Today’s topic is a dive into what our current society thinks is important in communication, especially in business, and how our priorities are shaped by the zeitgeist or the current cultural mood. Once I started thinking about this topic it took me to some interesting places and a few rabbit holes, but let’s talk about the zeitgeist.
What we deem important and how we see things is often through our own culture’s lens or perception. This perception—what’s important, what should be highlighted or emphasized, and how things should be approved or disapproved or judged in society—this perception subtly shifts as time passes and new generations, new technology, new ideas emerge and are highlighted or lost.
This sometimes happens quickly, but most often it is imperceptibly slow, so much so that we don’t realize that we are both creating and being influenced by our culture. The zeitgeist of an age is really based on intangible ideas but we often know it by its manifestation into things like fashion and music and novels and movies, and even politics. But how we communicate with one another and what we emphasize in our understanding of communication is also influenced by the zeitgeist. Quite simply, we place values on the methods we think are important for communication and recently those values have changed.
Let’s start with an example.
Teaching engineers, I remember hearing students brag about how terrible their handwriting was and doing so because it was seen as a badge of honour. Somehow poor handwriting had become a way of signalling superior intelligence. Perhaps it was influenced by the cliché of doctors having terrible handwriting, or perhaps it signalled that geniuses and rebels were beyond society’s conventions for good handwriting. Unfortunately, this understanding is not true and actually backfired on one student who failed a final, handwritten exam because no one—not me and not any of the numerous people I consulted with about the exam—could read his writing. He had failed to communicate with me on a basic level and that cost him a significant grade. So much for a badge of honour!
This photo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND
But this example illustrates just one way that we place cultural value around a method of communication.
Sticking with handwriting, you might find yourself with a bit of a sexist holdover if you differentiate between genders by their handwriting and if you judge one to be superior or a sign of superior intelligence. Generally, this falls into girls writing in bubbly cursive and boys writing in printed letters and possibly in all capitals. A good check for whether you are still feeling the shadow of sexism is to ask yourself what you’d think of a manly man, let’s say The Rock, if he had bubbly, cursive handwriting? Would you be surprised? Would you feel sorry for him because his writing might be mistaken for a woman’s writing? And being mistaken for a woman is, essentially, not a good thing for a man. That trail of identifying something as female and then seeing that thing as inferior is the sexist connection that women are lesser and therefore anything connected to women is not something you’d want. In other words, sexism doesn’t mean that men don’t like women it just means they see it a step down from being a man. So bubbly handwriting is okay for women because they are already sitting at a lower level in society, but for a man, bubbly handwriting would push you lower on the social and possibly intellectual scale.
This particular example where there’s a judgement between male and female handwriting is of a particular time, I think. In the scheme of things, it’s really just a blip. It probably came up most strongly when handwriting stopped being graded in school. In the mid-1900s, kids grew up with cursive being beaten into them and graded heavily in elementary school, and you’ll find that both men and women who grew up in that time have lovely, flowing cursive script. In my own experience, I met a fisherman in Newfoundland of a certain age whose cursive would have been the envy of every calligrapher on Etsy. For that generation, there was no gendered judgement about handwriting because everyone was expected to have the same handwriting. Everyone had school-learned cursive in the same way everyone had school-learned spelling.
The Three Categories of Communication
So this brings us to the main point of this episode. In thinking about communication and zeitgeist or influence of cultural trends on what we emphasize in our communication, I came to see three broad categories that define different cultural emphases across the generations. I am calling these three categories: No Exceptions; You versus Them; and Handshake. Each of these categories always exist and are all necessary, but depending on the trends, one of these categories tends to dominate a time period.
Let’s take a look at each of them separately.
No Exceptions
No Exceptions is a communication category that is most recently emphasized by those who were born before the mid-1900s, so thinking of Boomers and earlier. This is the category of basic mechanics of communication: spelling, grammar, and, yes, handwriting. It may be difficult to imagine, but handwriting and all these mechanics used to be very, very important and were taught and graded heavily in school.
