Sharing Nicely

Today’s UNU-MERIT I&T newsletter (RSS feed is here) mentions a fascinating study published in The Age / Journal of Personality and Social Psychology – February 16, 2006.

It’s happened to all of us that someone completely misunderstood the tone of our email. Sending a “funny” (or even worse, “sarcastic”) email, we receive the written equivalent of a blank stare. Sarcasm and humor are highly dependent on culture, age, background. Working in a highly international environment like UNU, it’s often the choice between (a) restraining oneself to exclusively informative (and dry) language, (b) or risking the occasional confusion.

Here is the snippet from I&T:

Who is to blame when a bitter email exchange escalates into electronic warfare? According to a US report, a simple misunderstanding might be at fault. In a recent study of 30 undergraduate students, researchers from the University of Chicago and New York University said the tone of an email message was only correctly interpreted 50 per cent of the time.

The students were paired off and given each a list of 20 statements about general topics such as campus food and the weather and were asked to e-mail the statements to a partner introducing either a serious or sarcastic tone. The senders of the messages expected their partners to correctly interpret their tone nearly 80 per cent of the time, but in fact they only scored just over 50 per cent, said the report.

Those attempting to interpret the message believed they had scored 90 per cent accuracy. The researchers said people often believed that the tone in their messages was obvious because they could hear it in their head as they wrote.