It’s NOT Just the Emails You Send… Equally Important are the Ones You Don’t Send!

Why Do We Receive Too Many Emails?

Because it’s so easy and so convenient… for the sender.

Be honest. How often have you had to forward that hilarious joke, the sentimental story, or those must-see animal pictures? I’m not suggesting that sending these types of emails is “necessarily” bad – we’ve all done it, but why would we all have to plead guilty?

Because it’s so easy.

As we’ll see, this “ease of use” is the root cause of all email angst.

If you’re about to protest by claiming that you send these “fun” emails to brighten someone’s day or to share a mutual laugh, I agree; that’s certainly part of it. But ultimately, you do so because it’s easy. This “ease of use” is the cancer and the culprit behind the many misuses of email. 

If you doubt that, ask yourself: If email didn’t exist, would you still have shared that fabulous joke or those irresistible animal pictures with your colleagues and friends?

Would you have gone to the trouble of printing them off and putting them into envelopes with a short note saying, “Hey, I thought you might appreciate this.”

It’s not likely. If the sender had to print, address, stamp, and mail an envelope, that “must-see” joke would suddenly lose its lustre.

Since clicking the “forward” button is so simple, we are unlikely to give this action much thought.

Herein lies a critical oversight on the sender’s part: We need to think of the receiver before we hit send because the receiver bears the cost of opening an email. The receiver has to stop what he’s doing – even if that means just disengaging from the present area of his focus – to access the far-flung reaches of another part of his brain to comprehend the funny quip or story you “knew” would make his day. (Multitasking: Are You Under the Influence?)

Please don’t get me wrong. If sending harmless jokes and animal pictures were the extent of email misuse, we could all live quite comfortably with its downside because sending these irrelevancies is just a fraction of a much larger problem.

The Greater Problem is that We’ve Come to Use Email as a Substitute for Focused Effort and Conversation.

Before email, communication was commonly transacted by telephone, face-to-face, or through hand-written or typed memos. Each of these forms of communication involved the cerebral cortex – the thinking part of the brain–whereas we’ve all experienced plenty of emails that left us wondering if the sender had such an organ.

If truth were told, email consistently fosters careless and thoughtless communication, and herein lies its danger. We think of email as a highly effective and highly efficient communication tool. But it’s not.

Email Cannot and Should Not be Considered a Means of Communication or Conversation.

Email is a wonderfully efficient medium for exchanging information, but by its very nature, it cannot substitute as a medium for either communication or conversation.

Conversation is synchronous – it requires at least two people. Email misuse and its associated problems result when you attempt to force this tool to replace conversation. For example, for you and me to have a “meaningful” conversation, we need to focus our attention on each other as we volley a common train of thought.

You say something, and being in the moment, I respond to everything you’ve just said and inferred. Since you’re also in the moment, you react in kind to my comments and gestures.

What happens if we try to have that same conversation using email? Email is asynchronous; it doesn’t require the presence of two people. So, if we try to replace a direct conversation with email, the dynamics, focus, interpretation, and meaning can be wildly different.

For example, in conversation, you say something to me, and I respond based not only on my focused attention on what you say but also on your body language and the tone and inflection of your voice.

All these cues and signals play a vital role in expressing your meaning and message, which has a profound influence on my response.

Now, have that “same” conversation by email; all those cues are absent, and each response is interspersed by time and focus.

You may send me a statement or an opinion that I may not respond to for an hour or more. When I do respond, you may not see that response for an hour or more.

So what’s going on? That same face-to-face conversation cannot be remotely replicated — not even close.

Not only is our email conversation interrupted by time, concerted mental focus, and other events and interruptions, but it’s also utterly void of conversational cues.

Depending on the complexity of the conversation, there’s simply no way the two methods of communication can produce the same result.

Now multiply that single conversation by the multitudes of email “conversations” that occur throughout the day, and we’re faced with momentous challenges to achieving any meaningful communication whatsoever.

Today’s Action Step is Twofold:

First, refrain from sending unnecessary emails. They do nothing for you and even less for the receiver.

Second, try to become acutely aware of the misuse of email. Catch instances when email has been mistakenly substituted for conversation.

We continually add to the dysfunction whenever we answer an email with content that should not have been written but discussed face-to-face or by phone.

Email is one of humankind’s greatest inventions, but let’s not confuse its use and purpose.

While it is a fantastic tool for exchanging information, it is not a substitute for conversation.

If everyone treated email with this awareness, the problems we associate with it would instantly vanish.

Blind Assumptions in Email Communication

People consistently overestimate their ability to communicate effectively with email. Email is a woefully inadequate medium for communication not only because of the unpredictable time lag between responses but also because it’s missing many of the vital components of successful communication: gestures, inflection, emphasis, intonation, and, all too often, thought.

In a series of experiments, researchers found that people fail to appreciate the crucial role that non-verbal cues play in successful communication, resulting in overconfidence in their ability to express themselves through email.

In a study titled “Egocentrism Over Email: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think?” researchers suggest that this overconfidence is born of egocentrism, the inherent difficulty of detaching oneself from one’s own perspective when evaluating someone else’s perspective.