And just as a tangent, this was also the time when left-handed writers in the Western world were forbidden to write with that sinister hand. My own father was forced to change his handedness in school, so his writing, which he started doing with his natural left hand only after he left school, has never been in cursive because that hand never learned it.
And just to leave off this tangent with a couple of interesting facts. First, research from 2024 suggests that lefthandedness is not a genetic trait, and although there is no answer as to why it actually occurs, science is now looking into the influence of brain chemicals during fetal development (Rascoe, 2024).
Second, a neurological study from 2007 found that “attempts to switch handedness by educational training far from weakening the functional expression of lefthandedness in higher-order motor areas of the (dominant) right hemisphere in fact enhance it.” So by trying to eliminate left-handedness, all those teachers did was make left-handedness even stronger. (Klöppel et al., 2007)
To give you an idea of how prevalent it was to convert left-handers: one study found that in 1939 only 2% of people in the US wrote with their left hand but in 1972, when it was becoming less common for teachers to try to convert students, the number was 12%. (Tracy, 1979). The general consensus is that being left-handed is rare but not as rare as we thought and depending on how you define being left-handed and the group you study, the rate it somewhere between 9% and 18% (Papadatou-Pastou et al., 2020). Either way, it’s crazy to think that not so long ago about 1 or even 2 in 10 students were faking their handedness in school so they wouldn’t be thought of as stupid, dishonest, unlucky, or just generally undesirable.
So getting back to the era of No Exceptions, the communication emphasis was on mechanics. This was a time when being able to parse a sentence was a skill and you were expected to follow grammar rules and speak the grammar rules of either British or American standard. You needed to spell things correctly. You needed to write cursive clearly. And there was absolutely no wiggle room. It was binary. You either did it correctly or you did it incorrectly. And people who, say, misspelled simple words opened themselves up to harsh judgement. Uneducated. Illiterate. Stupid. No exceptions.
The need for foundations still exists and will always exist, but they are not judged so harshly as they once were, although there is still plenty of teasing and shaming on social media for people who use the wrong spelling of your/you’re or their/they’re/there. This will never go away completely, as the fact is, you need some degree of fundamental knowledge of the mechanics of a language in order to communicate. It is like knowing how to balance on a bicycle if you want to bike at all. It is basic. You can’t say you are a good biker if you can’t balance and you can’t say you’re a good communicator if you can’t follow the shared fundamentals of a language.
But when this No Exception category was at its strongest, it meant that a line was drawn in the sand where those on one side showed themselves to be educated and thus intelligent and those on the other side—through simple errors—showed themselves to be uneducated and, therefore, unintelligent.
Today, there is a lot more variation. The current generation may not even be able to read cursive, and have never had a class in grammar, and have never been graded in school on the clarity of their handwriting or quality of their spelling, so their connection between these fundamentals and intelligence and education is not as strong as it used to be. There’s more wiggle room. I find, for example, that older people may put high value on their spelling skills while younger people don’t and use spellcheck programs without judgement.
Thus, the cultural era of No Exceptions as the focus of communication is not our current one.
Category: You Versus Them
Where our current emphasis is placed is in another category of communication. This category I’m calling the You Versus Them category.
Having done research and wandered the web for these episodes, I have found that, generally, when people in business talk about communication these days there is an emphasis on pseudo-therapeutics and pseudo-psychological training. I’m using the word “pseudo” here because the number of people trained in the field of psychology and the sub-field of communication seems to be rather small, and these research experts don’t seem to be offering the training courses that have overtaken this field. The people selling their services come from a variety of different backgrounds and seem to be benefiting from the current zeitgeist without much training. And so I am using the word “pseudo” because from the point of view of business, there doesn’t seem to be much difference in how business sees experts in this area. Formal training is not as important as getting in on the training because that is the current emphasis.
To be a bit more specific about the training I’m talking about, a quick look on Google for communication skills training in business will bring up dozens of courses on empathy, life coaching, career coaching, mindfulness, and diversity training. And this training is often distilled into neat five-step learning systems that often seem to centre around manipulation of co-workers through human psychological quirks. These five-step programs lean heavily on psychology as their flag of scientific credibility and set out the idea that people are, in a way, puppets that can be controlled by exploiting psychological hardwiring. This area is particularly problematic for me. I mean, I can see how it’s compelling because it suggests that soft skills and communication can be worked as a hard skill, but is it actually communication?
