Another situation that is near to me is the inability to determine emotional state via written communication. While I mentioned before that people have found a few ways to handle the obstacle of the lack of body language, or even use it to their advantage, just as often as a message is interpreted correctly, it is misinterpreted. A study by Kruger, Epley, Parker and Ng (2005) titled “Egocentrism Over E-Mail: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think?” found that a combination of egocentrism and a lack of paralinguistic cues makes it difficult to relay emotions effectively via email.

One part of their study involved having participants send messages to other participants via email, versus reading messages to them aloud. The first participants were to send some sarcastic messages, and estimate whether the person receiving them would be able to determine this or not. While in both cases the sender (or speaker) assumed a 78% chance of the second party decoding their intent, only 56% of people receiving the emails did (just slightly better than chance). In comparison, over 73% of those that heard the messages were able to tell whether the sender was being sarcastic or not. Results were similar when they tried having participants convey specific emotions via email, speaking to someone, or speaking with their backs facing one another. Even if people were friends or strangers, the success rate was similar, indicating both that the verbal portion of emotional cues is weighted more heavily, and that standards of familiarity are not a factor in conveying tone.

The likelihood for conflict is much higher in digitally mediated communication than in physical presence due to this overconfidence in tone detection. While it’s been suggested that higher synchronicity (faster response times) helps to alleviate this issue to a degree, it can also compound errors that are introduced. Jokes, emoticons/emojis and a quicker detection of negative emotions make it easier to create a positive communications experience, but misinterpretation of emotions will remain much higher than anticipated until some method of translating emotional cues exists.

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