There’s a 50/50 chance you’ll misinterpret the tone of this post
At least, that’s what Wired says:
According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I’ve only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.
“That’s how flame wars get started,” says psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, who conducted the research with Justin Kruger of New York University. “People in our study were convinced they’ve accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their odds are no better than chance,” says Epley.
The researchers took 30 pairs of undergraduate students and gave each one a list of 20 statements about topics like campus food or the weather. Assuming either a serious or sarcastic tone, one member of each pair e-mailed the statements to his or her partner. The partners then guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in their answers.
Those who sent the messages predicted that nearly 80 percent of the time their partners would correctly interpret the tone. In fact the recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time.
“People often think the tone or emotion in their messages is obvious because they ‘hear’ the tone they intend in their head as they write,” Epley explains.
At the same time, those reading messages unconsciously interpret them based on their current mood, stereotypes and expectations. Despite this, the research subjects thought they accurately interpreted the messages nine out of 10 times.
Given how many stupid fights I’ve seen over e-mail and on message boards, I’m surprised this percentage isn’t even worse.
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Oh YEAH? What’s that supposed to mean you manjerk?
Comment by f. chong rutherford — February 13, 2006 @ 12:04
I highly recommend reading the original paper “When what you type isn’t what they read: The perseverance of stereotypes and expectancies over e-mail”, which is not directly linked in the Wired article. It has a lot of other interesting stuff in it.
If you read it you’ll find a mistake that showed up in the Wired piece. People in their experiments didn’t have the a 50/50 chance of detecting emotional tone — instead, the chance of picking correctly the intent of irony vs sincerity was no better then random chance. I find this a much more accurate way to say it than a 50/50 chance.
There is a long history of academic research substantiating Eply/Kruger thesis that we don’t accurately interpret the emotional context (or as they call it, para-linguistic content) of text very well. The first academic paper that I’ve found that deals with this topic goes back to:
Sproull, L. and Kiesler, S. 1988. Reducing Social Context Clues: Electronic Mail in Organizational Communication. Readings in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 684–712. Los Altos, California: Morgan Kaufmann. (Citeseer Reference)
There are also a number of other psychological and sociological causes for the cycle of flames, including over-interpretation of emotional content, emotional contagion, and lowered empathy during higher intensity emotions. I’ve written more about these in my blog at Flames: Emotional Amplification of Text.
Comment by Christopher Allen — February 13, 2006 @ 20:09