Communication Prof. Bruce L. Lambert is social media famous. With more than 340,000 followers on TikTok, Lambert makes videos that cover a range of topics from relationship advice to “how not to be awkward.” Take a listen to what he’s got to say in the latest episode of What’s New at NU.
BRUCE LAMBERT: The main source of suffering in our lives is other people. And the main source of difficulty with other people is their feelings. Have a nice day!
ASHLEY DONG: That was Communication Prof. Bruce Lambert, Northwestern’s resident TikTok celebrity.
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ASHLEY DONG: From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Ashley Dong. This is What’s New at NU, a podcast about everything from mainstage NU issues and events to those hidden in the nooks and crannies of campus.
With more than 340,000 followers on TikTok and 170,000 subscribers on YouTube, Lambert shares tidbits of knowledge on his channels, both under the name “How Communication Works.” As a communication expert, Lambert has a lot to say.
ASHLEY DONG: Just to get started, could you tell me a little bit about what you do on How Communication Works?
BRUCE LAMBERT: So I have a Ph.D. in communication. I’ve had some experiences in the past as a consultant teaching people communication skills, starting in the mid-2000s, and I realized there was a demand for this, and YouTube was growing at the time, and so I thought, “Okay, let me start a YouTube channel teaching people communication skills.”
I take the title of my YouTube channel seriously: “How Communication Works.” I’m trying to teach them how it works so that they have some generalizable knowledge about — Why does listening work this way? Why does empathy work this way? How does turn-taking work? How can I, you know, get into a conversation? How does politeness work? How does power and politeness play off of one another?
People have a felt desire to get better at communication because they feel like poor communication skills are an obstacle to their success in dating or in professional life or in school or whatever. And so they go on YouTube, and they search “how not to be awkward,” and one of my videos comes up.
ASHLEY DONG: According to your LinkedIn, you started teaching in 1991. Then, you began your channel in 2017. What inspired you to expand your lectures to social media platforms?
BRUCE LAMBERT: It was really this experience I had consulting. So I was at the (University of Illinois) College of Pharmacy here in Chicago. That’s where I spent the first 22 years of my career.
And then I met my colleague, Tim McDonald, who’s an anesthesiologist and an attorney, and he introduced me to this whole new program where they were starting to tell the truth to patients and families who had been harmed by healthcare. And these conversations are very difficult.
I was kind of asked to be part of this patient safety group Tim was leading. And, eventually, these hospitals asked us to come and teach them how to do this, how to tell the truth to patients and families.
So, we went around the country teaching hospitals and their staff how to have these conversations. We had professional actors who would roleplay the patients or the family members, and then we’d get volunteers from the audience to come and try to break the bad news, explain the mistake and so on.
A lot of times they’re very bad at it. You know, they had never been trained. But I would teach these basic principles of active listening, empathic listening, empathic responding. And most of the people in the audience had never, ever, ever had a class where they learned these basic skills. And it turns out, these skills are not that complicated. They’re learnable.
And of course, it’s an audience full of professionals who are highly intelligent and have been through so many years of schooling. They would talk to me after these trainings and just say how impactful this was for them. So I wanted to start a business where my own skills were the primary contributor to the business.
ASHLEY DONG: In 2020, you expanded your channel to TikTok. Urged by a friend, you said you overcame your uneasiness with what you perceived as an app for silly dance videos, and your fifth TikTok blew up.
What was that video about?
BRUCE LAMBERT: I sat and I made a super serious kind of depressing video about the five givens of life. And they’re things like, life is not fair. People are not loving and loyal all the time. Suffering is the defining part of life. They were kind of these Buddhist or stoic principles of life, very serious and depressing. I’m sitting on the floor of my living room making this video on my phone, and suddenly it was getting hundreds of thousands of views.
It’s shocking to me, when I look at my analytics, and I looked at them for last month, it’s like 450,000 minutes of view time on my videos. And I think there’s just way more people I’m affecting on YouTube than I ever will in the classroom. It always boggles my mind.
