Posts

Communication Looks Different When Psychology Enters the Picture

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Photo: Macourt Media via Pexels · Pexels License C ommunication often begins with something we can control: the words we choose, the explanation we give, the image we publish. What happens afterwards is much less tidy. Psychology has made me increasingly curious about that second part. Once a message reaches another person, it encounters attention, emotion, trust, memory and judgement. I have started to realise that some of the most useful questions about communication begin precisely where control over the message ends. Communication often begins with something we can control, but what happens afterwards is much less tidy. From message to encounter Attention is now one of the first places I prefer to look. A message can be clear and accurate yet barely register if something else is competing for attention. Research on selective attention is a useful reminder that processing is selective rather than an exhaustive re...
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One Question, From Different Angles

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Photo: KoolShooters via Pexels · Pexels License O ne of the stranger things about studying across several fields is that their boundaries look much clearer on course websites than they do in real life. Psychology has one subject code, communication another, teaching another. Yet the same problem keeps turning up: information can be available without being understood, understood without being usable, and usable in one setting without travelling easily into the next. What looked to me, throughout the years, like separate interests in psychology, communication, teaching, language learning, research and support work, are now increasingly feeling like a recurring question about the space between knowing something and being able to do something with it . I keep arriving at the same gap: between information being available and a person being able to use it. Same question, different places Communication makes this gap easy to ...
Location: Australia
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The Problem Before the Problem

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Photo: Kurt:S via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0 P roblems rarely begin where we first notice them. A misunderstanding may begin with what people do or do not share as common ground; a decision, with how the options are framed; a breakdown in trust, with what earlier interactions taught someone to expect. I don't believe every problem has one neat root cause, and I'm oftentimes interested in knowing what happened before the visible endpoint: what was communicated, what was assumed, what choices seemed available, and which relationship or earlier decision changed what came next. The point where a problem becomes visible is not necessarily the point where it began. What happened before that? A misunderstanding is a simple example. Correcting the final piece of information may be enough to move on. But experiments on common ground found that shared knowledge and assumptions affect how questions are formed and unde...
Location: Australia
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They Were Already Doing It

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[Image: ALFINete ] I have been thinking about media literacy for years: reading the research, writing about it, building it into the way I think about communication and psychology. And yet the finding that stopped me most recently came from a group of Year 10 students in Australia whose first language is not English, who arrived here from somewhere else, and who were quietly doing something most adults I know don't do: asking "what do they want me to believe?" before sharing a political post. That detail is from Jennifer Alford's 2023 study , which I've written about at length over at EMPOWERVERSE. Go there for the full analysis: the research design, the five strategies, the supporting evidence, and what it means for adult education. What I want to do here is something different: sit with what it felt like to read it. The students who taught me the most were the ones navigating a world they hadn't grown up in, in a language they were still le...
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The Wizard of Mar-a-Lago: The Social Psychology of Performed Political Strength

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  The Wizard of Oz (1939)                                                        [Image: Flickr ] W hat makes a political leader look powerful? Is strength something a leader possesses, or something a society collectively agrees to see? In a recent interview with journalist Nicolle Wallace , historian and Professor Timothy Snyder offered a striking interpretation of Donald Trump's political persona: "He lives entirely by the strength that is conferred upon him by people who believe the story," Dr. Snyder told Wallace. "It's like the end of the Wizard of Oz. In a moment you realise — wait a minute, there actually isn't anything there." Taken psychologically, this argument is less about Trump's private personality than about a fundamental feature of social power: power is partly relational . A leader may occupy a formally powerful positi...
Location: Australia
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Zuckerberg vs. Reality: Meta’s Secret War on Self-Esteem

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[Image credit: raportuldegarda.ro ] I n 2021, an Instagram employee created a false account posing as a thirteen-year-old girl searching for diet tips. Within minutes, the algorithm was surfacing accounts titled "skinny binge" and "apple core anorexic". The employee documented what she found. It was not a surprise to her colleagues — internal research had been saying this for years. What made the moment extraordinary was that the documents eventually reached the public, courtesy of whistleblower Frances Haugen, and were published by the Wall Street Journal in September 2021 . They revealed something the company had worked hard to avoid saying publicly: Instagram knew it was making things worse. "We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls." — Internal Meta slide presentation, 2019 . What the internal documents showed The leaked presentations — reviewed across an 18-month window from 2019 — were striking not for being unusual ...
Location: Australia
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The Flaw in How We See Ourselves: Debunking the Myth of Personality Types

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[Image credit: frontiersin.org ] S omewhere between your third and fourth scroll this morning, an algorithm quietly decided what kind of person you are. It inferred your openness to new ideas from what you paused on, your emotional stability from what provoked a reaction, your social orientation from how you interact with others' content. Technology companies have been doing this for years, using personality models built by academic psychologists over decades. The real science behind those models — not the pop-psychology version — is far more nuanced and useful than any personality type has ever suggested. Understanding it matters for how we know ourselves, how we judge others, and how we resist being profiled by systems we didn't consent to. Personality is not a fixed label. It is a set of tendencies: measurable, partially heritable, genuinely predictive, and far more context-dependent than any online quiz has ever acknowledged. From types to traits For most of ...
Location: Australia
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