Chief Change Officer
#97 Juliana Schroeder Phd: How to Stay Human in a World of AI Machines
Wed, 11 Dec 2024
Juliana Schroeder, Associate Professor at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, unpacks the evolving dynamics of communication in the human-machine era.Juliana dives into the intersection of human and machine interaction, highlighting how technological advancements like generative AI are reshaping how we connect, collaborate, and convey ideas. From leveraging paralinguistic cues to mastering the art of switching between communication modalities, Juliana emphasizes the timeless value of empathy, adaptability, and emotional intelligence in navigating a world increasingly mediated by technology.Key Highlights of Our Interview:The Mind Behind the Machine“AI isn’t just changing technology; it’s reshaping how we think, act, and perceive power. When virtual assistants act human-like, they give users a psychological boost that can even alter decision-making.”Confirmation Bias Central“When users consult ChatGPT, it often mirrors their ideas, reinforcing their thoughts. It’s a colleague that nods a lot but rarely challenges, creating a unique kind of echo chamber.”Medium Matters“From text to video to voice, the platform you choose shapes how your message lands. Want to make a strong first impression? Skip the text and go for face-to-face—or at least a well-delivered elevator pitch.”Humanize the Experience“Paralinguistic cues—like tone of voice and facial expressions—are what make conversations truly human. To connect, think beyond words and embrace the richness of full-spectrum communication.”High Stakes, High Scrutiny“In critical domains like hiring, people demand transparency. The idea of an algorithm handling everything creates unease, sparking backlash when decisions feel like they emerge from a ‘black box.’”_________________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Juliana Schroeder, PHD_________________________--Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Deep Human Intelligence for Growth Progressives, Visionary Underdogs,TransformationGurus & Bold Hearts.6 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>100,000+ subscribers are outgrowing. Act Today.<<< --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.20 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1% Podcast.Top 5 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>180,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: Who is Juliana Schroeder and what are her credentials?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chan, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Coming to us from the halls of UC Berkeley is associate professor and psychologist, Juliana Schroeder.
You might have noticed most of our guests have taken quite the scenic route through their careers. Juliana, on the other hand, has kept her eyes on one prize, digging deep into the human mind. She is now leading the charge in teaching negotiation and management to both MBA students and seasoned executives.
Take a quick look at her website or UC Berkeley's, and you'll be blown away by her achievements. We are talking a laundry list of titles, a mountain of papers, and a substantial collection of awards. And get this, she's bagged not one, but two master's degrees and two PhDs at an age where many are still figuring things out.
I could easily spend a good 10 minutes here just running through her credentials bio and all the incredible things she's achieved. But let's be honest, I know you're here for the insights. So while I'm skipping the long intro to save us some time, I can't recommend enough diving into her profile yourself. Trust me, if you're even a bit of a nerd like me, Juliana's work is a gold mine.
Juliana and I met at Chicago Booth. She was my TA for two courses taught by two amazing professors and social psychologists, Nick Apley and Linda Ginzel. Still remember the first day we met? I was sitting next to her on front row when the whole classroom was packed. I didn't know she was actually my TA. I raised hand and answered question. I got the question wrong.
Then she whispered to me, trying to explain the reason why. Then we met again in Singapore. This time, I pulled her aside. asking her about reciprocity, a very important concept in psychology and negotiation. In my eyes, she is very sharp. Those who know me well understand that I use this word very selectively as a compliment. Over time, I've observed the growth of her academic career.
I told myself, I must invite her to my podcast. So, which granted, here we are. Let's get started.
Good afternoon, Juliana. Thank you so much for having me, Vance. Good afternoon.
Let's start with a brief introduction of your background. For the benefit of the audience, how I met Juliana, that was when I was at Chicago Booth.
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Chapter 2: How does human interaction with AI shape decision-making?
And then when I got to college, I took some social science classes. I took psychology and economics and I just completely fell in love with them. I just think it's fascinating to be able to better understand how people think and feel. They kind of say that research is me-search.
And so I think I like to study the things that I find to be like fascinating and challenging and that are kind of hard for me. So I study things like decision making and negotiations and persuasion.
And I'm an experimentalist, which means that I run experiments on people to better understand counterfactual worlds, like what would happen if people live their life in this condition versus this condition.
Check out your personal website. You have published a lot of papers over time. Like you said, you study power, study negotiation, decision making. I was wondering when you were in the master, PhD program, when you were thinking of
Choosing specific areas of research, why you chose language, mind perception, what's fascinating about those areas that you decide, well, yeah, I really, really want to go deep to become a deep thinker, researcher, and teacher in those areas?