ASHLEY DONG: How does your work at Northwestern through your lectures, your research in health communication, influence your videos?
BRUCE LAMBERT: It’s sort of indirect. They influence one another. I know sometimes there’s a topic I’ve talked about on YouTube that I know is popular because it was popular on TikTok, and it was popular on YouTube, so it’s already been market tested, where I know this is an idea that resonates with people. So I can bring that into the classroom knowing that it will work. Other times it works the other way around.
ASHLEY DONG: In your videos, you are often sitting on a brown couch. Where is this, and why is that your frequented filming location?
BRUCE LAMBERT: So that was really started during the pandemic. That’s the place I sit and read. That’s my favorite place in my own house, you know. So I’m just sitting on this, it’s like an old Lazy Boy couch. Some of my TikToks, I’m not being lazy, and I have proper lighting, and I have this microphone, and I have a backdrop, and it’s backlit and it’s all nice, but then I just got lazy, and I thought, the hell with it, and I would just pick up my phone and just shoot it. It’s a little embarrassing, but that’s the truth.
ASHLEY DONG: Do you have a favorite topic to talk about?
BRUCE LAMBERT: It probably is empathic listening. I’ve just had so much fun talking about it, thinking about it, and this is something that I should acknowledge and admit, because it’s important, which is that a couple of things I’ve really realized from listening to my commenters on YouTube, especially, is that teaching people communication skills is inevitably and inescapably linked to your own values.
I did realize that teaching communication skills is inherently value-laden. You can’t be value-free because you’re basically teaching people how to be a person in the social world. And there’s not only one way to do that. Different cultures value different aspects of personhood. I think there are some cultural universals, and there’s good evidence in sociolinguistics, things like, politeness really is culturally universal.
As far as we can tell, there are fundamental principles of politeness that operate in every culture. It doesn’t mean politeness is identical in every culture. It means that the underlying principles that drive the need for politeness are present in basically every culture that we’ve ever studied.
ASHLEY DONG: What do you think is the most important lesson for your students — or your viewers — to learn?
BRUCE LAMBERT: About communication or about being a content creator on social media or what?
ASHLEY DONG: About communication.
BRUCE LAMBERT: One is that the social world is like a stage, and we’re like actors on the stage. This is the so-called dramaturgical metaphor for the social world.
And what that means is that we are all presenting a version of ourselves in a performance, that every social encounter is a performance. We are enacting a role in a drama that’s unfolding in the social world.
So every time we’re in a social encounter, we are engaged in a performance. And this is so important because it allows people to realize that that’s not bad. That’s the way the social world works. Some people think, “Well, I’m faking it,” or “When I’m in a certain role, I’m not being authentic.”
This idea of authenticity I think is really an unfortunate idea because people think it means they should act the same way everywhere. And that’s absolutely the wrong idea of authenticity.
Each context demands different aspects of our identity and demands different performances. And there are different constraints and different social norms that govern each of those contexts. Communication is very contextually driven. What’s appropriate and normal is dependent on the context, and that means both the cultural context, the historic context as well as the physical geographical context.
So, I behave differently as a friend than I do as a father, than I do as a professor, et cetera. And in none of those am I being inauthentic. Or, the fact that I behave differently as a friend than I do as a professor does not mean I’m being inauthentic when I’m a professor. It means I’m being my authentic self as a professor, and I’m being my authentic self as a friend, and those are different facets of my identity.
So this idea that authenticity means you behave the same way all the time is a mistake and it leads to a lot of grief and misunderstanding and bad social behavior. Authenticity is more about being true to our most deeply held values.
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ASHLEY DONG: From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Ashley Dong. Thanks for listening to another episode of What’s New at NU. This episode was reported and produced by me, Ashley Dong.
The Audio Editor is Anavi Prakash. The Multimedia Managing Editors are Kelley Lu and Jillian Moore. The Editor in Chief is Lily Ogburn.
Our theme music is “He’s Gonna Come and Get You Baby” by Xennial, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and provided by the Free Music Archive.
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Email: ashleydong2028@u.northwestern.edu
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