Project description
How hybrid interactions influence social well-being at work
Hybrid work models and online communication are changing how we socialise, raising concerns about increased loneliness. It is important to help keep workers socially healthy. With this in mind, the ERC-funded HYIHY project aims to study how hybrid interactions (mixing in-person, online, and human-AI communication) change social well-being in hybrid work settings. The project’s goal is to learn how these affect feelings of loneliness and social bonding. It will develop a Hybrid Interaction Theory (HIT), using ideas from communication studies, psychology, and public health. The project will ask how different ways of communicating affect social well-being and what role online channels and AI play in creating these changes.
Objective
The HYIHY project investigates how HYbrid Interactions—blending face-to-face, digital, and human-AI communication—reshape social well-being in HYbrid work. To answer this, I propose communication episodes, their quality, and technological context as a unified lens. Through this lens, we can understand how complex sequences of face-to-face, digital, and AI interactions impact our sense of loneliness, connectedness, and community (i.e. social well-being). Ultimately aimed at formulating a Hybrid Interaction Theory (HIT), the project will dramatically move research beyond siloed insights from communication, psychology, human-computer interaction, sociotechnical studies, and public health.
Social connection is essential for human health and well-being—and the work domain is essential for adults to feel socially connected. Two interrelated trends currently redefine adults’ social well-being: hybrid work, blending office and remote work, and the increasing digitalization of sociality described by hybrid interactions. UN, EU, UK, and US institutions have voiced serious concerns over a post-pandemic ‘loneliness epidemic’ in this new world of work, yet evidence on how workers can maintain their social well-being is severely limited.
Three questions guide this project: (1) How do the various communication episodes in hybrid work shape social well-being? (2) How do digital channels and artificially intelligent (AI) interlocutors moderate these effects? (3) Which beneficial or harmful dynamics between face-to-face, digital, and human-AI communication episodes unfold in workers’ daily lives? To answer these questions and test multiple competing hypotheses, HYIHY combines qualitative, panel, experience sampling, experimental, and computational methods in a comprehensive work program. Informed by my findings, workers and stakeholders in labor unions, industry, and policy are well positioned to design, manage, and regulate hybrid and digitalized sociality in the future of work.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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91058 Erlangen
Germany
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