To call, or to text, that is the (mental well-being) question

by

Like most peo­ple, I’ve been doing a lot of tex­ting with friends and fam­i­ly late­ly. COVID-19 (and the phys­i­cal sep­a­ra­tion it neces­si­tates) has made social­iz­ing in per­son very lim­it­ed, which means I’ve had to work hard­er than ever to keep my rela­tion­ships strong and healthy.

But a new study sug­gests that if that’s my aim, tex­ting may not be enough. To stay close at a time when we all need com­pan­ion­ship and sup­port, we’d be bet­ter off pick­ing up the phone or set­ting up a video call—doing some­thing where we can actu­al­ly hear anoth­er person’s voice.

In the study, par­tic­i­pants imag­ined hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with a friend they hadn’t been in touch with for at least two years. They pre­dict­ed how awk­ward or enjoy­able it would be and how close they’d feel if they con­nect­ed by phone ver­sus email. They also said which medi­um they’d pre­fer to use.

Then, par­tic­i­pants were ran­dom­ly assigned to con­nect with their old friend via phone or email and to report back on the expe­ri­ence. Though most peo­ple antic­i­pat­ed talk­ing by phone would be more uncom­fort­able for them, those who spoke on the phone were hap­pi­er with the exchange, felt clos­er to the oth­er per­son, and felt no more uncom­fort­able than those who’d emailed—even if they’d said they pre­ferred to email, not call.

“We think it’s going to be awk­ward to talk to some­body, but that just turns out not to be the case,” says lead author Amit Kumar. “Instead … peo­ple form sig­nif­i­cant­ly stronger bonds when they’re talk­ing on the phone than when com­mu­ni­cat­ing over email.”

This find­ing also held true for peo­ple con­vers­ing with some­one they didn’t know at all, accord­ing to anoth­er part of the study.

Par­tic­i­pants were told they’d be using voice chat, video chat, or text chat to get to know a stranger. As in the pre­vi­ous exper­i­ment, they were asked to pre­dict what the expe­ri­ence would be like and how close they might become to the per­son. Then, they were paired with a stranger to do a “fast friends” exer­cise, ask­ing and answer­ing a series of increas­ing­ly per­son­al ques­tions, like “What would con­sti­tute the ‘per­fect’ day for you?” and “What is one of the more embar­rass­ing moments in your life?”

Over­all, those assigned to voice chat or video chat expect­ed con­ver­sa­tions to be more awk­ward and not bring any more close­ness than those assigned to text-chat. But they were wrong: Being able to hear people’s voic­es made them feel sig­nif­i­cant­ly clos­er to the stranger and was no more awk­ward than text-chatting.

Even though video chat­ting might seem bet­ter than audio alone (because peo­ple could see each other’s faces), it didn’t seem to matter—the two meth­ods had sim­i­lar results.

These exper­i­ments sug­gest there’s some­thing about the voice, in par­tic­u­lar, that increas­es intimacy.

“There are lin­guis­tic cues that come through someone’s voice that sug­gest a feel­ing and think­ing mind,” says Kumar. “And since con­nect­ing with some­body means get­ting a lit­tle clos­er to their mind, voice-based com­mu­ni­ca­tion makes that eas­i­er or more likely.”

He points to oth­er research that also empha­sizes the impor­tance of voice in our com­mu­ni­ca­tion. For exam­ple, peo­ple asked to eval­u­ate a poten­tial job appli­cant found the appli­cant to be more thought­ful, intel­li­gent, and com­pe­tent if they’d heard rather than read the person’s job pitch. Sim­i­lar to Kumar’s study, adding a video to the pitch was no more impact­ful than hear­ing the pitch with­out one.

In anoth­er study, peo­ple who lis­tened to some­one express a polit­i­cal view­point that they dis­agreed with were less like­ly to dehu­man­ize that per­son than peo­ple who sim­ply read the tran­script of their argu­ment. This sug­gests that talk­ing to peo­ple from dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal par­ties (rather than tex­ting or respond­ing to them on Face­book) might help bridge divides.

One rea­son for this is that our voic­es con­vey a myr­i­ad of emo­tions, which helps us under­stand one anoth­er bet­ter and feel more empath­ic. In fact, at least one study found that voice-only com­mu­ni­ca­tions may be supe­ri­or to those that include video, because they help peo­ple read oth­ers’ emo­tions more accurately.

Although it might seem triv­ial, the way we choose to com­mu­ni­cate mat­ters. We shouldn’t let fears of awk­ward­ness lead to less promis­ing inter­ac­tions, says Kumar.

“Peo­ple can some­times be rel­a­tive­ly insen­si­tive to the effect of their com­mu­ni­ca­tion media on their expe­ri­ence,” says Kumar. “But if their goal is to become clos­er to some­one, they’d be smarter to pay atten­tion to that.”

Tex­ting can be use­ful if you need to just pass on a quick mes­sage or set up a time to talk with some­one, he adds. But, he says, if you want stronger social connections—and the hap­pi­ness and well-being that come with those—calling may be the bet­ter way to reach out, espe­cial­ly dur­ing this time when it’s hard to be close to those we care about.

“We’re liv­ing in a time when lone­li­ness is an increas­ing con­cern, and peo­ple need to know what to do about it,” says Kumar. “When it comes to main­tain­ing and build­ing the social rela­tion­ships that are so inte­gral to well-being, folks would be wise to con­nect with oth­ers using their voices—by talk­ing rather than typing.”

— Jill Sut­tie, Psy.D., is Greater Good‘s book review edi­tor and a fre­quent con­trib­u­tor to the mag­a­zine. Based at UC-Berke­ley, Greater Good high­lights ground break­ing sci­en­tif­ic research into the roots of com­pas­sion and altru­ism. Copy­right Greater Good.

To Learn More: