Tone, Emotion, and Flaming
How likely are you to accurately determine the tone of any email message you receive?
According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, your odds are only about 50-50. The study also shows that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90% 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. . .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.
That's a huge discrepancy. But where does it come from?
The reason for this is egocentrism, or the difficulty some people have detaching themselves from their own perspective, says Epley. In other words, people aren't that good at imagining how a message might be understood from another person's perspective.
I'm sure that's true, but I think there's more to it than that.
A great deal of communication is non-verbal. According to a famous study (Mehrabian and Ferris, Journal of Consulting Psychology 31, 1967):
- 38% of communication is inflection and tone of voice
- 55% is facial expression
- 7% is based on what you actually say
These often-quoted findings are based on a situation in which a listener is analyzing a speaker's general attitude (positive, negative, or neutral) when there is no prior acquaintance and no prior context for their discussion. If those conditions are not the case (i.e., there is prior context or acquaintance), then the percent communicated by what you actually say will be somewhat higher.
Humans evolved to read cues other than words in order to ascertain meaning -- it was a matter of survival. But what we're dealing with here is email, in which there is no facial expression to see, and no tone of voice or inflection to hear. Even if we sometimes try to make up for these shortcomings with emoticons or or other textual tricks (bold, italics, CAPS, *stars*, etc.), it's still a very long way from being able to look at a speaker's face, hear her voice, or read body language.
Our brains are not wired (yet) to transmit or receive nonverbal communication in text-only communication. We think we ought to be able to understand what someone is saying just from the words they use, but we're wrong.
So, what happens? We get an email from someone, and we assume we know how to read between the lines and understand the intended tone. However, as shown above, we're just as likely to be wrong as right.
In face-to-face communication, prior acquaintance or prior context may improve the ability to infer an unspoken attitude, but I suspect the opposite is true with email. It seems logical that misinterpretation may happen even more often when we are acquainted with the writer or we do have context -- because then we'd be more apt to assume we know what's intended.
Obviously, this discussion has no direct bearing on nanotechnology, but it is quite relevant to the social exchanges that take place in blogging and commenting. I'm suggesting that we all (including me) should be cautious about making assumptions or jumping to conclusions. 
Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog
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