The Post-Gazette pointed me to this paper1 examining the communication of sarcasm over email. The authors run five experiments with pairs of communicating college students, and compare success in detecting sarcasm face-to-face, by phone, and over email. Not surprisingly, participants were more accurate face-to-face and by phone, and not so much over email (emoticons were not allowed). The interesting finding was that senders didn’t predict a decrease in accuracy for email. Likewise, receivers expected to identify email sarcasm as well as by other media. So everyone was especially overconfident about email in particular. When the experimenters forced senders to read their own messages to themselves in a non-sarcastic tone, their confidence about transmitting the sarcasm dropped. So, the authors conclude, it’s ego-centrism — difficulty in hearing a voice other than your own — that causes the overconfidence.
With canned messages, sarcasm/not-sarcasm was correctly identified 75% of the time over the phone (versus a chance accuracy of 50%) and not significantly better than chance (56%) over email. But with the participant’s own messages, sarcasm over email was detected 84% of the time. So it’s hard to say how well sarcasm is detected over email in an absolute sense. But it’s less well than you think.
- Kruger, Justin; Epley, Nicholas; Parker, Jason; Ng, Zhi-Wen. “Egocentrism Over E-Mail: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think? ” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 89 (6), December 2005, pp. 925-936. [↩]
#1 written by Moira July 12th, 2006 at 10:42
Funny — I blogged about this before we knew each other.
#2 written by Moira July 12th, 2006 at 10:43
Hmm . . . link didn’t go through:
http://www.considereddesign.com/2006/02/emoticons-in-jpsp.shtml
#3 written by joshuah July 12th, 2006 at 11:27
Stupid newspaper, citing a 7-month-old paper.
#4 written by Moira July 12th, 2006 at 17:33
At least the findings are still relevant seven months later. (And given that the article was probably in limbo for 18 months before publication, the results are more like two years old, geriatric in Internet time . . .)
#5 written by Cortney July 12th, 2006 at 18:01
Funny, I was going to mention that Moira had already blogged about this. Maybe the two of you are the SAME person. I just think that I’ve seen both of you at the same time.