A world Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

linguistic channel of information captured only a small part of what
would be important for understanding the interaction underway in
that conference room. Flowing concurrently alongside the words
being said was an unconscious social channel, made up of subtle
physical cues in body language and voice tone that painted a richer
picture of how decisions were being reached in that room. These
“ancient primate signaling mechanisms” had been previously studied
in apes, but Pentland’s sociometers were designed to prove that these
mechanisms still play a major role in human collaboration.
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There are many signals that work on this social channel. As
Pentland explains in his book on the topic, Honest Signals: How
They Shape Our World, this information is processed largely
unconsciously, often using lower-level circuits in our nervous system,
which is why it evades our perceived experience. Its impact, however,
shouldn’t be underestimated. “These social signals are not just a back
channel or complement to our conscious language,” Pentland writes.
“They form a separate communication network that powerfully
influences our behavior.”
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One such signal delivered through this unconscious network is
called, aptly enough, influence. It describes the degree to which one
person can cause another to match their speaking pattern. This
information, which is processed in our brain through subcortical
structures centered on the tectum, provides a fast and accurate
snapshot of power dynamics in a given room. Another such signal is
activity, which describes a person’s physical movements during a
conversation. Shifting in your seat, leaning forward, demonstrative
gesticulating—these behaviors, which are mediated largely through
the autonomic nervous system (“an extremely old neural structure”),
provide a surprisingly accurate reading of the true intentions of an
individual in the interaction.
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We know these signals are important because, as Pentland
demonstrates in his research, by measuring them using his
sociometers he can accurately predict outcomes of face-to-face
scenarios such as dating, salary negotiations, and job interviews
without any reference to the actual words spoken. Indeed, returning
to the study of the business executives in the MIT conference room,
Pentland later presented written versions of the plans to a new group
and asked each group member to decide on their own which was
best. Their decisions were significantly different from those reached
by the group that heard the pitches in person. “The executives [in the
group setting] thought they were evaluating the plans based on
rational measures,” Pentland explains, “[but] another part of their
brain was registering other crucial information, such as: How much
does this person believe in this idea? How confident are they when
speaking? How determined are they to make it work?”
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 The
executives who simply read the plans didn’t realize how much they
were missing. Both groups reviewed the same pitches, but they were
working with vastly different information.

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When we shifted toward the hyperactive hive mind workflow in
the 1990s and early 2000s, we believed we were just taking the
conversations that were happening in conference rooms and on
phone lines and shifting them onto a new messaging medium,
leaving the content of these interactions largely unchanged. As
research like Alex Pentland’s emphasizes, however, this prioritization
of abstract written communication over in-person communication
disregarded the immensely complex and finely tuned social circuits
that our species evolved to optimize our ability to work cooperatively.
By embracing email, we inadvertently crippled the systems that
make us so good at working together. “Memos and emails simply
don’t work the same way that face-to-face communications work,”
Pentland bluntly concludes.
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It’s no wonder that our inboxes so
often leave us with an unspecified and gnawing sense of annoyance.
This annoyance is heightened by the fact that we often
overestimate our correspondents’ ability to understand our
messages. In a now classic experiment that appeared in her 1990
doctoral dissertation, a Stanford psychology student named
Elizabeth Newton paired up research subjects, who sat across from
each other at a table. She asked one person to tap out a well-known
song using their knuckles on the table, while the other subject had to
guess the song. The tappers estimated that about 50 percent of the
listeners would figure out the song. In reality, fewer than 3 percent
succeeded in naming the rhythmic tune.
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As Newton argued, when the tapper is knocking on the table,
they hear in their head all the accompaniment for the song—the
singing, the instruments—and have a hard time putting themselves
into the mental state of the listener, who has access to none of that
information and is instead left grappling with a puzzling jumble of
sporadic knocks. Social psychologists call this effect egocentrism,
and as a research team led by Justin Kruger of NYU set out to
demonstrate in a surprisingly entertaining 2005 paper, appearing in
The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, it plays a big role
in explaining why email drives us crazy.
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Kruger and his collaborators started by studying sarcasm. In
their first experiment, they gave a group of participants a list of
topics. For each topic, they were asked to write two sentences: one
normal and one sarcastic. They then emailed their sentences to