That's a great question because psychology is so broad. There are so many different aspects of human bias and decision making and behavior that you could study. But to me, I kept coming back to the fact that we live in a social world and, you know, man is a social animal. And so all of our society kind of rests on having this cooperative function with those that are around us.
And that involves having to engage with other people effectively and productively. And so I see the umbrella of all of my research as being around mind perception, which is how we come to perceive and understand the minds of those around us. And this is a really fascinating topic because
of course we can't just directly read other people's minds and if we could the world might be kind of a mess you can imagine that that could end up leading to all sorts of problems and issues and it's good that we are allowed to keep secrets from each other but the fact that we don't have very much insight can lead to challenges as well because sometimes we have to make these guesses at what other people are thinking and feeling and there are systematic ways in which we can go astray in that and i basically
study all the different building blocks and how people come to make inferences about others' minds. Think about both the top-down and bottom-up influences on people's mind reading and mind perception. The top-down is like I bring to bear beliefs about the world and stereotypes about certain people.
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Chapter 3: What role does humanization play in AI interactions?
And then at the same time, the longer I engage with you, like say we're having an actual back and forth conversation might be synchronous or might be asynchronous. I'm starting to modify kind of those overall beliefs and stereotypes based on like this bottom up feedback I'm getting regarding your specific characteristics.
So what you're actually saying to me, how you're saying it, kind of your nonverbals and your verbals together. And I'm integrating all that information in my mind in this really fluent, amazing way to come up with an overall belief about you or belief system about you.
One thing before we deep dive into your research areas, while you're talking about trying to understand the mind in other people, always wondering like psychologists themselves, how they try to understand their own psychology. You, as a living human, how you perceive or figure out your own psychology, would you make you smarter or more complicated in a sense to understand
Figure out your own psychological state of mind when something exciting happened or something bad happened.
Yeah, that's such a great question, Vince. But I would say that I hope after having studied this for so long that I do have more insight, not just into how we engage with other minds, but also how we engage with our own minds. Sometimes we focus on the differential processes that are involved in trying to read other people's minds as compared to trying to recognize and understand our own minds.
Of course, when you're thinking about your own mind, the primary way in which you engage is just through introspection. You kind of introspect, like, what am I feeling and what am I thinking right now? But there is some really interesting research in psychology that has pointed to the limits of people's own introspection and their overconfidence when it comes to their own introspection.
So they might get a sense that, oh, I know exactly why I made that decision. But sometimes they don't know the factor that actually influenced them. It might even be something in the environment that was outside of their explicit consciousness that was swaying them. And the experimenters know this because they manipulated that factor.
But people still have the sense that they know why they made the decision because they can come up with some sort of post hoc rationalization for why they did it. That doesn't mean, so introspection sometimes fails. It doesn't, you know, we have the sense that we know ourselves, we know our own minds, but it doesn't necessarily mean that we truly do.
And so I think it's very interesting to think about the ways in which we sometimes fail when we're trying to read other people, but also the ways in which we sometimes fail when we're trying to understand ourselves. And I think there are some parallels and some ways in which the processes are different that I've studied.
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Chapter 4: How does psychology influence our understanding of AI?
So can you tell us a bit more about your argument for that paper back then?
Thank you for reading that paper. And it is right. It's a bit dated now. It's four years old. So funny. I wrote that with my co-author, Nate Fast. Together, we direct an institute called the Psychology of Technology Institute. And so we have been very interested in better understanding the psychology behind how people come to technology.
adapt and engage with and even design different forms of new technology with a particular focus on AI, as well as bidirectionally how technology changes our psychology and how technology has been changing our minds, both at like the micro level, the individual level, as well as how that aggregates to societal change, which a lot of people have been studying these days, thinking about things like polarization and misinformation and just how new tech is influencing our society broadly.
and democracy and other huge societal shifts that we're seeing in the world. And at the time, Nate and I were very interested in thinking about the proliferation of all these virtual assistants. So we were looking at like Siri and Alexa and we thought, oh, they're in fact in the marketing literature. There were a set of papers that came out around the same time.
And they were all kind of concerned about the fact that it seemed a lot of people had these personal virtual assistants that they could take with them anywhere. They were on their phones and they could tell them to do anything they wanted. And they would yell these orders to their virtual assistants and their virtual assistants would immediately do anything they wanted.
And the virtual assistants were usually female voices. And so we thought there might be some interesting psychology going on in this. And some of the papers that came out, in fact, were concerned about children growing up with virtual assistants and learning to be rude to their virtual assistants and what that would do to politeness and society.
And we were more interested in the feeling of power that it might give you, that if you carry these virtual assistants around in your pocket, that might lead people to have this sense that they have maybe almost like an inflated sense of the part of it could be real. So we differentiate between the subjective and the objective sources of power.
