Kenneth Savitsky

Who they are

At the time of the paper Savitsky was in the Department of Psychology at Williams College. His co-authors were Boaz Keysar, Nicholas Epley and Travis Carter of the University of Chicago and Ashley Swanson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This page rests on that one paper. His wider career and other publications have not been checked against a source here, and no claim is made about them.

Key papers

Key ideas

What the 2011 paper proposed

The paper's starting point is a common belief that people communicate better with close friends than with strangers. The authors proposed that closeness can lead people to overestimate how well they communicate, and named this the closeness-communication bias.

Their account is that people actively monitor a stranger's perspective because they know it may differ, and relax that monitoring with a friend, relying more on their own view. They also set out what the findings do not show: that friendship necessarily hinders communication.

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