I’ve been speaking in Washington DC recently at a variety of government venues, talking about the ideas and research in my new book, Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World, published by Harvard in October 2018.   I’ve been both surprised and delighted by the strong response to the basic premise:  if we are all so connected, why do we feel so alone?

That’s the key question of the digital era.  We are all unwitting participants in a massive social experiment that began in the 70s with email and has hugely accelerated in the last decade with the widespread adoption of the mobile phone.  We’ve moved from living most of the time in the face-to-face world, to living and working in a new hybrid existence, half face-to-face, and half virtual.

How’s that working out for us?  Not so well.  Employees are more disengaged than ever – up to 80% of workers in a worldwide survey.  We are drowning in a tsunami of email, text messages, Slack threads.  Forget “frictionless” and “asynchronous” – the twin promises of how life would get better in the virtual era.  Instead we’ve got 24-7 and information overload.  And we spend too much time on audio conferences on mute – trying to catch up on all those written communications.

And yet this half-virtual, half-face-to-face world is not going way.  It’s too much a part of modern organizational life.  It’s up to us to figure out how to make it work for all us.

In the book, I note how negative behavior has become normalized in the virtual world – from your slightly terse and perhaps (in retrospect) just a little curt email to a colleague, to the full-fledged trolling that goes on daily on Twitter and other social media.  But, as I’ve talked to audiences, we’ve also focused on a further concern about that online hostile behavior:  it’s leaking into the face-to-face world.

In other words, that behavior that the lack of emotion and empathy makes possible online is becoming more and more common face to face, where it never would have passed muster in the past.

It’s something we have to begin to pay closer attention to and to work against, or we will end up living in a world we don’t like.  The research shows that online we become more likely to assume the worst, that we are more likely to lead with hostility in anticipation of hostility from someone else, and that we feel more justified in responding online with less cooperation, even feeling more justified to lie.  Is that a world we want to live in?

This degradation of online relationships comes about because, lacking the full input that our brains are used to getting face to face, we make up information to fill the void.  We tend to make up negative information because in an evolutionary sense it pays us to be anxious and assume the worst.  The early human who assumed there was a tiger hidden in every bush was more likely to survive that the one who optimistically assumed no tiger.  Hence, we’re an anxious, nervous, disaster-biased species.

I put an empathy quiz in the book and on our web site so that you check the state of your own empathy in the virtual world.  We’ve been gathering some fun (aggregated) data on how empathetic you are, and I’m pleased to say that the readers of this blog, who take the quiz, are well above average in empathy.  The latest data puts our reader-quiz takers in the “highly empathetic” range, I’m delighted to report.  You rank lowest in valuing good manners, and in anticipating others’ needs, relative to the other questions, but still absolutely high.  Your highest scores demonstrate a sensitivity to the level of comfort other people are feeling when you’re together, whether they’re comfortable or not, and whether or not they want company.  And you are a caring group.

So if you haven’t taken the empathy quiz yet, here’s the link.  (Just scroll down a little bit.)  Take it today, because (here’s the good news) the research shows that simply taking an empathy quiz makes you (at least temporarily) more empathetic, and the world needs us all to keep our EQs high.  Together, we can fight the slow, sad slide toward hostility and anger that is gradually leaking back into the face-to-face world from the virtual one.

Take the Empathy Quiz