Because email communicators “hear” a statement differently – depending on whether they intended to be sarcastic or funny – it can be difficult for them to appreciate that their electronic audience may be unable to make the distinction.

“Our studies consistently revealed that subtle forms of communication, such as sarcasm and humour, are very difficult to convey through email.

But more than that, communicators are largely unaware of this limitation. Just because they knew what they intended to communicate, they assumed their audience would also.

These assumptions resulted from an excessive focus on their own phenomenology or experience and insufficiently considering the audience’s perspective.” (1)

Another study of people’s egocentrism and overconfidence in their ability to communicate successfully was revealed in the “music tapping” study conducted at Stanford University. In this study, participants were asked to tap the rhythm of a well-known song to a listener and then assess the likelihood that the listener would correctly identify the song.

The results were alarming: Tappers actually estimated that approximately 50% of listeners would correctly identify the song, compared with an actual accuracy rate of 3%! (2)

Naturally, the tappers could “hear” the tune and even the words to the song – perhaps even a full orchestration, complete with layered strings, winds, brass, and voice. The listeners, however, were limited to hearing an irregular series of taps interspersed by moments of silence.

Naturally enough, from the listener’s part, it would be near impossible to tell if the silence between taps should be construed as sustained notes, as musical rests between notes or as simple confusion on the part of the tapper as she searched her memory for what came next.

Incredibly enough, tappers frequently assumed that what was so obvious to them (the song’s identity) would be equally obvious to their audience.

Other Shortcomings of Email Communication

Since email communication is notoriously unreliable, probably the riskiest and worst use of email would be as a medium for negotiation.

In a study titled “Email Communication and Group Cooperation,” researchers found that those who interacted through email were less cooperative and felt more justified in being non-cooperative because of a lack of “social presence.” (3)

When people were asked to evaluate each other in performance appraisals using both pen-and-paper evaluations and email, they were consistently more pessimistic about their colleagues when using email.

In addition, email lacks rapport. It lacks the social cushioning of conversation that can smooth a misstatement or unintended slight. (4)

As if that weren’t enough to deter people from using electronic communication, people feel more comfortable – and sometimes feel justified – lying in their emails. People will lie in any medium, but compared with hand-written communications, they lie more over email and feel that lying is more justified.

In Naquin and colleagues’ 2010 study, participants lied 50% more when they negotiated over email compared with pen-and-paper methods. (5)

The researchers propose three reasons for this behaviour:

• Emails are less permanent: It feels closer to chatting than writing a letter.
• Emails are less restrained: People feel freer online because of the online disinhibition effect.
• There is lower personal connection: Over email, we feel psychologically distant, resulting in low trust and rapport. (6)

According to psychologist Daniel Goleman, electronic communication can mislead the brain’s built-in social systems – the part of our brain that gets us to do the harder thing when the harder thing is the right thing to do.

One of the many problems with electronic communication is a major disconnect between how our brains are wired to connect with each other in a face-to-face interaction and how we respond through an online interaction.

For our regulatory communication mechanism to function properly, we depend on continual, real-time feedback from the other person. In email communication, this vital element is missing.*

Without monitoring signals, basic communication can result in disinhibition and impulsiveness. (7)

Disinhibition – which requires an emotionally charged situation – is characterized by abrasive, angry, or otherwise inappropriate behaviour, often called “flaming.”

The hallmark of a flame is when a person will say things through an email that he would never say in a face-to-face conversation because his inhibitory circuits would not allow it. He may essentially say the same thing in a live encounter, but it would be worded differently to soften the message. (7)

As we all know, “effective” communication is not easy in the best scenario, but attempting to “communicate” through email is, at best, imprudent.

Email is not a communication tool. It’s a tool ideally suited for exchanging information… that’s it!

If you use it as a substitute for either conversation or communication, you do so at your peril.

References

1. Kruger, J., Epley, N., Parker, J., Ng, Z., “Egocentrism Over Email: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005, 89:(6),925 – 936
2. Newton, L., “Overconfidence in the Communication of Intent: Heard and Unheard Melodies,” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1990, Stanford University
3. Naquin, C.E., Kurtzberg, T.R., Belkin, L.Y., “E-Mail Communication and Group Cooperation in Mixed Motive Contexts,” Social Justice Research, December 2008, 21:(4),470 – 489
4. Morris, M., Nadler, J., Kurtzberg, T., Thompson, L., “Schmooze or Lose: Social Friction and Lubrication in Email Negotiations,” Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, March 2002, 6(1):89 – 100
5. Naquin, C.E., Kurtzberg, T.R., Belkin, L.Y., “The Finer Points of Lying Online: Email Versus Pen and Paper,” Journal of Applied Psychology, March 2010, 95(2), 387-394
6. Dean, J., “Email’s Dark Side: 10 Psychology Studies,” spring.org.uk/2010/09/emailsdark- side-10-psychology-studies.php
7. Brockman, J., What Is Your Dangerous Idea? Harper Collins, 2007