Professor Alex Gillespie
Alex Gillespie is Professor of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE.
What is your area of expertise?
I study dialogue. This can be face-to-face, such as when people raise concerns, argue, or repair misunderstandings. It can be online, when people are deliberating a political issue. It can be in formal complaints, online reviews, or other forms of feedback. Or, this can be people deliberating in their own thoughts, such as internal dialogue. I am particularly drawn to moments of disruption, misunderstanding, and crisis.
Methodologically I use a lot of naturally occurring data – recorded interactions, online discussion, diaries, public inquiries, emails, social media posts, black-box recordings, earnings calls, formal complaints, and incident reports. One of the great things about studying text, is that one can analyse it both qualitatively and quantitatively – for example, you can interpret this paragraph, count the words (it is 76), or use AI to score the sentiment (it is +0.6 on a -1 to 1 scale).
How did your interest for this area come about?
My interest in dialogue comes from everyday life. We live in dialogue. It is how we connect to others – and how we are disrupted by others. It ranges from marriage proposals to job interviews, and from creative brainstorming to calling out injustice. But, dialogue includes how we deliberate with ourselves, or internal dialogue. In short, I don’t think we can understand humans, without understanding dialogue.
What research projects are you currently working on?
Too many! Currently I’m working with amazing colleagues to: analyse how healthcare staff respond to critical feedback, specifically their defensive tactics; compare the difference between employee responses to closed-ended survey questions and what they write in open-ended text boxes; understand the dialogue processes triggered by a crisis or rupture; understand how people listen to (and reject) concerns; investigate the communicative behaviours of police trainees that create perceptions of procedural justice; and explore how large language models can augment our research methods.
What wider impact would you like your research to have on the world?
If I can improve the quality of dialogue, in any small way, I will consider my time on this planet worthwhile. Improving dialogue can lead to better information flow, clearer communication, people able to speak their mind freely, mutual understanding, creativity, and better social connection. With colleagues, I’m very proud to have made useful tools and techniques for studying face-to-face dialogues, augmenting internal dialogues, and learning from critical feedback.
What are the biggest challenges in your area of study?
There are practical and theoretical challenges. Frist, the practical problem is that there is so much dialogue in the world. The bulk of ‘big data’ is qualitative data – people communicating. The challenge is how to analyse such vast volumes of data. But, this is also an exciting potential because in the last decade AI algorithms for analysing communication at scale have progressed rapidly.
Second, te theoretical challenge is that dialogue is really complex. Talk is a behaviour that refers to past, present, and future potential behaviours. What people are doing with their words is often indirect: people speaking up don’t say they are speaking up – they talk about risks. Moreover, people talk about what other people talk about – especially when they disagree with it. And what an utterance means, might be different for the speaker and the listener. Accordingly, what people say is deeply perspectival, with shifting frames of reference, and often more potential than actual.
What is your favourite topic to teach, and why?
I am very fortunate because I teach on dialogue. I run a postgraduate course entitled ‘Dialogue: conflict & negotiation’ that allows me to explore all the topics I’m interested in, keep up-to-date with the latest research, and have super discussions with our students. One of the great features about dialogue, from a teaching point of view, is that everyone already has incredible skills in it, even if they are unaware of them. So, it is a great subject to run fun interactive workshops that reveal the hidden grammar of social interaction.