The idea of using psychological triggers to influence people is not new. Robert Cialdini wrote Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion all the way back in 1984 and it just had a new and expanded edition come out in 2021. But, for me, this is about tricking people into buying something that you’re selling, which is a very cynical approach to communication, if that’s how you’re using it.
It suggests there’s a shortcut to getting people to do things for you. It isn’t about communication as much as it is about manipulation. And when Cialdini was asked about his theories as manipulation techniques, he struggled to separate influence from manipulation because the techniques are, essentially, amoral in that he asserts that they are hardwired into us, so the difference between influencing someone and manipulating someone is really just in the intention of the person doing the influencing or manipulation. (Cialdini, 2012). As one commenter on the book said, “Thanks. I’m on my road to becoming a villain. Wish me luck.”
So, yes, psychological techniques do often work. Screaming “Fire!” from the back row in a crowded theatre has a knowable outcome—people will stampede in fear for the exits—but is that the same as the theatre manager stopping the play, getting up on stage, and explaining that management is investigating a possible fire in the lower-level storage room, and asking people to calmly head for the nearest exist while they sort things out? They will both get people to abandon their seats and leave the theatre and they do this by communicating with words, but one feels like a manipulation and one feels like a connection.
Just as a note and in defense of Cialdini’s book, he not only gives the ways you can influence people but also gives you ways to avoid being influenced by the same techniques. The book struck me as similar to Dan Ariely’s early book Predictably Irrational (2008) which was also a fun read about how we can be manipulated.
All this is to say that right now, in the zeitgeist of the early 2020s, our communication emphasis comes from pseudo-therapeutics and pseudo-psychological manipulation, and part of this emphasis is a very strong sense of individuality placed against an “other” or a “them” that are not “you”. I am using the word “you” instead of “I” because part of this approach is to see yourself as if separated from yourself, by identifying yourself as a type. These approaches always ask the question “What kind of person are you?” and then they are eager to tell you who you are or what box you fit into and thus who “they” are in relation to that “you.”
This idea took me down a rabbit hole into personality and work compatibility testing, which was fascinating but deserves its own episode, so keep an eye for that in the coming weeks.
But for now, I want to just consider the idea of us living in an age of tribalism and on looking to psychology as the authority to explain why “people like you” do things and how people like you can make “them” or “those people,” often the people you work with, do the things you want them to do: so we have managers vs employees, women vs men, people of colour vs people of no colour, introverts vs extroverts. But that focus takes us very far off the foundations of communication, which should be about “us” not “you vs them”.
So to remind you of the categories that we were talking about. The first was No Exceptions, which focused on the fundamentals of communication: spelling, grammar, and handwriting for example. Those still exist today but they are not emphasized as they once were, and we are much more open to different grammars, different ways of speaking, and we have software to help us navigate these fundamentals, so we don’t judge people for mistakes in these areas as harshly as we once did.
Where we do judge people harshly right now, is in the second category of “You versus Them” which emphasizes communication as a series of interactions with one another through pseudo-scientific patterns. Communication is seen through a lens that is scientific (meaning data-driven and measurable) where people are put into types. These types can be seen as ways to influence communication in a positive sense through ideas of diversity, empathy and mindfulness, but they can just as easily be used for manipulation, as Cambridge Analytica and Facebook did and do. It is a double-edged sword: once you identify someone as a white, middle-class, extroverted man, what you do with that information is up to you. You can use that information to think that you can better understand them as an employee in a team or you use that information to shape the way they’ll vote in the next election.
While the question of influence vs manipulation is an interesting one, from the point of view of communication, my concern is more that this emphasis on communication through identification of types actually weakens the bonds of communication while claiming to do the opposite. It puts people into tribes and groups of “you” and “them,” and asks all of us to see ourselves as a type and to see others as types, which inhibits communication because it makes us fearful of saying the wrong thing, having the wrong thoughts, or of being on the wrong side.
