People are incredibly lame at predicting how funny recipients of their e-mail will think it is, according to a recent study.
But then, we all knew that, didn’t we?
A series of five studies by four business school professors from New York University, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, asked a bunch of people to e-mail funny and sarcastic phrases to one another and predict whether the messages’ recipients would accurately be able to detect the intended tone.
In one study, 56% of recipients guessed incorrectly about an e-mail’s intended tone, while 78% of the senders incorrectly predicted whether or not the recipients would get it right.
“People routinely overestimate how well they can communicate over e-mail, we offer, particularly when the meaning of the message is ambiguous,” said the study.
An inability to empathize with recipients contributes to senders’ inability to predict how accurately the message’s tone will be perceived, the researchers said.
“We further argue that this overestimation is caused, at least in part, by egocentrism, 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,” the study said.
OK, let’s take a little test. See if you can detect the tone of the following:
Four people at three schools conducted five studies to find out that an inability to empathize causes people to misread how their e-mail to others will be perceived. Nice to see those tuition and tax dollars spent so wisely.
A series of five studies by four business school professors from New York University, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, asked a bunch of people to e-mail funny and sarcastic phrases to one another and predict whether the messages’ recipients would accurately be able to detect the intended tone.
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