[stressdoc]

E-Mail Is Easy to Write (and to Misread)

By DANIEL GOLEMAN
Published: October 7, 2007
AS I was in the final throes of getting my most recent book into print, an employee at the publishing company sent me an e-mail message that stopped me in my tracks.
I had met her just once, at a meeting. We were having an e-mail exchange about some crucial detail involving publishing rights, which I thought was being worked out well. Then she wrote: It’s difficult to have this conversation by e-mail. I sound strident and you sound exasperated.
At first I was surprised to hear I had sounded exasperated. But once she identified this snag in our communications, I realized that something had really been off. So we had a phone call that cleared everything up in a few minutes, ending on a friendly note.
The advantage of a phone call or a drop-by over e-mail is clearly greatest when there is trouble at hand. But there are ways in which e-mail may subtly encourage such trouble in the first place.
This is becoming more apparent with the emergence of social neuroscience, the study of what happens in the brains of people as they interact. New findings have uncovered a design flaw at the interface where the brain encounters a computer screen: there are no online channels for the multiple signals the brain uses to calibrate emotions.
Face-to-face interaction, by contrast, is information-rich. We interpret what people say to us not only from their tone and facial expressions, but also from their body language and pacing, as well as their synchronization with what we do and say.
Most crucially, the brain’s social circuitry mimics in our neurons what’s happening in the other person’s brain, keeping us on the same wavelength emotionally. This neural dance creates an instant rapport that arises from an enormous number of parallel information processors, all working instantaneously and out of our awareness.
In contrast to a phone call or talking in person, e-mail can be emotionally impoverished when it comes to nonverbal messages that add nuance and valence to our words. The typed words are denuded of the rich emotional context we convey in person or over the phone.
E-mail, of course, has a multitude of virtues: it’s quick and convenient, democratizes access and lets us stay in touch with loads of people we could never see or call. It enables us to accomplish huge amounts of work together.
Still, if we rely solely on e-mail at work, the absence of a channel for the brain’s emotional circuitry carries risks. In an article to be published next year in the Academy of Management Review, Kristin Byron, an assistant professor of management at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management, finds that e-mail generally increases the likelihood of conflict and miscommunication.
One reason for this is that we tend to misinterpret positive e-mail messages as more neutral, and neutral ones as more negative, than the sender intended. Even jokes are rated as less funny by recipients than by senders.
We fail to realize this largely because of egocentricity, according to a 2005 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Sitting alone in a cubicle or basement writing e-mail, the sender internally hears emotional overtones, though none of these cues will be sensed by the recipient.
When we talk, my brain’s social radar picks up that hint of stridency in your voice and automatically lowers my own tone of exasperation, all in the service of working things out. But when we send e-mail, there’s little to nothing by way of emotional valence to pick up. E-mail lacks those channels for the implicit meta-messages that, in a conversation, provide its positive or negative spin.
On the upside, the familiarity that develops between sender and receiver can help to reduce these problems, according to findings by Joseph Walther, a professor of communication and telecommunication at Michigan State University. People who know each other well, it turns out, are less likely to have these misunderstandings online.
These quirks of cyberpsychology are familiar to Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University’s interactive telecommunications program. His expertise is social computing — software programs through which multiple users interact, ranging from Facebook to Listservs and chat rooms to e-mail. I asked Professor Shirky what all of this might imply for the multitudes of people who work with others by e-mail.
When you communicate with a group you only know through electronic channels, it’s like having functional Asperger’s Syndrome you are very logical and rational, but emotionally brittle, Professor Shirky said.
I’m part of a far-flung distributed network that at one point was designing a piece of software for sharing medical data; we worked mostly by conference calls and e-mail, and it was going nowhere. So we finally said we’d all fly to Boston and get together for two days, just sit in a room and hash it out.
During that meeting, the team got an enormous amount of work done. And, Professor Shirky recalls, “because the synchronization by e-mail was so much better after the face-to-face piece, we actually hit the launch date.
He proposes that work groups whose members are widely dispersed but need to have high levels of coordination say, a computer security team protecting a global bank do not have to assemble everyone in one room to reap the same benefit. Instead, he suggests a banyan model, after the Asian tree that puts down roots from its branches.
In this approach, he said, you put down little roots of face-to-face contact everywhere, to strategically augment electronic communications.
Professor Shirky advised the I.T. head of a global bank to gather together one representative from disparate cities for a day or two and complete tasks. That way, when the security group in Singapore gets e-mail from the security people in London, someone will be more likely to know the sender, and sense how to read the information with less risk of misconstruing or discounting it.
CONSIDER, too, the e-mail the guy down the hall effect: as the use of e-mail increases in an organization, the overall volume of other kinds of communication drops particularly routine friendly greetings. But lacking these seemingly innocuous interactions, people feel more disconnected from co-workers. This was noted in an article in Organizational Science almost a decade ago, just as e-mail was starting to surge. Saying Hi, it turns out, really does matter; it’s social glue.
As Professor Shirky puts it, social software like e-mail is not better than face-to-face contact; it’s only better than nothing.
Daniel Goleman is the author of Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (Bantam). E-mail:
preoccupations@nytimes.com.

