Slashdot Log In
The Secret Cause of Flame Wars
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Feb 13, 2006 09:22 AM
from the i-thought-it-was-because-you-suck-at-life dept.
from the i-thought-it-was-because-you-suck-at-life dept.
Mz6 writes "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."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Technology Fueled Escalation (Score:5, Informative)
If you and your friend are having an argument through e-mail, you probably feel that you have to cover the whole spectrum of abrasiveness with each e-mail you send. In real life, you would have the social tact to start out with statements and leave room for yourself to retract what you've said or to give a little ground and end up mutually agreeing on something.
What seems to be my problem with e-mail is that I send a message and I run the topic into the ground in that first e-mail (saying everything about it). Now, that's written in stone like a Slashdot comment. No backsies.
And the fact that he might not get the e-mail for a while makes me want to accelerate the severity of the issue since we don't want to take two weeks discussing it. Had we been more gradual at accelerating the argument, things said could probably have been avoided. Secret? Not quite. I might end an e-mail with "...screw Oasis and Weezer, every Beatles' album is far greater than all of theirs combined." Now, in real life, I'd say that with a malevolent shit-eating grin on my face signaling that I know it's not true. But my friend might read it and imagine me with a stone faced militant music-nazi expression and my finger pointing into his chest. What ensues is a standard flame war. The cause of this is no secret.
Re:Technology Fueled Escalation (Score:3, Funny)
I don't have that problem, because I'm always right to begin with.
Paranoia in theory (Score:3, Insightful)
Self-fulfilling prophecies, anyone?
Re:Paranoia in theory (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
well, let's test it then (Score:5, Funny)
Serious or sarcastic? 10 euros for correct guess.
Re:well, let's test it then (Score:3, Funny)
Re:well, let's test it then (Score:4, Funny)
10 Euros = 25.6305 Brazilian Reals
You've got real cojones to ask a question like that, though. 5,963.91 of them, in fact (10 Euro = 5,963.91 CRC).
(Yeah, okay, so they're Costa Rican Colones. Still funny when you haven't had your morning coffee...)
Parent
The real question is... (Score:3, Funny)
How flame wars really start. (Score:3, Funny)
2 Rules: (Score:5, Insightful)
2. When there are 2 ways to read something, assume the other end didn't want to offend you unless you have very good reason to assume they did (i.e. when the flame war is already running to the joy of the general audience).
Then again, if everyone knew those 2 rules and took them serious, trolls would probably go out on the street and set fire to real life objects... Maybe the world's better the way it is.
You're an idiot. :) (Score:5, Funny)
At work, I find myself peppering my e-mails with these damn cute smiley emoticons even though I feel like a teenage girl (which I'm not, even on the Internet). Sometimes I'll respond with a terse message that basically says "I fixed your damn user error", and then add a smiley face at the end.
I think it means that I'm secretly passive-agressive, trying to cover it up with cute little characters.
Parent
Re:2 Rules: (Score:5, Funny)
"There is no emoticon for what i am feeling!"
Parent
Re:2 Rules: (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this a solid solution for the problem? I see this as, perhaps, a workaround; a crutch for what may actually be an increasingly lacking reading comprehension skillset in modern society. How will leaning on emoticons make you a better writer or reader?
Instead of emoticons, use complete, structured thoughts and sentences, and know how to read them. Learn when and how to use word variants and punctuation to pace your sentences. Understand the difference between passive and active voice, and know when and why to use which. All of this seems to be a far more solid approach than emoticons.
We should be concerned with deterioration of language to the point where we need emoticons to interpret other people's written communication. Resorting to requiring smilies for correspondence surely cannot help to reverse any possible erosion of language arts skills that prompted the requirement in the first place.
It's good to know how to interpret other people's emoticons, as so many people who communicate via the Internet use them, but it's probably not a good idea to lean on them yourself.
Now, this is simply my opinion--I could be completely off-base. Are there any English teachers in the Slashdot audience who might have an opinion on the matter?
