All posts in the topic Some scientific input on e-mail (Short link)

2007 Oct 11 17:27 UTC

Hence negative e-mail - like personal attacks or name calling - is
probably perceived even more negative to an extreme IMHO.

Steven Clift

From:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/jobs/07pre.html?em&ex=1192161600

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

...

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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/syracuse_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>’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.

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