Category: Handshake
This brings us to the third category of communication, as I see it. This is the one that I like best. I call it “Handshake” because it is the one that focuses on sitting down with someone across a conference table or figuring out how to explain your ideas to someone. It is the area of debate, argument, rapport, reconciliation, and convergence. It is where you learn a bit about my ideas and I learn a bit about yours. It will entail some muddling through with misunderstandings, clarifications, and disagreements, but the handshake is a physical, tangible human experience that identifies what we share—being human—before we sit down to disagree, argue, shift, and reformulate our ideas together.
This category is focused on our larger connection to one another rather than our smaller divisions, whether those divisions are based on skin colour or the ability to write in cursive. This category begins with the larger acknowledgement of being human as a shared experience, and keeping that as a connection no matter how tenuous it may become through opinion, argument, and ideology.
In history, I see this emphasis in some of the greatest periods of thinking and literature, like in England in the time of Shakespeare, for example, where divisions existed, of course, but the communicational emphasis was on what tied us together and how we became divided from that point of connection.
You can see why it is my favourite category because that is what I’m doing right now in this article and this podcast. I am reaching out to people to try to communicate my ideas. It is a community endeavor. It is a virtual community, but this is still a reaching out to find that community. But to do this, to share like this, to bring us together instead of isolating us at either ends of the spectrum staring at our own navels, we need skills in organizing our thoughts and skills in translating those thoughts into words.
So this third category is really about communication beginning from a place of being human and looking at our divisions of “you” and “them” as branches from a central tree rather than the tree itself, and looking at the mechanics of language as tools in service of organizing our thoughts and translating them into a language we share.
Again, we need the foundations of spelling and grammar, we need these foundations in the service of connecting our thoughts and desires and ideas with others and writing them down in a clear way. And we need the empathy and willingness to accept diversity of perspectives, so that we have a bigger space in which we can still have productive encounters. But this category, of Handshake, is about using these other categories to help us bridge the space between us. I see this category as situated between the two others, which, as we’ve seen, at their worst are about judgement on small errors and manipulation and isolation through self-help and salesmanship.
In this category, the emphasis is on building skills to better organize our thoughts, better ask questions, and better answer questions. A handshake is an acknowledgement that even if we disagree about ideas, we share a platform of being human. From that acknowledgement we can work outward, respecting differences, but bypassing whatever difference is not in service of the shared and human goal of understanding one another even when we don’t agree with one another.
Conclusion
It makes me a bit sad that our zeitgeist is not currently emphasizing the Handshake with its skills in critical thinking, organization, and rapport. Saul Bellow, a Nobel prize winning writer wrote about how you shouldn’t fight against the zeitgeist of your age if you want a happy life. Do as others do and you’ll have an easier time of it. However, I’m a bit stuck here, as I find writing mechanics a bit too dry for me and I find the pseudo-scientific focus manipulative and isolating. So I can’t follow Bellow’s suggestion and will just continue to muddle away in my own dark corner, putting out the occasional squeaks of dissent until the next cultural moment slides into place, hoping my voice might make a difference about what that next moment might be.
Want More?
Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. https://danariely.com/books/#book-predictably-irrational
Cialdini, R. B. (2021) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
Cialdini, R. B. (2012) “How to influence others” Big Think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cILPoUtuDbQ&t=402s
Klöppel S, Vongerichten A, van Eimeren T, Frackowiak RS, Siebner HR. (July 18, 2007). Can left-handedness be switched? Insights from an early switch of handwriting. Journal of Neuroscience. 27(29):7847-53. doi: 10.1523/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6672868/
Papadatou-Pastou, M. et al., (2020). Human handedness: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 146(6), 481–524. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000229
Rascoe, A. (April 21, 2024). Genes play a very small role in determining left-handedness, research finds. [interview] NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/04/21/1246163875/genes-play-a-very-small-role-in-determining-left-handedness-research-finds
Tracy, L. (August 13, 1979). On the other hand, consider who’s left: A bill of lefties’ rights making a stand for lefties’ rights. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1979/08/13/on-the-other-hand-consider-whos-left/6c2c854c-42eb-44fa-b4c8-f2a04a740049/