Comments on: Misunderstandings

By: Pernille

Pernille — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 15:03:32 +0000

Thanks for alerting me to the Wired article and the research. Unfortunately the link Christopher Allen gives above is not to the sarcasm/sincerity e-mail research paper but another one by the same authors, different journal, on the perseverance of stereotypes over e-mail, which is also interesting. It looks like you can ask the nice people at the Chicago Graduate School of Business Center for Decision Research to e-mail you a pdf of the sarcasm/sincerity article.
http://www.chicagocdr.org/cdrpubs/author_search.asp?author=epley
I’ve just asked - haven’t received it yet, hope it’s not just for affiliated people.

By: Leasey

Leasey — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 14:57:18 +0000

I’m not taking the mickey - I really am that naive when it comes to politics. I don’t even get the jokes on the cartoons now I’ve seen them.

What will you do with me?

By: Leasey

Leasey — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 15:44:37 +0000

Oooh. I didn’t know Lego was danish. And as I have no idea what the “famous cartoons” were, I don’t think I will get the joke!!!
Want to divulge what the cartoons were?

By: PooterGeek

PooterGeek — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 10:54:47 +0000

“I don’t understand why the wired cover was unfortunate.”

Because Lego™ is famously Danish.

By: Leasey

Leasey — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 08:50:03 +0000

I don’t understand why the wired cover was unfortunate. I think it looks cool! Then again, I am one of the few sad individuals who still has all their childhood lego sets….

By: Simon holyhoses

Simon holyhoses — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 12:10:17 +0000

If you regard words as signifiers, little more than “place-holders” for the ideas and objects they represent in our minds, then language itself is about as blurred a way of painting a picture as casting clods of paint over the shoulder, without looking, at a blank canvas when trying to portray a landscape.

It’s about as controlled as a hungry ferret that’s loose in the trousers.

It’s all a bit too DIY-like too, in the sense that we can’t really guarantee that the interpreter of what we say/write to have the correct tools for the job of putting the message back together.

The only way I’ve found to be sure of reasonable communication is to be very very long-winded, and that’s hard work all round.

By: PooterGeek

PooterGeek — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 22:26:12 +0000

It’s worse than that: I didn’t even include a link to the Wired article in my original post. I’ve corrected that now. Sorry. I’ve been a bit distracted today by computer hassles—as you might have noticed. Thanks for the additional info. I might even follow it up if I get the time later.

By: Christopher Allen

Christopher Allen — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 21:58:41 +0000

You should definately read the original paper “When what you type isn’t what they read: The perseverance of stereotypes and expectancies over e-mail”, it has a lot of other interesting stuff in it.

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 of irony vs sincerity 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:

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.