And we're really just more looking at people's subjective sense. So do they feel like they have power? And there's a long line of research that finds that when people feel like they have Power, that puts them into more of a goal orientation. So they're more likely to act rapidly. They make quick decisions. They tend to be more instrumental and less relationship focused.
They may be more overconfident in their decision making. So power can lead to this like inflated sense of self and changes the ways in which people behave in these systematic ways. And most of that research had looked at real instantiations of power, like people having resources and people having other humans that were doing things for them.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of AI on personal power dynamics?
So if it was the case that people engage with a virtual assistant and see it as being somewhat human-like, then perhaps they would show some of these consequences of power, that they would become higher in their goal orientation and instrumentality. And so we did find that, and it's interesting to think even how we were considering humanization back then, because now...
Of course, as you mentioned, there are so many more types of virtual agents that are out in the world. And they're not necessarily just assistants anymore either. Like, I don't know. So we haven't tested this in ChatGPT, for example. I don't know if people, when they engage with ChatGPT, they see it as being an assistant for them.
Or if they see it, I know a lot of people who would just anecdotally will say that when they engage with chat GPT, they try to be very respectful and very kind because you never know when the machine overlords are going to take over. You know, so they probably are seeing themselves as being more low power, right? I don't know like subjectively how that would work with certain people.
virtual agents that are out in the world now, but I do know that if people see the virtual agent as an assistant, like they're there to serve you and they humanize it, then I think we would expect to see these results of goal orientation.
Now the humanization piece I mentioned is interesting too, because at the time we were thinking about humanization as being more about, for example, whether you interact with it as if it's like a human, like, does it talk to you? Can you talk back to it? As opposed to, you know, writing, does it have an avatar with it? Like, so would there be some sort of face that you can see?
And now I think there's a lot more sophistication in terms of humanization. I think that even... So research now suggests that for most LLMs, like JAP2PT and other ones, most people cannot differentiate it from a human when they don't pass the Turing test, is what we call it.
So they cannot tell whether or not, in abstract, in isolation, if you just give it the responses, they can't tell whether... it is a human or not with any sense of accuracy. So they're essentially at the level where they are using language to the degree that a human would. And I do think that still the voice to voice interaction is fundamentally humanizing and I have some other research on this.
So I think that voice to voice will make people see agents as being more human-like. I think language, yes, we already know that the LLMs are at the level of human. And then we've been studying just other random cues to humanness that exist, especially when you're engaging in like text-based online communication with the ambiguous agent.
So, for example, we found one of another cue that you might not expect is whether or not it makes typos and corrects those typos. So we found. So it's interesting, like typos in general are kind of dehumanizing. When you see a type, you're like, oh, that, you know, it's not very competent. Whenever the agent is, if you imagine it's possible that it could be.
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Chapter 6: How can empathy enhance human-machine communication?
But what we found is that when you're having a synchronous back and forth conversation, like for example, with customer service agents, like on Amazon or something, and they make a typo and then they correct that typo, then people are really likely to think it must be a human.
And that's because I think people have expectations that they're bringing to bear regarding the humanness of the agents that they're interacting with and the programming of different chatbots and what they expect to be in the programming or not. And so they're not expecting that a typo that's corrected will be something that most companies would program into their chatbots.
It also signals something about like having an active mind, that there's like a mind, a human like mind on the other end that is monitoring the conversation and the errors and correcting their own errors. So that just really signals humanness. You can also imagine we're also kind of playing with other things that there There are other cues that people might take to signal a humanness.
Like perhaps if you have a really overly effusive customer service agent that uses a lot of exclamation marks, English marks and things, and you're like, okay, that seems like it's probably a human because why would the chatbot do that? But so those are like new things that are happening in the world right now.
So are you carrying on with your original research back in 2020 and today with all the new development and still studying this? If you are, what's your status? What's your observation?
Yeah, we really were mostly just theorizing even in the 2020 article. And I think that the theory would still hold that people would feel when they feel like they're more They have more power because they're engaging with a virtual agent that's humanized. That's when they're going to engage in more goal-oriented type behavior that we generally see from like higher power people.
But when they are not perceiving the virtual agent to be their assistant... and then they don't feel like they have power, or if they see it as their assistant, but it's not humanized, then I don't think that we would see the same results. So I would predict that the theory would still hold, but we have not tested it with some of the newer technology that exists.
So I would love for anyone out there who wants to study this to reach out to me so I can test it further.
now let me share a bit about my user viewpoint yes i use chat gpt sometimes i don't have that conscious feelings of power when i use it do i see it as assistant i see it as honestly as a colleague so to speak although i found this colleague a lot of times provides me with a huge degree of confirmation bias. Whatever I say, oh yeah, that's right. You can think of it this way and all that.
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