Daniel Goleman on email communication

[Steven Gordon]

I saw the article by Daniel Goleman in the NY Times below and thought  
others might enjoy it.  It makes some very interesting observations  
about the limitations of email interactions.  Goleman's latest book,  
"Social Intelligence" provides an nuerologic explanation for many of  
the phenomenons that we observe in psychodrama such as tele.

Steve

October 7, 2007
PREOCCUPATIONS
E-Mail Is Easy to Write (and to Misread)

By DANIEL GOLEMAN
AS I was in the final throes of getting my most recent book into  
print, an employee at the publishing company sent me an e-mail  
message that stopped me in my tracks.

I had met her just once, at a meeting. We were having an e-mail  
exchange about some crucial detail involving publishing rights, which  
I thought was being worked out well. Then she wrote: “It’s difficult  
to have this conversation by e-mail. I sound strident and you sound  
exasperated.”

At first I was surprised to hear I had sounded exasperated. But once  
she identified this snag in our communications, I realized that  
something had really been off. So we had a phone call that cleared  
everything up in a few minutes, ending on a friendly note.

The advantage of a phone call or a drop-by over e-mail is clearly  
greatest when there is trouble at hand. But there are ways in which e- 
mail may subtly encourage such trouble in the first place.

This is becoming more apparent with the emergence of social  
neuroscience, the study of what happens in the brains of people as  
they interact. New findings have uncovered a design flaw at the  
interface where the brain encounters a computer screen: there are no  
online channels for the multiple signals the brain uses to calibrate  
emotions.

Face-to-face interaction, by contrast, is information-rich. We  
interpret what people say to us not only from their tone and facial  
expressions, but also from their body language and pacing, as well as  
their synchronization with what we do and say.

Most crucially, the brain’s social circuitry mimics in our neurons  
what’s happening in the other person’s brain, keeping us on the same  
wavelength emotionally. This neural dance creates an instant rapport  
that arises from an enormous number of parallel information  
processors, all working instantaneously and out of our awareness.

In contrast to a phone call or talking in person, e-mail can be  
emotionally impoverished when it comes to nonverbal messages that add  
nuance and valence to our words. The typed words are denuded of the  
rich emotional context we convey in person or over the phone.

E-mail, of course, has a multitude of virtues: it’s quick and  
convenient, democratizes access and lets us stay in touch with loads  
of people we could never see or call. It enables us to accomplish  
huge amounts of work together.

Still, if we rely solely on e-mail at work, the absence of a channel  
for the brain’s emotional circuitry carries risks. In an article to  
be published next year in the Academy of Management Review, Kristin  
Byron, an assistant professor of management at Syracuse University’s  
Whitman School of Management, finds that e-mail generally increases  
the likelihood of conflict and miscommunication.

One reason for this is that we tend to misinterpret positive e-mail  
messages as more neutral, and neutral ones as more negative, than the  
sender intended. Even jokes are rated as less funny by recipients  
than by senders.

We fail to realize this largely because of egocentricity, according  
to a 2005 article in the Journal of Personality and Social  
Psychology. Sitting alone in a cubicle or basement writing e-mail,  
the sender internally “hears” emotional overtones, though none of  
these cues will be sensed by the recipient.

When we talk, my brain’s social radar picks up that hint of stridency  
in your voice and automatically lowers my own tone of exasperation,  
all in the service of working things out. But when we send e-mail,  
there’s little to nothing by way of emotional valence to pick up. E- 
mail lacks those channels for the implicit meta-messages that, in a  
conversation, provide its positive or negative spin.

On the upside, the familiarity that develops between sender and  
receiver can help to reduce these problems, according to findings by  
Joseph Walther, a professor of communication and telecommunication at  
Michigan State University. People who know each other well, it turns  
out, are less likely to have these misunderstandings online.

These quirks of cyberpsychology are familiar to Clay Shirky, an  
adjunct professor in New York University’s interactive  
telecommunications program. His expertise is social computing —  
software programs through which multiple users interact, ranging from  
Facebook to Listservs and chat rooms to e-mail. I asked Professor  
Shirky what all of this might imply for the multitudes of people who  
work with others by e-mail.

“When you communicate with a group you only know through electronic  
channels, it’s like having functional Asperger’s Syndrome — you are  
very logical and rational, but emotionally brittle,” Professor Shirky  
said.

“I’m part of a far-flung distributed network that at one point was  
designing a piece of software for sharing medical data; we worked  
mostly by conference calls and e-mail, and it was going nowhere. So  
we finally said we’d all fly to Boston and get together for two days,  
just sit in a room and hash it out.”

During that meeting, the team got an enormous amount of work done.  
And, Professor Shirky recalls, “because the synchronization by e-mail  
was so much better after the face-to-face piece, we actually hit the  
launch date.”

He proposes that work groups whose members are widely dispersed but  
need to have high levels of coordination — say, a computer security  
team protecting a global bank — do not have to assemble everyone in  
one room to reap the same benefit. Instead, he suggests a “banyan  
model,” after the Asian tree that puts down roots from its branches.

In this approach, he said, “you put down little roots of face-to-face  
contact everywhere, to strategically augment electronic communications.”

Professor Shirky advised the I.T. head of a global bank to gather  
together one representative from disparate cities for a day or two  
and complete tasks. That way, when the security group in Singapore  
gets e-mail from the security people in London, someone will be more  
likely to know the sender, and sense how to read the information with  
less risk of misconstruing or discounting it.

CONSIDER, too, the “e-mail the guy down the hall” effect: as the use  
of e-mail increases in an organization, the overall volume of other  
kinds of communication drops — particularly routine friendly  
greetings. But lacking these seemingly innocuous interactions, people  
feel more disconnected from co-workers. This was noted in an article  
in Organizational Science almost a decade ago, just as e-mail was  
starting to surge. Saying “Hi,” it turns out, really does matter;  
it’s social glue.

As Professor Shirky puts it, “social software” like e-mail “is not  
better than face-to-face contact; it’s only better than nothing.”

Daniel Goleman is the author of “Social Intelligence: The New Science  
of Human Relationships” (Bantam). E-mail:
preoccupations at nytimes.com.=
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