Following up on an earlier post about political junkies’ (sparing) use of the logic centers in our brain, a recent paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology proposes that the internet compounds our alleged nutsness by making it harder to understand what the other person is trying to say:
According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I’ve only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.
“That’s how flame wars get started,” says psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, who conducted the research with Justin Kruger of New York University. “People in our study were convinced they’ve accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their odds are no better than chance,” says Epley.
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.
Most political sites solve this problem by having an opinion on most things that you can pretty much predict in advance. Kos will get offended at Bush searching under his desk for WMDs while Malkin will find it funny. Vice-versa when Dana Milbank wears an orange safety vest to work.
Things get trickier when you have, say, a conservative blogger who has run completely off the reservation. I can’t count the number of times that John has written a reasonable post and been tagged as an apologist (because, see, he’s a Republican so he must have a Republican angle for saying X), or how many times I’ve put up some Bush-critical post which people read exactly the opposite way because they thought I was John, or how many times lefty blogs have picked up a neutral post on John’s part and taken it as an endorsement of the rightwing perspective. Apparently where I come from colors dramatically what I’m trying to say. For the record then, I’m a Democrat and former Green who has worked for both Republican and Democratic candidates and regrets neither, a scientist and liberal on most relevant issues insofar as the words ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ have any meaning anymore.
All in all, an interesting study that takes what we more or less already knew and gives it the blessing of ‘science.’
pharniel
scooped! darn. I was going to post that link in the other thread.
‘splains so much.
ET
Tim thanks for this. I was trying to get that out on one of the earlier threads but I couldn’t get my words to convey my thoughts.
One other thing I wanted to add was sarcasm is not easy to covey with just letters typed in a post.
Richard Bottoms
John remeber your ealier post about, “Why don’t you guys understand my meaning”, or words to that effect.
Not only do you have an explaination here of why that may be so, but the first clear statement of Tim’s position in the political universe. And yes affects how I will read what he writes.
Sometimes you’ll just have to state in some posts your position, and not just imply it or assume we know because of the headline or the story itself.
I don’t claim to be a non-partisan and I am always going to look for the most damagin, negative connotation to anything about George Bush.
He gets no quarter because by 9/12 the previous day’s events were already being used for political advantage and have been every day since.
Wickedpinto
For the study of “Personality and Social Psychology” to be treated as a science, it is necessary for them to create archetypes, to make it look clear and obvious that people can be as easily repaired as a dull gear, or an oblong pulley, a burned out transistor, a weakened beam.
Hyperbole is the only thing that psychology has applied scientificly.
The Other Steve
I am part of the Radical Middle. I make no apologizes for being Radical. You wingnuts and moonbats made me that way.
Robert Bove
Perhaps the “psychosis” isn’t in bloggging, itself, but within antique media who are paid to observe new media. Maybe I’m reading to much into this piece in Sunday morning’s Washington Post: “Blog Rage,” by Jim Brady, Washington Post executive editor. (washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/11/AR2006021100840_pf.html)
It’s really really long for a piece that seems as much about Jim Brady’s confusion, his psyche, as anything else. Is he becoming too self-absorbed? He’s missed the actual impact of Internet. Why?:
“Blogs play a crucial role in the national conversation, whether it’s giving readers insight into a specific topic, providing a forum for healthy debate or holding the media’s feet to the fire. Bloggers have indisputably helped fan controversy over a CBS memo on a broadcast about President Bush’s National Guard service, publicize then Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott’s comments on Strom Thurmond and spread word of a contentious speech by CNN executive Eason Jordan.”
Antique media plays a crucial role in new media – not the reverse relationship Brady sees. Who can blame him?
But… The “but” is implicit everywhere in his piece. Read it.
Krista
That doesn’t surprise me in the least. It’s one thing for it to happen on a blog, but I’ve seen it happen in the workplace. Not good. I know people think emoticons are dorky and annoying, but sometimes they do serve a purpose, evidently.
KCinDC
The explanation of the experiment makes no sense. They gave them a list of 20 statements and had them send the statements to their partner “assuming either a serious or sarcastic tone”? It sounds from the description like they’re sending the whole list of statements, which can’t be right. But the more important point is what this business about assuming a tone means. Presumably they’re rewriting the statements in some way — but if so, why doesn’t it say so? And did the partners know each other? And were the statements somehow selected so that they’d be equally likely to be said seriously or sarcastically?
Presumably Wired is just describing the experiment very badly, but as it is it sounds like they had a bunch of people e-mail the exact same message while imagining they were being sarcastic or serious at the time, and then (surprise, surprise) the recipients did no better than chance at reading the minds of the senders.
Cyrus
I can’t say I’m surprised at this. My jokes almost always fall flat or even offend people over AIM. You never realize how important tone of voice, expression, and other stuff is until you try communicating without it.