Texting is the worst, but fixable. Here’s how to message more humanely.

Our brains were designed for face-to-face conversation. Not text messaging.

If we were to exchange numbers, I would quickly tell you that I hate texting and am terrible at it. What I mean though, is that I will probably hate texting you because you’re terrible at it. But it’s not your fault; it’s just how our brains evolved. Despite its proliferation, messaging apps are not designed with our brains in mind, and most people do irresponsible things on autopilot without reflecting on their behavior¹. As someone who’s researched social connection and cares about how technology alters our ability to understand other’s minds, I want to share why texting is awful. And I want to suggest ways to improve the experience if only to avoid hating you, should we ever exchange numbers.

When you text, obvious things are missing, like the tone of voice and facial expressions. Those are important, but there are more fundamental and pernicious problems. To put it eloquently, we are fucking with the temporal order of the universe. For the vast majority of evolutionary history, you had to be in the same time and place when you communicated with someone. There was a clear start. When you spoke, you were relatively confident the sound waves produced by your vocal cords hit someone’s ear drum, and you had to listen as the other person composed their thoughts. Together, people had to figure out when to take turns speaking and when to end the conversation. Even the worst conversations were structured, efficient, and time-constrained. People had to be mentally “present.”

Spoiler Alert: Face to face, it is very clear when you are, and are not, having a conversation.

Imagine you’re in the middle of some deep work, or having a meaningful conversation with your mom, or taking a nap — whatever it is — and someone random just pops up and says, “Hey! What’s up?” Or, on the flip side, imagine being in the same physical space, asking someone a question and not getting a response. You’d probably at least repeat yourself or check if the other person had a sudden bout of narcolepsy. With texting, conversational clarity falls apart. Typically there are no hellos or goodbyes, just one never-ending conversation with stupidly long pauses. A wealth of research has demonstrated that your brain doesn’t like unresolved things (check out the footnotes to learn why unfinished thoughts are so…²) so having a conversation without clear boundaries for when it begins and ends is distracting and cognitively taxing.

For a receiver, a text message means you get pinged with no regard for the fact that you might be busy with other things. You and the sender aren’t occupying the same physical space, so they have no idea what you’re doing at that moment. Because technology often hijacks our attentional system³, we look at the message. You might not have time to write back, but its open-ended nature means there is a subtle cognitive pressure to respond even if you don’t have time to engage. This often leads to short, or worse, stupidly drawn-out exchanges because you’re busy and can’t engage fully or because the other person is busy by the time you respond.

On the flip side, for a sender, you initiate a text conversation by throwing a message into the universe with no idea when it will reach someone. Messaging apps don’t have a standardized, reliable signal that you’ve been heard. SMS won’t tell you. Apple Messages defaults to having read receipts off (but you can turn them on⁴). WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Twitter default to having them on (but you can turn them off). Even with a read receipt, there is no signal of when to expect a response. If you don’t hear back quickly, you think, “Surely they will write back once they know what interesting things I’ve shared. They wouldn’t be terrible and just ignore me.” But people are terrible because they have plausible deniability; maybe the message hasn’t been received or processed. As a sender, I have to give you that leeway because I have no evidence to the contrary that you heard me and didn’t bother to respond. Senders look unstable if they go on the offensive for not getting a response when the recipient may not have gotten the message. However, some (non-peer-reviewed) research suggests that people touch their phones an average of 2,617 times a day⁵. If someone hasn’t written back in a while, it’s not because they didn’t have the opportunity to read it; it’s because they didn’t intentionally engage.

^^ Mille

To ghost or not to ghost?

If the stars align and two people catch each other when they can both be present, they typically have a real-time exchange, which abruptly stops without warning. We don’t say goodbye; it just ends because someone got distracted and stopped writing back. That feels negative if there isn’t a mutual distraction, but it has become acceptable because we know we can distract ourselves with something else and pick up the conversation later. People might not be ditching conversations on purpose; it’s just that real reality needs more immediate attention than a text conversation. In the face-to-face world, we’re in the same shared reality; we can tell if the other person is focused on the conversation or needs to do something else because joint attention is one of humankind’s everyday superpowers⁶. When people text, they’re living in two totally different realities and trying to create an impoverished shared reality that doesn’t work because people can’t perceive each other’s distractions.

