The Prospecting Professor: E-mail + Emotion ='s E-Risky

February 22, 2006

E-mail + Emotion ='s E-Risky

Have you ever sent an e-mail where the tone that you intended...was completely misread by the recipient?

You aren't alone...in fact, it happens all of the time.

In a recent study by psychologists Justin Kruger PhD, and his colleague Nicholas Epley PhD, they help explain why electronic misunderstandings occur so frequently "See article". When we send e-mails, we all overestimate both our ability to convey our intended tone...be it sarcastic, serious, or funny...as well as our ability to interpret the tone of messages that we receive.

Kruger and Epley found that people are much better at communicating and interpreting TONE in vocal messages than in text-based ones. In their experiment, they tested two groups of undergraduate students. The first group read statements into a tape recorder...taking either a sarcastic or serious tone...while the second group e-mailed identical statements. The participants then listened, or read, their partners' statements, and guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in the answers.

The partners who read the statements over e-mail had only a 56% success rate at interpreting the correct tone...not much better than chance!

The reasons for the misinterpreted e-mails are that a great deal of communication depends not only on what is said, but how it is said. These "paralinguistic clues" such as gesture, inflection, pronunciation, vocal expression, fluency, and tone are each important clues to the speaker's meaning. Moreover, ego-centrism plays an important role in this communication disconnect. People have a difficult time detaching themselves from their own perspectives and understanding how other people will interpret them.

Here's what it boils down to...the ease and speed with which e-mail (or instant messaging) triggers exchanges makes it seem less like written communication, and more like a face-to-face transaction. Wrong! It's not.

There's a simple solution to limiting the possibility that your message gets heard as you intended it...use the phone. E-mail is fine if you just want to communicate content. However, if you are sending any emotional material...Caveat Emailori! (Let the e-mailer beware.)

February 22, 2006 in Etiquette | Permalink

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