Getting e-mail right

We all know that personal relationships are important, and that no matter the quality of our ideas and our work, good relationships help us meet whatever goals we have. However, relationships that rely on email may face a difficult battle. Consider this study by Janice Nadler, Ph.D., a psychologist and law professor at Northwestern University. She paired law students from Northwestern and Duke and asked each pair to agree on the purchase of a car. The teams were to bargain entirely through e-mail, but half of them were secretly told to precede the negotiation with a brief getting-toknow chat on the good old telephone.

The results were dramatic. Negotiators who first chatted by phone were more than four times likelier to reach an agreement than those who used only e-mail. Those who never spoke were not only more likely to hit an impasse; they also often felt resentful and angry about the negotiation. Of course, all sorts of online exchanges can be misunderstood, but faceless strangers are especially likely to run into problems. Avoiding simple greetings, for example, can come across as rude, especially if communicators don’t know each other. A hurried email can give the impression that the exchange is unimportant. And because first impression set the tone for subsequent interactions, the exchange can go downhill quickly from there.

The missing element in electronic communications is rapport, says Dr. Nadler. Facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice are all cues missing in e-mail (and smileyface emoticons can’t do much to replace them). But because messages travel instantly, people act as if they are in face-to-face conversation. This illusion of proximity tricks us into thinking we can communicate about difficult subjects, such as disagreements or criticism, and that the tone of our writing will be perceived correctly.

Even if we have the best of intentions, the lack of continuous feedback, by which we constantly adjust our words in conversation, can cause us to go on happily composing messages that will make the recipient angry.

The less we know someone, the more likely we are to engage in what psychologists know as transference — the tendency to project our desires and fears onto another person. Without social cues, such tendencies can get out of control, causing us to interpret messages in ways that are overly self-affirming and potentially extremely inaccurate.

By Hara Estroff Marano. In: http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/ (with slight adaptations)