The tone of e-mail messages

"Don't work too hard," wrote a colleague in an e-mail today. Was she sincere or sarcastic?"

According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we have only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message.

The study also shows that people think they have correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.

The researchers took 30 pairs of undergraduate students and gave each one a list of 20 statements about topics like campus food or the weather. Assuming either a serious or sarcastic tone, one member of each pair e-mailed the statements to his or her partner. The partners then guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in their answers.

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 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".

Further,"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. So, e-mail is very easy to misinterpret, which not only triggers flame wars but lots of litigation.

Note: Tone in a e-mail is the quality in your writing that reveals your attitude toward your topic and reader. Tone comes from your choice of words, the structure of your sentences, and the order of the information you present.

Historical reference about e-mail

E-mail was created in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson. At that time there was a message system in every computer (which was shared by several users), but there wasn’t a mail program per se that allowed a user to send messages to another.

In those days we placed in a predetermined directory a file containing the message we wanted others to read. When the recipient wanted to know if he/she had mail, he/she had to check that directory. It was like a bulletin board, but inside the computer.

Tomlinson created a program that allowed sending these messages from one computer to another. Since it was necessary to separate the name of the user from the machine sending the mail, he selected “at” (@) as the division between the user’s name and the computer where the mail box was located.

The symbol “@” means literally “in that place”, so we could say “I am in Caracas” as “I am @ Caracas”. My e-mail address jucar@cograf.com, means the mailbox of “jucar” is located at the “cograf.com” web domain.

The name e-mail (a contraction of “electronic mail”) comes from its analogy with regular mail: Both serve to send and receive messages, using “intermediate mailboxes” (located in the servers) where messages are stored until the recipients retrieve them.

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E-mails and egos

An inability to step outside of one's own head may be behind e-mail miscommunication, according to recent research.

Kruger, a professor at New York University, was once a member of a psychology departmental e-mail list at a different university. A job candidate came into town to interview for a faculty position. The faculty member responsible for organizing a meet-and-greet dinner sent around an e-mail invitation that read "talking to the candidate is not required; just don't embarrass us."

"She meant it as a joke, but much to her surprise some people were really upset," says Kruger. "It was a comical miscommunication."

Now, Kruger and his colleague Nicholas Epley, of the University of Chicago, have published research that helps explain why these electronic misunderstandings occur so frequently.

In a study in the December Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, they find that people overestimate both their ability to convey their intended tone–be it sarcastic, serious or funny–when they send an e-mail, as well as their ability to correctly interpret the tone of messages others send to them.

The reason for this communication disconnect, the researchers find, is egocentrism–the well-established social psychological phenomenon whereby people have a difficult time detaching themselves from their own perspectives and understanding how other people will interpret them.

And as e-mail has become more prevalent, Epley says, the opportunities for misunderstanding have increased.

"Of course there's nothing new about text-based communication; people have been writing letters for centuries," he explains. "But what's different in this medium is…the ease with which we can fire things back and forth. It makes text-based communication seem more informal and more like face-to-face communication than it really is."

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Some of the most frequently used emoticons in e-mails

In 1979, the need and possibility to add some emotion to written messages was considered, and “emoticons” were created, a neologism whose root is formed by the words “emotion” and “icon”.

These are a sequence of characters that when you see them with your head tilted to the left, you see a symbolic representation of a human face showing an emotion. For instance, the emoticon :-) is used to symbolize a smiling face.

Some of the most frequently used emoticons in e-mails:
:-) = Happy face with nose
:) = Happy face without nose
;-) = Winking face with nose
;) = Winking face without nose
:-D = Laughter
8-) = Surprised happy face
:-( = Sad face with nose
:( = Sad face without nose
:’( = Sad face crying
8-O = Surprised face with nose
=O = Very surprised of startled
:-\ = Unpleasant face
:-| = Serious face
:-X = “My lips are sealed”, or “silent”
:-b = Sticking the tong mockingly
8-P = My mouth is watering, with eyes open wide
<3 = A heart or “I love you”
0:-) = “I am a saint”, “I am innocent”
:-* = Kiss

Bad e-mail can creates human resources nightmares

Wasted Talent: Xerox fired more than 40 employees in 1999 for idling away up to eight hours a day on X-rated sites. The downloading of porn videos was so pervasive, it actually choked Xerox's computer network and prevented employees from sending and receiving legitimate eMail.

Wasted Talent: Dow Chemical fired 64 workers and disciplined 230 more in 2000 for violating the company's policies against pornographic eMail.

Wasted Talent: The New York Times Company fired nearly two dozen employees and reprimanded another 20 workers for sending and/or receiving eMails that included sexual images and offensive jokes.

Lost Productivity: Firefighters in Columbus, Ohio triggered an internal investigation, media sensation, and public uproar when a routine scan of on-the-job Internet surfing revealed that fire division headquarters' staff were visiting as many as 8,000 pornographic sites a day.