The secret cause of flame wars…

I think probably all us us have accidentally upset others with emails we’re written. I have one friend who’s (I think) not speaking to me months after interpreting an email in a different way from what I’d intended him to.

The most interesting article I’ve read today is an old one but directly touches on this. A Wired story reports on research into how confident people are that the emotional tone of their emails will be correctly understood, how confident people people are that they are correctly identifying the emotional tone of emails they read, and how accurate they are at doing these things. The results are pretty shocking.

• 80% of senders thought that others would correctly determine the emotional tone of their emails.
• 90% of recipients thought that they were correctly identifying the emotional tone of the emails they were reading.
• But only 50% of the recipients were correct, meaning that when we write emails we’re way over-confident in how well we’re expressing ourselves, and when we’re reading emails we’re way over-confident in how well we’re understanding the other person.

As someone who’re used email for a long time now I do try to be careful about what I write in emails (I think I’m less careful in this blog). As a general rule I try to watch out for when I have an emotional reaction to an email, and when I see my hackles beginning to rise I back off and let the email sit for a while before I attempt a response. And when I do respond to those emails I try to watch out for any provocative statements that might slip out: I think about what the likely reaction would be.

Still, as the study shows it’s possible to completely misgauge how the reader is going to interpret things, and also our guard can slip. In the case of the friend above I was being deliberately confrontational because I thought something important was at stake, and I wanted to be very clear about where the boundaries of decision-making lay in a certain situation (translation — someone was stepping on my turf).

There’s not necessarily anything wrong with confronting people — it can simply mean, as I think it did in this case, that you’re holding the truth out in front of someone so that they can’t avoid it. But doing so was a risk, and it did lead to the re-establishment of clear boundaries but also to some disharmony. I thought I was being clear and assertive (but not aggressive) but one of the other people reading the email thought I was indeed being aggressive. I just have to accept that I’m not a perfect communicator and see if I can find a more skillful tone in the future.

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