Alright, come and take a look at this email. It’s one I received a couple of years ago
about something pretty important. “Hi Vanessa, this is a start…
we should meet together in person to talk.”
Now I want you to rate this: Do you think it’s negative? Positive? Or neutral?
Answer down in the comments and we’ll revisit this shortly.
Every single day, 306 billion emails are sent and received worldwide. Which is a lot of data,
full inboxes and fingers typing in every corner of the globe.
So why are people so bad at writing them? And why are we often terrible at reading them?
Now back in 1990, a Stanford PhD student named Elizabeth Newton
designed a simple study called “the tap test.”
In this study people were assigned one of two roles,
either “tapper” or “listener”. The tapper tapped out a rhythm on a table and the
listener’s job was to guess the song. Let’s try it – I’ll tap and you listen
[tapping]
Do you know the song? In Newton’s experiment,
the tapper predicted the listener would guess the song correctly 50% of the time. They tapped
out 120 songs so they thought listeners would guess around 60 of them correctly.
The listeners only guessed 3 of the songs correctly. Which is a success rate of 2.5%
When you tap out a tune, you can’t avoid hearing the tune being played out in your
head. Once you know, you can’t unknow. But all the listener can hear is a bizarre Morse code.
This is called The Curse of Knowledge or Knowledge Bias –
a cognitive bias that occurs when a person, communicating with other people,
incorrectly assumes that others have the background to understand.
Knowledge Bias plays out in a fun way all over YouTube.
It helps if you have the title for the song
This one’s my personal favourite.
Once you have the information, you can’t imagine what it was like not to have the information!
Assuming people know what you know is the biggest mistake we make in communication. We think we’re
being super clear, even when we’re not. Scientists think that this has to do with
“egocentrism” – which is essentially the inability to see things from someone else’s point of view.
When you send an email, you have all of the context in your head.
But when someone else receives it – it can come across like a series of disconnected taps.
If you’ve ever been confused by an email, the good news is that
you’re not alone. I get confused by and irrationally mad at emails all the time.
Remember this example from the start of the episode?
Did you rate this as negative? Positive? Or neutral?
This was the response from a client about a big project I was working on,
after I’d sent them what I thought was great work. I read this as negative and I
really spiralled – I thought I was going to lose the job.
But it turns out this email was… positive. Or kind of neutral-positive. They just wanted to
get together in person to talk through some tweaks and brainstorm for the next stage of the project.
They could have been more specific, but more than that, the meaning was lost in my interpretation.
We often approach/read email with a negativity bias.
Psychologist Daniel Goleman has written that if a sender feels positive about an email,
the receiver usually just feels neutral. And if the sender feels neutral about the message, then
the receiver typically feels negative about it. This suggests that every message
you send gets bumped down a few points in positivity when someone else reads it.
But there’s actually not a ton of published research on negativity bias in digital
communication styles, so I wanted to test out your perception of punctuation, to see
if you have a negativity bias towards certain punctuation. The full stop has been singled
out as hostile and research has found that text messages ending in a full stop are less sincere.
Research, I will add, that included a scientific figure that was an image of a Blackberry.
So I did a survey on Instagram to try to replicate the Blackberry-figure study.
In the example from that study, most people rated the full stop
as neutral rather than less or more sincere.
Sadly for me and how I’ve used my time over the past week, a survey on Instagram isn’t
a real scientific study. So these results could be different if they were administered
a bit more systematically. You had lots of thoughts about it and both Veritasium
and Physics Girl pointed out that the Instagram Poll feature is frustrating.
The jury was also out on the full stop being negative, but the majority of people rated
the dreaded ellipsis as negative. In the open comments people had a negative bias towards
both the full-stop and ellipsis – there were described as “passive aggressive”,
“skeptical”, “ominous” and “very very bad”
Which somewhat explains the rise in exclamation points to make your emails more positive!
But not unhinged or unprofessional. Just friendly! And enthusiastic!
Though this email/exclamation point trend on Tiktok isn’t surprising – your age is related
to how punctuation influences your perception of messages.
A 2018 study looked at differences in how people born before 1985
interpret messages compared to those born in 1985 or later.
Participants read an exchange where some
of the replies contained full stops “Sorry. I probably can’t this weekend.”
While others had the same text but no full
stops “Sorry I probably can’t this weekend” Just take a final moment to rate these
two messages. Is one more negative? Or are they the same?
The study participants rated the replies on how positive or negative they thought they were.
And for those born before 1985, it didn’t seem to matter whether the reply had a full stop or not.
Younger people on the other hand, rated messages with full stops as more negative
than those without. This is subtle, but
important for school or workplace dynamics if younger people are interpreting messages
from professors or colleagues or bosses as more negative than they were intended
Now it’s easy to be critical of just the confusing emails you receive – but the reality is we’re
all a little bad at communicating. People vastly overestimate their ability to get a
message across when they’re sending an email. And this isn’t an easy problem to fix – we do
so much emailing everyday, and it’s exhausting to do everything with intention. But what you
can do is be aware of The Curse of Knowledge, Negativity Bias and Generational Punctuation.
Keeping these in mind can nudge our messages in a clearer direction.