Slashdot Mirror
The Secret Cause of Flame Wars
Mz6 writes "According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I've only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time. "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. 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."
Sadly, Slashdot readers have known this for years.
Kids, this is why it's so important to properly use your <sarcasm> tags and your emoticons!
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
If you and your friend are having an argument through e-mail, you probably feel that you have to cover the whole spectrum of abrasiveness with each e-mail you send. In real life, you would have the social tact to start out with statements and leave room for yourself to retract what you've said or to give a little ground and end up mutually agreeing on something.
What seems to be my problem with e-mail is that I send a message and I run the topic into the ground in that first e-mail (saying everything about it). Now, that's written in stone like a Slashdot comment. No backsies.
And the fact that he might not get the e-mail for a while makes me want to accelerate the severity of the issue since we don't want to take two weeks discussing it. Had we been more gradual at accelerating the argument, things said could probably have been avoided. Secret? Not quite. I might end an e-mail with "...screw Oasis and Weezer, every Beatles' album is far greater than all of theirs combined." Now, in real life, I'd say that with a malevolent shit-eating grin on my face signaling that I know it's not true. But my friend might read it and imagine me with a stone faced militant music-nazi expression and my finger pointing into his chest. What ensues is a standard flame war. The cause of this is no secret.
My work here is dung.
Just goes to show that you should never assume that anyone is mean or out to get you, or react in such a way... or they will become VERY SOON!
Self-fulfilling prophecies, anyone?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
"I love Linux. It's great."
Serious or sarcastic? 10 euros for correct guess.
throw new NoSignatureException();
"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,"
On it's face, this statement is incompatible with:
"In fact the recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time."
It's no better than chance. It is better than Chance.
Nice going..
...will flamebait comments on this story be considered informative?
www.code-fix.com
This is the best article I've seen posted in years! I thought /. was on the decline, but clearly it is just reaching its stride.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
CowboyNeal solves all of my computer woes!
Choose:
A) Serious
B) Sarcastic
You suck!
1. Use emoticons and know how to read them.
2. When there are 2 ways to read something, assume the other end didn't want to offend you unless you have very good reason to assume they did (i.e. when the flame war is already running to the joy of the general audience).
Then again, if everyone knew those 2 rules and took them serious, trolls would probably go out on the street and set fire to real life objects... Maybe the world's better the way it is.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That much of communication is non-verbal is quite known. When it comes to business communication, it seems like the treacherous part of this is that so many people are using e-mail and IM for informal communication, and insert so much of our personality into our messages. They're simply not nearly as professional as letters were in the past.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Being able to correctly interpret messages in text form is a skill, if you're good at it you can get far more than 50% right. My rule of thumb is simple - assume the best, in other words, only be insulted if you're sure. Or put another way - "If you're in any doubt about whether or not I intended to insult you, I didn't. If I had, you'd know it."
That all flame wars erupt from somebody misunderstanding another persons tone in email.
In most of my experience, most flame wars kick in because of old fashioned beligerance. People see somebody that disagrees with them, and has the courage to say things that they wouldn't say to the other person's face, by virtue of being separated by miles of network cable.
Now everybody that disagrees with me is a G4Y A55FUK3R!
Actually, most flamewars are caused by Vim being much worse than Emacs.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Since the end of World War 2, a clandestine, shadowy organisation known colloquially as "The Illuminati" has been secretly instigating and orchestrating all major flamewars. Conflicts such as the Tannenbaum Crisis, and the ongoing battles at comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy were all sparked by this bunch as part of their twisted plan to control the world packet flow through decreasing the SNR on the Internet, and when it finally collapses, replace it with their evil commie New World Protocol. Fight the evil!
You know who they are.
They know who they are.
Don't you people ever read Indymedia? It's all in there!
Simple statements with little or no context (and statements taken out of context) are misunderstood ~50% of the time.
--Captain Obvious
Another reason for flame wars online, especially with regards to games, and on Slashdot, programming languages -
:-)
A friend who studied psychology talked to me about the "crafty consumer" phenomenon. If we have purchased something we have looked forward to, we will disregard negative things about this and might even become angry if friends point out flaws in the product to us. This is because we all want to think that we are crafty consumers who have made the smart choice. Of course, WE would never fall for advertising, we think. So when evidence mounts that the purchase wasn't as good as we thought, we resist facing it until the evidence is overwhelming. Then it is a blow to our self-esteem and might even cause a depression ("Maybe I'm not as smart as I thought I was... and all that money wasted...").