Parent
Re:2 Rules: (Score:3, Insightful)
Amen. Consider the following:
...and compare it to this:
Of course, it takes more
Re:2 Rules: (Score:4, Interesting)
Although, overuse, of, punctuation? is, highly; distracting.
Understand the difference between passive and active voice, and know when and why to use which.
Active voice (taking responsibility):
We made an error.
Passive voice (shifting responsibility):
An error was made.
We should be concerned with deterioration of language to the point where we need emoticons to interpret other people's written communication.
I find it amusing that the deterioration of our language in many cases is cause by an overabundance of vocabulary. I think more words, with very subtle shades of meaning, can allow more depth in our communication. However, most people use these words with slightly different meanings almost interchangably, and that confuses the reader. What, exactly, is the difference between "paradigm," "model," "precedent," and "situation?" If you don't know the difference, don't use the words.
Resorting to requiring smilies for correspondence surely cannot help to reverse any possible erosion of language arts skills that prompted the requirement in the first place.
This is a chicken-and-egg problem. Were our language arts skills weakened by our poor typing skills (the main reason emoticons were developed in the first place--they are easier to type than words if you're not a touch typist), or were our poor typing skills a reflection of our weak language arts skills?
Parent
Re:2 Rules: (Score:3, Interesting)
In summary: you can't hear the other person, and it's quick and easy to insult them back.
The problem with gaining writing skills is that it won't hel
No surprise... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's an important skill (Score:3, Insightful)
It's Vim's fault (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's Vim's fault (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:It's Vim's fault (Score:3, Funny)
Everyone knows that Emacs is better. The real reason most flamewars start is the because Java is fast and better than .NET.
Re:It's Vim's fault (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It's Vim's fault (Score:5, Funny)
I honestly think they are trolls because I have never met someone who actually used Emacs for more than the 10 seconds it takes to find out how much it sucks.
Parent
The Illuminati (Score:5, Funny)
Since the end of World War 2, a clandestine, shadowy organisation known colloquially as "The Illuminati" has been secretly instigating and orchestrating all major flamewars. Conflicts such as the Tannenbaum Crisis, and the ongoing battles at comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy were all sparked by this bunch as part of their twisted plan to control the world packet flow through decreasing the SNR on the Internet, and when it finally collapses, replace it with their evil commie New World Protocol. Fight the evil!
You know who they are.
They know who they are.
Don't you people ever read Indymedia? It's all in there!
Re:The Illuminati (Score:3, Funny)
(What, I'm just trying to brin
"Crafty consumer" phenomenon (Score:5, Interesting)
A friend who studied psychology talked to me about the "crafty consumer" phenomenon. If we have purchased something we have looked forward to, we will disregard negative things about this and might even become angry if friends point out flaws in the product to us. This is because we all want to think that we are crafty consumers who have made the smart choice. Of course, WE would never fall for advertising, we think. So when evidence mounts that the purchase wasn't as good as we thought, we resist facing it until the evidence is overwhelming. Then it is a blow to our self-esteem and might even cause a depression ("Maybe I'm not as smart as I thought I was... and all that money wasted...").
This can be even more amplified here on Slashdot when someone criticizes something that we have spent a lot of time and intellectual effort to grasp. When someone bash our favourite language, we think our anger comes because we feel "love" for the language, but it has probably more to that with the fact that it is a blow against our major source of pride - our intellectual capabilites. And if the language is not as good as we thought, it might take a long time to learn a new language as well. So in time of economic downturn the stress of increased job insecurity, we get angrier and defensive more easily. See my sig...
Writing (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you guess the tone of this comment?
PRECISE DICTION (Score:5, Insightful)
There are devices such as certain words, punctuations or even emoticons that can help you give your message the flavor of meaning that you want it to have, provided you know how to use them correctly.
The skill to write well is a thousand times more valuable today than most people give it credit for. In a time when so much of our worldwide communication is written, we have to know how to properly build a written message instead of simply writing what we would speak and assume the reader will "get" it. You never know when you might offend someone.
Re:PRECISE DICTION (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sorry, but I have to take exception to this statement.
