Without the benefit of paralinguistic cues such as gesture, emphasis, and intonation, it can be difficult to convey emotion and tone over electronic mail (e-mail). Five experiments suggest that this limitation is often underappreciated, such that people tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can. Studies 4 and 5 further suggest that this overconfidence is born of egocentrism, the inherent difficulty of detaching oneself from one's own perspective when evaluating the perspective of someone else. Because e-mail communicators "hear" a statement differently depending on whether they intend to be, say, sarcastic or funny, it can be difficult to appreciate that their electronic audience may not.
From the body of the paper.
Social judgment is inherently egocentric. When people try to imagine the perspective, thoughts, or feelings of someone else, a growing body of evidence suggests that they use themselves as an anchor or reference point. Although precisely why this occurs—whether the result of an overlearned and generally valid heuristic, the residual byproduct of an earlier stage of childhood egocentrism, or the inevitable consequence of an effortful cognitive process such as anchoring and adjustment—is a matter of some debate, the fact remains that the assessment of another’s perspectives is influenced, at least in part, by one’s own (Camerer,Loewenstein, & Weber, 1989; Epley, Keysar, Van Boven, &Gilovich, 2004; Fischhoff, 1975; Flavell, 1977; Fussell & Krauss,1991; Gilovich, Medvec, & Savitsky, 2000; Gilovich, Savitsky, & Medvec, 1998; Hoch, 1987; Inhelder & Piaget, 1958; Kelley &Jacoby, 1996; Keysar, Barr, & Horton, 1998; Keysar & Bly, 1995;Nickerson, 1999, 2001; Ross & Ward, 1996).Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in the music tapping study conducted by Elizabeth Newton (1990). Participants in her study were asked to tap the rhythm of a well-known song toa listener and then assess the likelihood that the listener would correctly identify the song. The results were striking: Tappers estimated that approximately 50% of listeners would correctly identify the song, compared with an actual accuracy rate of 3%.What accounts for this dramatic overestimation? The answer becomes immediately apparent when one contrasts the perspectives of tappers and listeners, as Ross and Ward (1996) invited their readers to do when describing Newton’s results. Whereas tappers could inevitably “hear” the tune and even the words to the song (perhaps even a “full orchestration, complete with rich har-monies between string, winds, brass, and human voice”), the listeners were limited to “an aperiodic series of taps” (Ross &Ward (1996, p. 114). Indeed, it was difficult from the listener’s perspective to even tell “whether the brief, irregular moments of silence between taps should be construed as sustained notes, as musical “rests” between notes, or as mere interruptions as the tapper contemplates the “music” to come next” (p. 114). So rich was the phenomenology of the tappers, however, that it was difficult for them to set it aside when assessing the objective stimuli available to listeners. As a result, tappers assumed that what was obvious to them (the identity of the song) would be obvious to their audience.
When participants in the study listened to a message with sarcasm, they were able to identify the intonation of sarcasm 73% of the time. The speakers had, on average, expected that 78% of listeners would discern the sarcasm. In this scenario, the accuracy demonstrated (73%) was pretty close to the accuracy anticipated (78%).
In contrast, when reading an email with sarcasm, the email writers similarly thought that the sarcasm would have been detectable 78% of the time. In fact, the sarcasm was detected only 56% of the time by the readers.
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