Psychology Then & Now E-Mail Dilemma In 2005 a study was done by researchers headed up by a guy named Kruger. These researchers were interested to see if there is a difference in how people interpret information between being told something face-to-face or reading it through an email. In this study, college students were given a number of topics they were asked to communicate about. Some were given topics such as dorm life or dating. Each participant was told that they needed to convey their topic with a different emotion. Some were told they needed to make their message convey sarcasm, sadness, anger, or seriousness. The participants were asked to convey their topic in three different ways: email, over the phone (voice only) and face-to-face. After they were finished, the researchers asked them how accurate they thought their messages were conveyed. All participants rated their messages as very high in accuracy of conveying their emotion (in all three ways). After which, the messages were heard / read by others and
they were asked to interpret the messages. What they found was that there was the largest discrepancy when a message was conveyed via email.
In other words, people found it more difficult to interpret emotion through reading an email than when they heard and saw the message face-to-face. The moral of the story is that relying of words alone can easily result in a miscommunication.
The six participants were arranged such that two of them could see only Actor A’s face, two of them could only see Actor B’s face, and the last two could see both Actor A & Actor B. After the six participants listened to the conversation, they were asked questions like, “Who had taken the lead in the conversation?” Another question was, “Who in this conversation had chosen the topics?” The researchers found that the person each participant could see better was the person they thought had more impact on the conversation.
Correspondence Bias & Perceptual Salience Researchers Taylor and Fiske conducted a study in 1975 to look at the impact of a person’s visual field on their perception of a situation. They asked college students to come into a room six at a time and sit around two collegeaged men who were going to have a conversation (Actor A and Actor B).
In other words, if a participant was sitting to look at Actor B, they would have felt like Actor B had taken more control over the conversation. It seems that the participants interpreted more control to the actor they could see better – the actor that was more perceptually salient to them.