Egocentrism and the web: a recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that, although people think they have correctly interpreted the tone of emails they receive 90% of the time, they have only random odds (50/50%) of being right. And people think that the tone they intend to use in sending a message will be sensed correctnyl by the receiver around 80% of the time. The researchers suggest that this is because of ‘egocentrism’:

A better term, I think, is ‘subjectivity’. Perception is inevitably shaped by our mindset and expectations. Communicationon the web is quite prone to this trap, it seems. First of all, it is usually pithy and condensed, leaving fewer clues from context. It is a tenet of communication theory that redundancy improves the signal-to-noise ratio, yet those who include more explicit statements of their emotional state (which I find prescient anticipation of the fact that their tone would otherwise be opaque to their readers), such as smileys or written interjections such as “[grin]”, are considered kitschy. Keep watch — the temptation to add these extra clues varies inversely with the average size of a message, being greatest in instant messaging and SMS. In conditions of decreased certainty about the intentions of a stranger interacting with you, it makes evolutionary sense to assume hostility and respond defensively.

Web communication may be more susceptible to this problem for another reason. It is a stereotype of social psychology, although I believe it, that women are on the whole more sensitive nuanced communicators; web communication on the whole has been dominated by males. And recall the speculation several years ago that geekiness is a watered-down version of Asperger’s Syndrome? This is the autistic-spectrum disorder which comes without intellectual impairments and is characterized by some or all of the following: impairment in nonverbal behaviors and gestures to regulate social interaction; impairment in age-appropriate peer relationships; lack of social or emotional reciprocity; restricted, repetitive or stereotypical behavior patterns; etc. This might be a neurological basis for the predominant insensitivity to nonverbal factors in composing and interpreting web communications. (Wired News via walker)