This can be even more amplified here on Slashdot when someone criticizes something that we have spent a lot of time and intellectual effort to grasp. When someone bash our favourite language, we think our anger comes because we feel "love" for the language, but it has probably more to that with the fact that it is a blow against our major source of pride - our intellectual capabilites. And if the language is not as good as we thought, it might take a long time to learn a new language as well. So in time of economic downturn the stress of increased job insecurity, we get angrier and defensive more easily. See my sig...
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
And in the same paragraph, he predicted Slashdot:
/.'s Psychic-in-Residence: Psychic to the Geeks
This study took essentially random, disparate topics, from multiple boards, and sent them in emails, isolated from the context. Of course people are going to have a hard time ascertaining sincerity when they don't see the context! An meaningful study would have measured people's perceptions of posts on boards they regularly go to. The conclusion may be the same, but at least then it would be well-grounded.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
Sorry, couldn't resist.
:P
At work, I find myself peppering my e-mails with these damn cute smiley emoticons even though I feel like a teenage girl (which I'm not, even on the Internet). Sometimes I'll respond with a terse message that basically says "I fixed your damn user error", and then add a smiley face at the end.
I think it means that I'm secretly passive-agressive, trying to cover it up with cute little characters.
I find this hard to believe. In fact, I'd say the "karma" system here is a good indicator of why it's hard to believe.
I don't think most people are shocked at what the moderator action is to any one of their particular posts. This is why some people preface what they are about to say with, "Mod me as you will...", or "I know I'll burn karma for this but...". People know.
The problem isn't with being able to convey intent with email (words). The problem is with SEMI-LITERATE PEOPLE trying to convey, and conversely intepret, intent with email.
If you take the time to be clear and articulate, there is no way it can only be 50/50 on someone understanding your intent, unless you are speaking to an absolute moron.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
It is difficult for most people to ascertain the tone of written communication due to their poor reading skills and the poor writing skills of the sender. Idiots need to go back to elementary school to learn something about grammar.
Can you guess the tone of this comment?
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
This is why precise diction--speaking and writing clearly--is necessary. It is often just as much the fault of the writer as it is the reader when a message's tone is misinterpreted.
There are devices such as certain words, punctuations or even emoticons that can help you give your message the flavor of meaning that you want it to have, provided you know how to use them correctly.
The skill to write well is a thousand times more valuable today than most people give it credit for. In a time when so much of our worldwide communication is written, we have to know how to properly build a written message instead of simply writing what we would speak and assume the reader will "get" it. You never know when you might offend someone.
Kids, this is why it's so important to properly use your <sarcasm> tags and your emoticons!
Well, when you're communicating with Americans, certainly...
semicolon right parenthesis
Well, if you really did make that post without the disclaimer there's really no hint of sarcasm in your post. If you're making a snide comment it's really your job to convey that. If someone takes it the wrong way and you didn't make some kind of effort to convey tone, that's really your fault in not communicating properly.
AccountKiller
The English language (and even more so, in some other cases) is well equipped with nuanced words and structures that can accurately convey meaning, intent, tone, and information both simple and complex. Of course context is vital, but one of the most important considerations in any form of communication is an ability to preview what you're about to convey from the audience's point of view. When you send an e-mail to an informed co-worker, the circumstances surrounding the note probably make sense... but may not to the person to whom she forwards it.
Most folks simply don't have the skill, or take the time, to craft a message that carries its context with it. The ironic flip side to this is that when someone does take more time to write a more solid, contextually portable note, people not used to digesting that sort of thing presume it's either pretentious, condescending, or just verbose for the sake of verbosity. This is a cultural thing, and speaks to the continuing erosion in critical thinking skills and the obligation families feel to pass them along to children.
Anyone good with rhetoric knows how important it is to put yourself in your audience's shoes before opening your yap. The clearest communicators I know are the ones that are the most broadly exposed to the world at large, and take a deep breath before saying/typing anything, the better to ask themselves: will the person about to receive this e-mail get it? Five extra seconds can save hours of backpeddling, re-explaining something, or salvaging that business/personal relationship. But we've switched to celebrating speed and quantity of noise over quality of actual communication. This isn't going away any time soon, especially when entire generations are hitting their first email-enabled actual jobs thinking that "Dude" is an entire sentence.
The plague that is the use of "like" among teenagers (and stunted-growth adults) is at the heart of this. When some 16-year-old encounters a friend in the mall and says, "So, I was like..." and rolls eyes in a re-enactment of experiencing the emotions surrounding some other social interchange, the message gets across. That even works on the phone ("I was like, 'oh no you did-unt'"). But when all of the social warm-and-fuzzies that a young person feels happen without the need for a multi-syllable vocabulary, we can't wonder why they suck at both investing rich meaning in, and parsing full meaning from the written word.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Maybe it's just me getting older, but they're making a pretty big claim when their test group was a bunch of undergraduate students. I mean, it's a cliche that college students are clueless, hung over, self-involved, etc., etc., etc., and cliches get to be cliches for a reason.
