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Social methods: The phone calls make us feel better than text communicating

Social methods: The phone calls make us feel better than text communicating

BY Diana 20 Nov,2020 Social Phone

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Making a phone call is probably the least used basic function of the modern mobile phone.

After months of social isolation, people rely on modern technology heavily for social connections. But study from the University of Texas at Austin shows that people are more likely to feel the connection they crave when they are on the phone than when they're text communicating.

“In the study, people chose to type the words because they believed that making a phone call would be embarrassing, but they were wrong.” Amit Kumar said, assistant professor of marketing at The McCombs School of Business.

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Kumar says, “People feel more connected through voice-based media, but their fear towards embarrassment is pushing them toward text-based media.”

The study was published in advance online in the Journal of ‘Experimental Psychology’.

In the experiment, 200 volunteers were asked to predict how they would feel about reconnecting with an old friend via email or phone and were randomly assigned to do so. Even though participants said that making a phone call would make them feel better, they still wanted to send an email because it would be embarrassing.

The researchers found that the phone was much better than email.

Kumar said, “When it came to actual experiences, people reported that phone conversations did make them feel more connected to old friends, and they were less embarrassed than they had previously thought.”

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In another experiment, the researchers randomly assigned strangers to text/video/audio only in real-time chat. Participants had to ask and answer a series of personal questions, such as: “What is your dream?” Or “What was the last time you cried in front of someone?

Participants did not want to communicate with strangers according to the text, and they predicted they'd be embarrassed.

But the researchers found that when they did interact with each other, people felt significantly better when they communicated through conversation rather than typing words. And again, they found that the voice chat itself was not so embarrassed.

Another famous modern myth is that telephone communication is not efficient. At this point, the researchers again arranged for the participants to reconnect with their old friends.  They found that phone calls took the same amount of time as reading and responding to electronic texts.

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