[extropy-chat] Inadvertant insult

[Hal Finney]

One problem with mailing lists, and email in general, is that people
miscommunicate their mood and intentions, leading to insult where none is
intended (or its counterpart, failure to appreciate a well-aimed barb).
A recent study investigated this effect:

<http://content.apa.org/journals/psp/89/6/925> requires a
subscription, but Wired Online had an article about it last week,
<http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70179-0.html>.

> 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.
> ...
> 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.

So writers predicted that their tone would be understood 80% of the time,
readers thought they had received the tone accurately 90% of the time, but
actually the tone was only communicated correctly about 50% of the time.

Now, this is a particularly hard case since I gather that only one
sentence was sent.  In practice with email, probably the whole message
adopts a particular tone.  Nevertheless the significant datum is the
discrepency between people's impression of their own communication
effectiveness, 80-90%, and their actual ability level, ~50%, only slightly
better than flipping a coin.  This is in accord with a wide range of
studies showing that people systematically overestimate their abilities.

We've seen this kind of communication problem often here on this list,
including a message I just read a few minutes ago.  Studies like this
one suggest that this is a bigger problem than most people realize.

I've long had a dream for this mailing list, and ExI's communication media
more generally, as a place where we could experiment with non-standard
techniques with the goal of improving our ability to communicate.
I've been so frustrated over the years to see us falling again and
again into the same kinds of pointless debates that could be found on
virtually any other mailing list in the world, particularly the political
arguments which have followed the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war.  I don't
necessarily have any brilliant suggestions for how to fix things, but I do
believe in the homespun saying, if you always do what you've always done,
you'll always get what you've always got.  You have to make changes if
you want something different to happen.  This is why I continue to hope
that ExI will press on with their plans to find new ways for people who
share a vision to communicate and coordinate their efforts.

In the mean time, we can certainly benefit by increasing awareness of the
limitations of this text medium.  I wrote earlier about evidence-based
medicine; Max wrote about evidence-based business methods.  We should
dedicate ourselves to evidence-based communication!  In fact, we could
do worse than to set as our goal, moving towards an evidence-based
lifestyle.  (The Left has co-opted "reality-based" to refer to their
own ideological biases, but AFAIK "evidence-based" still has objective,
academic connotations.)

In terms of this recent study, the obvious conclusion is that where mood
is important, we need to be much more explicit in stating our intentions.
A simple proposal along those lines is to use smileys :).  I am not a
fan of this technique personally - I don't like unbalanced parentheses!
Too many years writing code.  I used to always try to work my smileys into
parenthetical expressions (like this :) so that the parentheses balanced.
A bit of compulsiveness on my part, I'm afraid.  But it can certainly be
helpful, if you are joking or making what you intend to be a light-hearted
comment, to add the smiley and lessen any chance of misinterpretation.

On the receiving end, as a general rule it is safe to assume that the
other guy probably does not mean to be insulting.  If you read something
that seems vicious or angry, try to read it as if it were said in a
bantering, light-hearted tone, and see if that helps.

Hal