[JSpira]

I read that article when it came out.

I have written several articles about "tone" both in e-mail and other CMC (computer-mediated communications).

It is a big problem.

[Vikingus]

ouch, it burns

[Serjames]

I think a good example of this in action could be witnessed over on the UK forum.

We've now met each other at least once, maybe not the whole group, but a good majority.

As such the general tone is really positive with jokes being understood by both parties and just a really nice happy clappy-ness about the whole place that I don't think used to exist.

I wonder as the mini-site grows if this will start to be diminished ?

Good article, thanks

SJ

[- Paul -]

Great article and something that I studied in A level Psychology.

[Carnage]

Originally Posted by JSpira

I read that article when it came out.

I have written several articles about "tone" both in e-mail and other CMC (computer-mediated communications).

It is a big problem.

I agree. When I was working on my Masters, I wrote an long paper on the subject of email and how was slowly destroying the "art" of face to face communication. It is a much bigger problem then people realize.

[Revlis]

Good Reading, and working for what is currently a Mom and pop operation that is now becoming the corporation something that has been addressed a few times.

[stressdoc]

Wow, I thought I was the only neuro-geek on E90post!

[TurboFan]

Originally Posted by stressdoc

E-Mail Is Easy to Write (and to Misread)

By DANIEL GOLEMAN
Published: October 7, 2007
AS I was in the final throes ...].

Once someone's spent about 2 days in corporate america, especially working for a large multi-national, this guy get's nominated for the captain obvious award!

It's all very true, and painful. I can't stand a conversation over e-mail, when a quick conversation would have replaced the entire exchange. The art of conversation is very quickly changing, and being somewhat sterilized. Emoticons are an interesting introduction, but not terribly professional. Imagine reading an e-mail from the prez of the company, and it's littered with ':-)' and ';-)' or '' or the like. ( . )( . ) might be interesting, but likely to get one fired!

However, there is one intersting upside. As we remove some expression from our language, and must focus on words, it makes international communication a little better, as long as we watch the slang. I have a team in India that I work with regularly, and they do not pick up on inflections, pace of speech, etc. As long as I e-mail them, and use the "queen's english", or proper english relatively devoid of jargon, they understand me more quickly.

[Taittinger]

Originally Posted by TurboFan

Once someone's spent about 2 days in corporate america, especially working for a large multi-national, this guy get's nominated for the captain obvious award!

It's all very true, and painful. I can't stand a conversation over e-mail, when a quick conversation would have replaced the entire exchange. The art of conversation is very quickly changing, and being somewhat sterilized. Emoticons are an interesting introduction, but not terribly professional. Imagine reading an e-mail from the prez of the company, and it's littered with ':-)' and ';-)' or '' or the like. ( . )( . ) might be interesting, but likely to get one fired!

However, there is one intersting upside. As we remove some expression from our language, and must focus on words, it makes international communication a little better, as long as we watch the slang. I have a team in India that I work with regularly, and they do not pick up on inflections, pace of speech, etc. As long as I e-mail them, and use the "queen's english", or proper english relatively devoid of jargon, they understand me more quickly.

Agreed. I think much of the misunderstanding in written communications stems from poor writing skills when people begin writing as they would speak, which, more often than not, is poorly. Ironically enough, the telephone must have contributed to this as people started writing letters less frequently. And now, it seems the prevalent use of email now, a newer technology, is raising awareness of proper writing skills.

[TurboFan]

Originally Posted by Taittinger

Agreed. I think much of the misunderstanding in written communications stems from poor writing skills when people begin writing as they would speak, which, more often than not, is poorly. Ironically enough, the telephone must have contributed to this as people started writing letters less frequently. And now, it seems the prevalent use of email now, a newer technology, is raising awareness of proper writing skills.

If anything saves the art of the written form, it will probably be e-mail. Instant messaging / texting will be the death of the art that is writing.