Faculty

Michael Schober’s academic background is in cognitive psychology (Ph.D., Stanford University, 1990) and cognitive science (Sc.B., Brown University, 1986). He is currently Professor of Psychology and Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs. From 2006-2013 he was dean of NSSR. From 2005-2015 he was editor of the journal Discourse Processes.  

He has taught graduate and undergraduate lecture and seminar courses in psycholinguistics, human-computer interaction, research methods, psychology and design, and psychology of music (music and mind, collaborating in and beyond music).

For many years he has collaborated with Frederick G. Conrad, research professor in the Survey Research Center and director of the Michigan Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Michigan, and research professor and director of the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Together they have been awarded the 2013 Warren J. Mitofsky Innovators Award from the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

His research deals with questions that cross the lines between psychology, linguistics, human-computer interaction, music, public opinion research, and design. Recent and ongoing studies examine: conversational language use and perspective-taking, how differently people can conceive of what they are discussing despite apparent understanding, how partners with differing abilities take each other into account, conceptual misalignment in survey interview and testing interactions, how IQ testers can influence responses and scores, how survey interviewing techniques affect response accuracy, being together with virtual partners, how jazz duos (pianists and saxophonists) coordinate their performance face to face vs. via remote video vs. via remote audio, how interacting with interviewing systems that are more and less human-like affects survey respondents’ willingness to disclose personal information, comprehension of natural speech, including disfluencies and stutters, interface design and interaction, how attention to respondent disfluencies and other “paradata” can be useful for interviewing interfaces, interfaces for enhancing remote collaboration in studio design teams, augmenting musician’s coordination cues and sense of copresence, how audience interactions and motion contagion affect performers and speakers.

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PhD 1990, Stanford University

Recent Publications (Select Articles for PDF Download*):

• Schober, M. F., & Spiro, N. (2016). Listeners’ and Performers’ Shared Understanding of Jazz Improvisations. Frontiers In Psychology, 7, 1-20.
• Antoun, C., Zhang, C., Conrad, F. G., & Schober, M. F. (2016). Comparisons of Online Recruitment Strategies for Convenience Samples. Field Methods, 28(3), 231-246.
• Conrad, F. G., Schober, M. F., Jans, M., Orlowski, R. A., Nielsen, D., & Levenstein, R. (2015). Comprehension and engagement in survey interviews with virtual agents. Frontiers In Psychology, 6, 1-20.
• Sankaram, K., & Schober, M. F. (2015). Reading a Blog When Empowered to Comment: Posting, Lurking, and Non-Interactive Reading. Discourse Processes, 52(5/6), 406-433.
• Schober, M. F., Conrad, F. G., Antoun, C., Ehlen, P., Fail, S., Hupp, A. L., & ... Zhang, C. (2015). Precision and Disclosure in Text and Voice Interviews on Smartphones. Plos ONE, 10(6), 1-20
• Schober, M.F., & Spiro, N. (2014). Jazz improvisers’ shared understanding: A case study.  Frontiers in Psychology: Cognitive Science 5:808. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00808
• Lind, L.H., Schober, M.F., Conrad, F.G., & Reichert, H. (2013).  Why do survey respondents disclose more when computers ask the questions? Public Opinion Quarterly 77(4), 888-935. doi: 10.1093/poq/nft038 
• Johnston, M., Ehlen, P., Conrad, F.G., Schober, M.F., Antoun, C., Fail, S., Hupp, A., Vickers, L, Yan, H., & Zhang, C. (2013). Spoken dialog systems for automated survey interviewing.  Proceedings of the 14th Annual SIGDIAL Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL 2013) (pp. 329-333), Metz, France.
• Schober, M.F., Conrad, F.G., Dijkstra, W., & Ongena, Y.P. (2012).  Disfluencies and gaze aversion in unreliable responses to survey questions. Journal of Official Statistics, 28(4), 555-582. 
• Schober, M.F., & Glick, P.J. (2011).  Self-deceptive speech: A psycholinguistic view.  In C. Piers (Ed.), Personality and psychopathology: Critical dialogues with David Shapiro (pp. 183-200).  New York: Springer.
• Schober, M.F., & Carstensen, L.L. (2010).  Does being together for years help comprehension? In E. Morsella (Ed.), Expressing oneself/Expressing one's self: Communication, cognition, language, and identity (pp. 107-124).  London: Taylor & Francis.
• Schober, M.F. (2009).  Spatial dialogue between partners with mismatched abilities.  In K.R. Coventry, T. Tenbrink, & J.A.  Bateman (Eds.), Spatial language and dialogue (pp. 23-39). Oxford: Oxford University Press
• Healey, P.G.T., Frauenberger, C., Oxley, R., Schober, M.F., & Welton, M. (2009). Engaging audiences. Abstract of paper presented at workshop Crowd Computer Interaction, CHI 2009, Boston, MA.
• Schober, M.F., & Conrad, F.G. (2008). Survey interviews and new communication technologies. In F.G. Conrad & M.F. Schober (Eds.), Envisioning the survey interview of the future (pp. 1-30).  New York: Wiley.
• Schober, M.F. (2008).  Collaborative design. In M. Erlhoff & T. Marshall (Eds.), Design dictionary: Perspectives on design terminology (pp. 65-67). Zurich: Birkhäuser Verlag AG.
• Ehlen, P., Schober, M.F., & Conrad, F.G. (2007). Modeling speech disfluency to predict conceptual misalignment in speech survey interfaces. Discourse Processes, 44(3), 245-265.
• Turner, G., & Schober, M.F. (2007). Feedback on collaborative skills in remote studio design . Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS-40).
• Schober, M.F. (2006). Virtual environments for creative work in collaborative music-making. Virtual Reality, 10(2), 85-94.

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