respect your time and that i put time into it and even conveys warmth and these other things as well because people are even reading what you've written whereas otherwise they might not yeah right so i'm already thinking about a half dozen experiments we need to do together todd um but we'll talk about those later let's get to some of these other questions that we got that are relevant here nick before can i just make one that it is i want to reiterate the two-stage process part which is this is like i you know i used to do the stuff in politics and for 15 years did political communications and the like see the hidden secret of it especially when you're pushing information to people whether it's like let's imagine it's a mailer uh or even a tv ad where can you capture

and maintain attention long enough to get the information across that's the first constraint is do you capture and maintain attention long enough to get your information across and a tv ad you can disengage from a mailer you look at for three seconds before you throw it away an email i open it to figure out what it's about i don't know and then move on and so like they're you gotta get through that first stage and if you don't then at least you need to make sure that first stage got the core information across i uh please continue so i will let me also highlight with that that's a really important reason for studying the facts out in the field in the world um you can do lots of research where you don't witness that two-stage process because you make people pay attention to something in an experiment and so just a shout out for doing that kind of uh out in the field sort of work so there were a number of questions in addition to the how-to that i would categor categorize as what about kinds of questions which are what about this effect or that effect or this consequence that maybe you hadn't had talked about and one of those was whether you think these principles apply to other ways of communicating with other people you know on the phone say when we pick up and call somebody or when we're meeting in person should we be thinking about our more informal communications in the same way so let's uh let's be more let's be concrete we're you and i are colleagues and we bump into each other in the coffee room uh do i if i have an object some so again we are i am restricting to a space where i need you to get something done uh obviously me just coming in damn it nick i need you to film that thing you know like that probably coming in hot isn't the ideal strategy yeah but short might be damn it i need you to fill this thing out yeah uh that would be concise that would be the concise the more i mean it depends what our objective is and i uh i had a friend who when he became a management consultant like had this norm of like writing an outline before leaving voicemails uh and he told this he was also he was like me not a new yorker reader and and said that when i leave rambling messages it tells this is literally a quote when i leave rambling voicemail message this is you know obviously i graduated a long time ago we left voicemail messages uh when i leave rambling voicemail messages it tells him he doesn't that i don't value his time and i mean it's not quite a social we had so then i would leave him i would give him 10-minute voicemail messages but eventually when i conformed to his objectives or his criteria i mean it would still be social content in there it was just it was more structured but i also don't want to like impose structure like some of the best conversation if we were going for a walk with no goal in mind at all is just free like my like association but i'm not trying to get you to do stuff then yeah right yeah that's just connecting and there's a different goal there and there more conversation is probably better like in our walk and talk we had a week or so ago which was great fun i did get a call the other night from a company asking me to fill out a survey which i had already agreed to do uh and i answered the phone and there was talking talking talking talking i looked at the phone it was 30 seconds and they still hadn't asked me a single question and i'm just asking the questions i will answer them and it was a minute they had not gotten to the questions and then i was done and i already agreed to answer that question so one thing that seems important is whether you're the person you're communicating with can can um act on that first filter you described which is just cutting off right if you don't have attention you're not going to pay attention you're not even going to get the message if you run into me in the faculty lounge i'm probably not going to say bye and leave in the middle of conversation so that would be a context where more could be said and maybe the effectiveness wouldn't be lost but in a case like a voicemail message or a phone call where somebody could drop off from or a zoom call like this one um you might experience those um those negative consequences yeah i mean it's okay so that's the so interpersonal live even dyadic interactions but like in our family we have a to-do list that is kept in

google keep and so people can update it and like if it is multiple lines long i'm not i'm it's very often that i'm gonna skip reading it and go to the short option on the to-do list before the long one like and we're talking it takes three sec probably exactly three seconds to read the two-line one but i'm not like i'm just i'm going to skip it and that's but again it did just if you took my perspective you would just realize like he's gonna jump around to like and i don't think i'm the only one who would jump around to the things that are easiest to comprehend before getting harder to comprehend and that's not quite a an interaction but it's an it's not an email or a text yeah right lots of interactions look like that where you could cut off the interaction um or the communication not pay attention um we do have a number of questions about whether they're sort of a dark side to brevity and you touched on this a bit about so one person for instance how do you wrote how do you balance being concise and polite in an email to a superior especially when you when asking for a favor another person wrote i believe in succinct writing however some find it blunt and offensive offensive i see it as saving time so there's a perspective gap right between two in other words i justify some ramblings as wanting to be warm and human are there tricks to being concise while still being you those are great i am i always reserve even in a work in the lab where we have a three to five sentence max the first sentence is always a warmth social uh message for exactly the reason of like bluntness uh i don't again i don't have good evidence although you could imagine it wouldn't be that hard to test like it that adding a vacuous warm message just in like five words hope you're well please fill out my survey pay your debt uh yeah i mean like i did but i think that they're not wrong like at the the risk of cutting of of losing warmth but i think we as we talked about you can keep it i mean you know strong uh the elements of style omit needless words those are needless words uh and i'm saying you can even cut more i think but you there's a there doesn't have to be the trade-off i think one challenge is that the words that we produce seem more valuable and so it's hard to identify which ones are needless like every author has experienced this right that um that you know editing is hard because you love the words you came up with and you can't cut it's hard to do because you value those words in a way that a reader might not that seems very challenging yeah though any psychologist or i'm sure other fields have the same thing nick and i are sometimes right for a journal like psych science which has a cap on the number of words and the experience of having to add something and then needing to stay under the word cap like it really is pretty eye opening that i don't think i lost anything i just cut out redundancy that cap really sort of like is eye opening and i assume people in other fields experience it too right absolutely all right well uh i want to be cognizant of people's time uh including yours it is uh it is seven o'clock which is the at least in chicago eight o'clock where you are todd um so i'm gonna let you go and i'm gonna thank you again for spending time with us tonight uh it's always so much fun to talk with you and hear uh what you're up to and the impact that you're having on the world and i want to thank uh thank all of the audience members who stuck with us uh tonight during these hard times we hope you're staying well and hanging in there as best you can we will look forward to seeing you uh on february 17th when i fishbach joins us and until then uh please do your best to stay well we'll see you soon bye everybody thank you thanks time