My issue with it is that the more specific and correct I get, the more often I am misunderstood. Too much of the American version of English has been twisted with emotional (and frequently regional) baggag
It's not because we can't, it's because we won't (Score:5, Insightful)
Most folks simply don't have the skill, or take the time, to craft a message that carries its context with it. The ironic flip side to this is that when someone does take more time to write a more solid, contextually portable note, people not used to digesting that sort of thing presume it's either pretentious, condescending, or just verbose for the sake of verbosity. This is a cultural thing, and speaks to the continuing erosion in critical thinking skills and the obligation families feel to pass them along to children.
Anyone good with rhetoric knows how important it is to put yourself in your audience's shoes before opening your yap. The clearest communicators I know are the ones that are the most broadly exposed to the world at large, and take a deep breath before saying/typing anything, the better to ask themselves: will the person about to receive this e-mail get it? Five extra seconds can save hours of backpeddling, re-explaining something, or salvaging that business/personal relationship. But we've switched to celebrating speed and quantity of noise over quality of actual communication. This isn't going away any time soon, especially when entire generations are hitting their first email-enabled actual jobs thinking that "Dude" is an entire sentence.
The plague that is the use of "like" among teenagers (and stunted-growth adults) is at the heart of this. When some 16-year-old encounters a friend in the mall and says, "So, I was like..." and rolls eyes in a re-enactment of experiencing the emotions surrounding some other social interchange, the message gets across. That even works on the phone ("I was like, 'oh no you did-unt'"). But when all of the social warm-and-fuzzies that a young person feels happen without the need for a multi-syllable vocabulary, we can't wonder why they suck at both investing rich meaning in, and parsing full meaning from the written word.
Re:It's not because we can't, it's because we won' (Score:3, Interesting)
College students? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe it's just me getting older, but they're making a pretty big claim when their test group was a bunch of undergraduate students. I mean, it's a cliche that college students are clueless, hung over, self-involved, etc., etc., etc., and cliches get to be cliches for a reason.
More seriously, like any other skill, you get better at communication the more you do it (if you have any brains, and care at all what's going outside your own skull, that is). So I'd venture to say that a bunch of 30-year-olds would do better than those college students because they have moved out into the world and gotten smacked around because they didn't understand what people were really saying. 40-year-olds would do better and so on, up to some point at which the improvement would stop (probably when people started to think they know it all).
And there's the writing skill component. College students are learning to communicate, and from what I've seen of college grads their success rate is pretty spotty. It would presumably be easier to parse the tone of an e-mail sent by somebody who has more communications skill.
I could go on, but I think this is just confirming the experience of too many people, blinding them to the study's weaknesses.
Or maybe I just missed the point...
The major flaw in this study is -- BAD ACTING (Score:3, Interesting)
One huge gaping problem in methodology here is the apparent researcher request that students essentially fake the tone of their email. So this study is in large part measuring how well the sender *acts* "sarcastic" or "serious." From my observations in theatre, most people are not very good at faking their "tone", compared to when they actually *want* to be sarcastic or serious. A better study would have asked students to write on subjects and send the emails to their friends, then asked the sender and recipient of the tone of the email, then compared the results, without asking the sender to fake their feelings. I'll bet the percentage would go way, way up.
no better than chance (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, no. 50-50 is not "no better than chance" when it comes to the tone of emails. That would imply that 50% of emails are friendly and 50% are unfriendly, and readers are getting half of both wrong.
Given this utter lack of understanding of probability and statistics, I'm going to have to doubt everything else the author says.
He'll probably take that as an insult. Well, fuck him.
That's Why . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
Better Interpretation (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to feel silly having "writing" as one of the skills I put on a resumé. Not anymore. Thank you, internet, for boosting my self-esteem.
Re:Not news to us, unfortunately... (Score:5, Funny)
</sarcasm>
Parent
Re:Not news to us, unfortunately... (Score:3)
(Note: This is my attempt at humor, if you don't like it you can KMA!)
Re:Not news to us, unfortunately... (Score:5, Interesting)
Humor or not, you do have a point. In formal communications it has always been considered important to maintain the best of manners and to always give the sender the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise, a fairly harmless letter exchange can quickly turn into a long slew of misunderstandings.