Even when people are decent, self-aware, and try to text responsibly without disappearing, the medium still has problems. There is no signal for whether someone is done with their thought, and turn-taking is difficult. Ever watch those bubbles stutter-start and then just stop? In verbal conversations, I have to listen to what you’re saying as it unfolds; engagement has a temporal aspect. Keeping track of your ideas means I cannot be overly busy doing other things or composing my own thoughts. Even with relatively rapid texting, a conversation doesn’t unfold in real-time, there is a composition gap, and then the receiver gets all of the information at once. During the composition gap, I might go do something else and forget about our conversation, or my mind may wander to another idea I want to share with you, so I start an entirely different topic which makes the conversation fractured. Even when people mean well, the medium is precarious. Texting masquerades as social interaction, which we want because our brains crave human connection⁷, but it is challenging to connect fluently.

^^Jennifer Daniels @NYT

What can you do?

Thankfully, there are ways to avoid bad autopilot texting. We can nudge ourselves into better practices and hold ourselves accountable. I do seemingly odd things like purposefully turning on “read receipts” and not opening messages until I have time to respond. I mostly have notifications silenced when I’m doing other stuff, and if someone catches me when I’m free, I write back quickly and then make it clear when I will stop writing back. If we are texting a lot in real-time, I suggest hopping on a quick call; wild, I know⁸.

Even with all that, I fail frequently, but humans are exquisitely sensitive to social norms so I also wrote this and posted it on the internet. It certainly ups my personal accountability and it might also improve others’ behavior, which will improve mine, which will improve yours. I’m aiming for a flywheel of better norms, rather than the, “Well, I’ll just be terrible because that’s what people do” race to the bottom we’ve fallen into. Do me a favor and try some of these things out. People may think you’re weird but your brain, and their brain, will thank you. Worst case scenario, it’s a fun throwback to when you had to say bye on AOL messenger because you were literally leaving your computer. Best case scenario, you rely a little less on technology and a little more on humanity to build your connections.

So, cheers to examining our behavior and operating less on autopilot 🥂. Now, please excuse me while I text this article to a bunch of people and knowingly start very inefficient conversations. I welcome you to do the same.

End Notes.

1. Sherry Turkle has some of the most interesting thoughts on technology and connection. Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together digs into these issues brilliantly. You can ease in with this Atlantic article interview.
2. Loewenstein (1994) proposed that we should view our curiosity for unfinished thoughts as “cognitively induced deprivation,” which comes from knowing you don’t know something. Deprivation is bad because humans hate not having things, even when the thing is information they don’t actually need. Enter clickbait. Learn more from the source or this pop interpretation,
3. Attention is fascinating. Check out this review article by my very first research advisor, Marisa Carrasco here.
4. Please read Carrie Dennis’ excellent take on why read receipts help you be a “grown-ass person.” Also, there’s some documentation floating around that Apple Messages will only send read receipts if both parties have opted in. Shockingly, USA Today lacks source quality and is wrong. If you have them turned on, people will see yours even if you can’t see theirs. More fun, even if you have read receipts turned off, sometimes people will see them anyway.
5. Ok, touching your phone 2,617 times a day is a complex, potentially misleading statistic; see Groshek (2018) for a critique. The company is publishing a blog, not a research paper. And they are counting literal touches, which is every tap you make every time you pick up your phone. And the study only had 94 people. And they were Android users. I can only imagine it’s worse for blue bubble people; who wants to touch an Android?
6. Mundy & Newell (2007) have written a pretty accessible review of joint attention. Or just stare at something and wait for others to look at it too.
7. Nick Epley’s Mindwise is a lovely deep-dive into why and how people connect (or don’t) with others.
8. Hat-tip to Adam Mastroianni, who unpacked some of these best practices with me at a lab happy hour a hundred years ago and writes some of the smartest stuff I read each week over at Experimental History. Do your brain a favor and subscribe.