which sentences were meant to be sarcastic. “As expected, the
participants were overconfident,” the paper explains. The sentence
writers predicted that the readers would essentially get every choice
right. In reality, they failed nearly 20 percent of the time.
In a follow-up experiment, half the sentence writers got to record
themselves reading their sentences on a tape recorder, while the
other half still emailed their creations.
Perhaps not surprisingly,
hearing sentences on a recording made it easier to determine
whether or not they were sarcastic. What
was surprising was that the
sentence writers predicted there would be no difference: they
believed the recipients would have an equally easy time detecting
sarcasm in written and recorded sentences.
To test the claim that
egocentrism was the source of the
participants’ overconfidence, the researchers turned their attention
to humor. They now provided each sender with a short humorous
passage. In particular, they drew from humorist Jack Handey’s
Deep
Thoughts: absurdist mini monologues
delivered as scrolling text,
read by a deadpan narrator and set against a relaxing backdrop.
These appeared as a regular feature on
Saturday Night Live during
the 1990s and early 2000s. To make this experiment more concrete
(and to provide me an excuse to replicate the funniest passage I’ve
ever read in a peer-reviewed article), here’s an example
Deep
Thought that was actually used by the researchers:
I guess of all my uncles, I liked Uncle Caveman the best. We
called him Uncle Caveman because he lived in a cave, and
because sometimes he’d eat one of us. Later on we found out
he was a bear.
To test egocentrism, the researchers randomly divided the
senders into two groups. Each participant
in the first group was
simply provided a
Deep Thought to send via email. Those in the
second group were shown a clip of the thought being delivered on
Saturday Night Live, with the oh-so-perfect calming music, the
deadpan narrator, and the shocked laughter from the audience. After
watching the clip, this group also emailed just the text. In both cases,
the senders were asked how funny they thought the passage was and
to estimate how funny the recipients would find it.
“Participants in the videotape condition thought that the [
Deep
Thoughts] were funnier than did
participants in the control
condition,” the paper reveals, “and the same was true of participants’
predictions of the recipients’ evaluation of the jokes.” Seeing the
video clip provided the minds of the participants with a richer
accompaniment to play alongside the text they were typing into the
email. Like Elizabeth Newton’s song tappers hearing the music in
their head, the videotape group couldn’t shake the funny visuals and
laughing crowd when trying to judge how well their email would be
understood. The richer the sender’s subjective experience of what
she’s trying to communicate, the bigger
the gap grows between her
understanding and that of her correspondent—evidence that
egocentrism is at the core of the measured overconfidence.
The conclusion of this work is that emails are commonly
misunderstood because of the “inherent difficulty of moving beyond
one’s subjective experience of a stimulus and imagining how the
stimulus might be evaluated by someone who does not share one’s
privileged perspective.” To make matters even worse, the researchers
found that the recipients of these ambiguous messages were as
overconfident as the senders. They were confident that they were
correctly detecting sarcasm or identifying humor, even when they
weren’t doing well at all. This last observation
applies a particularly
devious twist to our understanding of email’s many confusions. It’s
not just that we’re less clear than we think, but we’re often
completely misunderstood. You were
sure that you were sending a
nice note, while your receiver is equally
sure you were delivering a
pointed critique. When you build an entire workflow on exactly this
type of ambiguous and misunderstood communication—a workflow
that bypasses all the rich, non-linguistic social tools that researchers
like Alex Pentland documented as being
fundamental to successful
human interaction—you shouldn’t be surprised that work messaging
is making us miserable.
We don’t need research studies, however, to emphasize
something that many of us already experience on a daily basis. In her
book
Reclaiming Conversation, MIT social scientist Sherry Turkle
catalogs stories of the issues caused when workplaces shift more of
their interaction to written text. One such case study focuses on the
trials of a technology director named Victor,
who manages a team at
a large financial services firm. “Typically, things get into trouble
when too much has been done by email,” Victor tells Turkle. He
keeps having to convince his team that when problems arise with a
client, they need to talk to them in person. “This is not something
they would come to themselves,” he explains. “I’m usually facing
someone who wants to send twenty-nine emails to fix a problem.”
His solution is simpler: “Go talk to them.” As Victor elaborates, his
younger colleagues see electronic communication as a “universal
language” that provides a more efficient way to interact.
Increasingly, Victor sees his role as convincing them that this
couldn’t be further from the truth: email is not a universal form of
interaction,
he keeps trying to explain; it is instead an impoverished
simulacrum of the types of complex and nuanced behaviors that
through most of human history defined our communication. We all
increasingly feel the effects of this mismatch.
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