Once the Internet came along, senders and receivers alike began to believe that a formal tone was unnecessary to the otherwise informal communications. The result was that users began deciding the tone of the message by how new the sender was to the forum. If he was new, then his tone was automatically assumed hostile and his content full of stupidities. If he was old, then the tone was automatically seen as friendly and smart. This led to the situation of new forum members being forced to walk on eggshells until they were accepted by their peers.
---
As an example of of how important the tone is to a conversation, consider this real life situation: People who run into each other on a campus (such as college or work) regularly engage in a simple greeting exchange like this:
"How are you today?"
"Fine, thank you!"
Such greeting are ingrained into us as the way things are. But what if someone changes the message but uses the same tone? A story that was related to me was of a college student who amused herself with this exchange:
"How are you today?"
"Fine! To hell with you?"
Since she used the exact same tone as someone replying politely, very few individuals caught on to her rather rude retort. (Which, of course, produced no end of amusement for both her and her friends.)
---
Thankfully, there is one popular location on the Internet where formalized communication is still expected. (No, it's Slashdot.) If you have ever visited Wikipedia, you'll find that they encourage people to allows assume the best in their exchanges, and be careful about taking offense. If a communications breakdown occurs, then volunteers provide mediation to help to the two parties come to a better understanding of what each other is trying to say. In this way, miscommunications are usually kept from starting outright flamewars. Without these procedures, Wikipedia would have long ago devolved into nothing more than massive editing wars.
Parent
Re:Not news to us, unfortunately... (Score:3)
Re:Not news to us, unfortunately... (Score:3, Funny)
Now you tell me, what's my tone?
Re:Not news to us, unfortunately... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Not news to us, unfortunately... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think it's fair to say that everyone chooses to be offended. I am rarely offended by internet posts, but occasionally someone does manage to sneak one in that raises my ire. "Righteous indignation" might be a better word for it...I don't know.
I think it's justified to be offended by someone who assumes you are an idiot for whatever pointless reason. For example: I'm a Christian. That does not in itself say much at all about my character, my mental capacity, or any personality traits I might have. Yet any time that comes up on one of the debate forums I frequent, there's some bigot who thinks that my faith invalidates any points I might have. I find such mindless hate offensive, whether it's directed at me or at someone else.
Because of that, one might occasionally misinterpret a sarcastic/satirical post as being sincere, and take offense. Two intelligent people can sort that out easily enough without things escalating by simply saying "No, you misunderstood me." It's when one or both choose to be idiots that things get stupid.
Parent
Re:Not news to us, unfortunately... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Not news to us, unfortunately... (Score:3, Funny)
As a fun game, can you guess which one thinks he is the Son of God? (Hint: There is more than one answer.)
*By "in-depth study", I mean smart-ass remarks I thought up over my morning coffee.
Re:Not news to us, unfortunately... (Score:3, Funny)
T. OMG Palmer?
Is that guy's middle name really OMG?
Re:This just in... (Score:3, Insightful)
Mod parent up.
From what little details can be gathered from the article, the 20 statements were read and rated in isolation. Context is important in determining the tone of any statement, regardless of whether its spoken or written. Of course, in spoken language there's body language and, well, tone, to help, but the context is still very important.
In fact, the tone of an isolated statement can also contrast with the overall tone of the conversation, so the tone of the isolated statement may not be helpfu
Re:Serious or Sarcastic? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Non slashdotter's response... (Score:4, Funny)
"What?"
"Did you just call me a moron?"
A fifty-something bloke once cycled at me on the pavement. I asked him "does your mother not let you ride on the road yet?" as he passed. He turned round, cycled back and hit me, for "saying something about my mother"! It took me an age to work out that he simply did not understand what I was getting at.
I vote we all use emoticons, and then ban people without typing skills from the net. And the pavement.
Justin.
Parent
Re:IRC (Score:3, Insightful)
That's because on IRC there are only two tones: SillyStupid and Asshole.