How technology is eroding our most basic human skills
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In an age of Zoom meetings, Slack channels, and LinkedIn profiles, our ability to truly understand and connect with others is at risk. Richard Davis, author of Good Judgment: Making Better Business Decisions with the Science of Human Personality, argues that our increasing reliance on technology is undermining a fundamental human skill: the ability to recognize and understand others in face-to-face interactions.
“There’s a widespread concern that our insight into other people is in danger of decline, that we’re losing it, with serious consequences,” Davis told me in a recent conversation. He attributes the decline in our ability to perceive interpersonal relationships to our constant engagement with digital devices and the shift to virtual interactions.
The dangers of a digital-only connection
What Davis calls perceptual acuity — our ability to gauge other people’s personalities and reliably predict their behavior based on those personalities — is diminished by “constantly being on our phones, having many of our conversations, connections, and decisions over Zoom.”
“Being always online creates a huge loss of fidelity,” Davis said. “The loss of fidelity in digital interactions can lead to misunderstandings, poor judgments, and missed opportunities to truly connect with others.”
The value of face-to-face recognition
Why is this important? Davis argues that the ability to understand others is crucial to success and happiness in all aspects of life. “And that applies to success and happiness in life well beyond the workplace.” In essence, the ability to understand and be understood by others is a fundamental life skill that impacts everything from personal relationships to professional success. As we rely more and more on digital interactions, we risk losing the nuanced understanding that comes from face-to-face encounters.
Strategies for maintaining and improving face-to-face perception skills
So how can we maintain and improve our ability to understand others in an increasingly digital world? Davis offers a few strategies.
1. Prioritize face-to-face interactions
“If you have decisions to make, make sure you do them in person, not over Zoom,” Davis advises. Digital tools can certainly help, but big decisions and important relationship building should happen in person whenever possible.
2. Build a framework for understanding personality
When observing others, Davis recommends using a framework based on the Big Five personality traits, which he groups into five “boxes”: intelligence, sociability, emotionality, drive, and conscientiousness. With these categories in mind, we can more effectively process and remember the information we gather about others during face-to-face interactions.
3. Practice active observation
“Let’s take our eyes off our digital devices and exercise this power of perception. Pay attention to people and observe their behavior,” suggests Davis. He encourages us to “have an almost child-like curiosity about the people we interact with. Ask ourselves, ‘What am I really looking at? Am I really paying attention to this person?'”
4. Create opportunities for individuality
As leaders and colleagues, we can create an environment that encourages people to reveal more about themselves. Davis advises, “A big part of a leader’s job is to ask the right questions and adopt attitudes that encourage people to reveal their true character.”
5. Be open and transparent
To encourage others to open up, we need to model openness ourselves: “People tend to close down when they feel they’re being interrogated,” Davis warns. Instead, she recommends, “maintain a relaxed demeanor that makes the other person feel at ease and allows them to reveal more of themselves.”
The urgency of maintaining face-to-face perception skills
Davis offers a compelling analogy to illustrate the urgent need to preserve in-person perceptual skills: “The analogy I use is ‘wayfinding.’ We have essentially outsourced our wayfinding abilities to our phones and GPS, and the same is true for perception. At one time, we had the ability to get from point A to point B. But these days, too many of us can’t get anywhere without the turn-by-turn directions on our phones.”
Just as we risk losing our natural sense of direction when we rely too heavily on our GPS, we risk losing our ability to truly understand and connect with others when we rely too heavily on digital interactions. The consequences of this loss can be severe, affecting everything from personal relationships to professional success.
Making a conscious effort to maintain and improve our face-to-face perception skills is important to navigate an increasingly digital world. Prioritizing face-to-face interactions, creating frameworks for understanding others, practicing active observation, and creating environments that encourage openness can help us maintain this fundamental human capacity.
In Davis’ words, “We need to collectively turn our eyes, pay attention, and engage with people as directly as possible.” Our ability to truly understand and connect with others may depend on this.