More seriously, like any other skill, you get better at communication the more you do it (if you have any brains, and care at all what's going outside your own skull, that is). So I'd venture to say that a bunch of 30-year-olds would do better than those college students because they have moved out into the world and gotten smacked around because they didn't understand what people were really saying. 40-year-olds would do better and so on, up to some point at which the improvement would stop (probably when people started to think they know it all).
And there's the writing skill component. College students are learning to communicate, and from what I've seen of college grads their success rate is pretty spotty. It would presumably be easier to parse the tone of an e-mail sent by somebody who has more communications skill.
I could go on, but I think this is just confirming the experience of too many people, blinding them to the study's weaknesses.
Or maybe I just missed the point...
"What?"
"Did you just call me a moron?"
A fifty-something bloke once cycled at me on the pavement. I asked him "does your mother not let you ride on the road yet?" as he passed. He turned round, cycled back and hit me, for "saying something about my mother"! It took me an age to work out that he simply did not understand what I was getting at.
I vote we all use emoticons, and then ban people without typing skills from the net. And the pavement.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
One huge gaping problem in methodology here is the apparent researcher request that students essentially fake the tone of their email. So this study is in large part measuring how well the sender *acts* "sarcastic" or "serious." From my observations in theatre, most people are not very good at faking their "tone", compared to when they actually *want* to be sarcastic or serious. A better study would have asked students to write on subjects and send the emails to their friends, then asked the sender and recipient of the tone of the email, then compared the results, without asking the sender to fake their feelings. I'll bet the percentage would go way, way up.
Currently hooked on AMP
>no better than chance
Um, no. 50-50 is not "no better than chance" when it comes to the tone of emails. That would imply that 50% of emails are friendly and 50% are unfriendly, and readers are getting half of both wrong.
Given this utter lack of understanding of probability and statistics, I'm going to have to doubt everything else the author says.
He'll probably take that as an insult. Well, fuck him.
That is why God gave us emoticons! :-) So people would know what our mood or tone is.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
People writing emails, intentionally trying to convey tone, have only a 50/50 chance of actually succeeding at it.
I used to feel silly having "writing" as one of the skills I put on a resumé. Not anymore. Thank you, internet, for boosting my self-esteem.
Poorly composed emails are not necessarily a symptom of fewer critical reasoning skills; I think they are more the result of a shift in focus during communication, from a single point of context (such as a letter or a book) to interactive, real time textual communication (such as email or instant messaging). When writing begins to feel more like speaking, the two forms of communication will blur. Interactive, conversational communication allows instant clarification, and does not require rigorous composition.
You're right! You should have just said, "You're wrong," and then I could have asked for some clarification.
Kidding, of course.
I think you're generally right. There are just too many variations, though, on the poor-emailing-skills theme to explore them all with one thesis in mind. I think the real problem with the really poor cases (of both writing AND reading such) is lack of attention span. Some people just can't hold a concept in their heads all the way to the second paragraph. It takes practice to stretch out and tune your linguistic/symbolic/conceptual input buffer, and very few younger people are getting that practice any longer. The biggest narrative arc they can handle is exactly as long as a music video. Sigh.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
That's because on IRC there are only two tones: SillyStupid and Asshole.
If you read it you'll find a mistake that showed up in the Wired piece. People in their experiments didn't have the a 50/50 chance of detecting emotional tone -- instead, the chance of picking correctly the intent was no better then random chance. A much more interesting interpretation than 50/50.
There is a long history of academic research substantiating Eply/Kruger thesis that we don't interpret the emotional content (or as they call it, para-linguistic content) of text very well. The first academic paper that I've found that deals with this topic goes back to:
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/context/1589611/0 Sproull, L. and Kiesler, S. 1988. Reducing Social Context Clues: Electronic Mail in Organizational Communication. Readings in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 684--712. Los Altos, California: Morgan Kaufmann.
I've written more about this topic and other sources for the cycle of flames in my blog at Flames: Emotional Amplification of Text.
The study says nothing about being able to ascertain tone in real e-mail messages where cues for tone may actually be present. It says that it's impossible to ascertain the state of mind of people sending canned e-mail messages which (having been composed by someone other than the sender) have no cues for tone. Probably should have been published in the Annals of Improbable Research instead of a serious journal.