Date:         Tue, 30 May 2006 19:16:06 -0400
Reply-To:     Joe Whitehurst <joewhitehurst@GMAIL.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         Joe Whitehurst <joewhitehurst@GMAIL.COM>
Subject:      ON and OFF TOPIC
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; format=flowed

    [image: go to csmonitor.com's homepage]
<http://www.csmonitor.com/>                WORLD
<http://www.csmonitor.com/world/index.html> USA
<http://www.csmonitor.com/usa/index.html> COMMENTARY
<http://www.csmonitor.com/commentary/index.html> WORK & MONEY
<http://www.csmonitor.com/wam/index.html> LEARNING
<http://www.csmonitor.com/learning/index.html> LIVING
<http://www.csmonitor.com/living/index.html> SCI / TECH
<http://www.csmonitor.com/scitech/index.html> A & E
<http://www.csmonitor.com/arts/index.html>
TRAVEL<http://www.csmonitor.com/living/travel.html> BOOKS
<http://www.csmonitor.com/books/index.html> THE HOME FORUM
<http://www.csmonitor.com/homeforum/index.html>
*Home*<http://www.csmonitor.com/index.html> About
Us/Help <http://www.csmonitor.com/aboutus/about_the_monitor.html>  |
Archive <http://www.csmonitorservices.com/archive?A-Headerearch>  |
Subscribe <http://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe>  |
Feedback<http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/contactus.pl>
|   Text Edition <http://www.csmonitor.com/text>   |  *Search:*
 &nbsp | &nbsp*Search:* &nbsp &nbsp       Special Offer: Subscribe to the
Monitor for just 43 cents an
issue.<https://www.csmonitorservices.com/csmonitor/subscription/print_sub.jhtml?I04TT08>Special
Offer: Subscribe to the Monitor and get 32 issues
FREE!<https://www.csmonitorservices.com/csmonitor/subscription/print_sub.jhtml?I04T05>

  <http://ads.addesktop.com/ads/ad10246i-map.cgi/ns/v=2.0D/sz=728X90A/kw=KEYWORD/>
  [image: Section Branding] <http://www.csmonitor.com/scitech/index.html>


Computers & Tech <http://www.csmonitor.com/scitech/computersTechnology.html>

Environment <http://www.csmonitor.com/scitech/environment.html>

Science & Space <http://www.csmonitor.com/scitech/scienceSpace.html>


 *Also see:*

 <http://www.csmonitor.com/commentary/jregan.html>

 <http://www.csmonitor.com/commentary/thaller.html>

 <http://blogs.csmonitor.com/scitechblog/>

 <http://blogs.csmonitor.com/liblog/>

    In Sci/Tech:

Bush energy plan whacks
conservation<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0531/p02s01-uspo.html>

Clothes make a statement
electronically<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0531/p13s01-stct.html>

Security fears stunt online bank
growth<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0531/p16s01-stct.html>

Not 'just in.' But just
interesting.<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0531/p25s02-stct.html>

Backstory: The gator cops<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0530/p20s01-ussc.html>

Enough coal on hand to keep US
cool?<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0525/p03s03-usgn.html>

On the horizon <http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0525/p16s01-stgn.html>

Gore back in the limelight, and setting off a
buzz<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0524/p01s01-uspo.html>

Cartographic wizardry <http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0524/p25s01-stct.html>

The great eclipse of 2006<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0523/p25s01-stss.html>

Big galaxies, it seems, eat little
ones<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0518/p14s02-stss.html>

Backstory: A natural Segway
...<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0518/p20s01-stct.html>

Behind the scenes at The Royal National
Theatre<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0517/p25s01-stct.html>

     [image: XML: RSS file] <http://www.csmonitor.com/rss/scitech.rss> What
is this? <http://www.csmonitor.com/rss/index.html#about>


 Most-viewed stories:
(for 05/29/06)

05/25/06
Beware Sir Paul: Divorcées are entitled to
more<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0525/p04s02-woeu.html?s=t5>

05/30/06
Riots breach Kabul
'island'<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0530/p06s01-wosc.html?s=t5>

05/26/06
Have the heirs of Barbie hit limit for risqué
dolls?<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0526/p01s04-ussc.html?s=t5>

05/26/06
A Latin leader set to defy leftist
trend<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0526/p01s03-woam.html?s=t5>

05/26/06
Where gas already costs $4 a
gallon<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0526/p03s03-ussc.html?s=t5>


Sci/Tech <http://www.csmonitor.com/scitech/index.html> > Computers &
Technology <http://www.csmonitor.com/scitech/computersTechnology.html>
from the May 15, 2006 edition

  It's all about me: Why e-mails are so easily misunderstood By Daniel
Enemark | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

Michael Morris and Jeff Lowenstein wouldn't have recognized each other if
they'd met on the street, but that didn't stop them from getting into a
shouting match. The professors had been working together on a research study
when a technical glitch inconvenienced Mr. Lowenstein. He complained in an
e-mail, raising Mr. Morris's ire. Tempers flared.

"It became very embarrassing later," says Morris, when it turned out there
had been a miscommunication, "but we realized that we couldn't blame each
other for yelling about it because that's what we were studying."
      *In the Monitor*
Wednesday, 05/31/06
 <http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0531/p01s01-wogi.html?s=itmthumb>

25 years on, AIDS still
spreading<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0531/p01s01-wogi.html?s=itmthumb>


Mr. Wall Street goes to
Washington<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0531/p01s03-uspo.html?s=itm>

Kenya killing stirs bitter
past<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0531/p06s01-woaf.html?s=itm>

Frustration mounts between US,
Pakistan<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0531/p04s02-wosc.html?s=itm>

*Editorial: *The corner office as a hot
seat<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0531/p08s02-comv.html?s=itm>

More stories...<http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?todaysHeadlines>


Get all the Monitor's headlines by e-mail.
Subscribe for free<http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/signup.pl?s=mti5&module=1>
.

         E-mail this story <javascript:daughter =
window.open('/cgi-bin/send-story?2006/0515/p13s01-stct.txt','emailthis','width=300,height=450,toolbar=0,menubar=0,scrollbars=0,resizable=0,status=0,location=0');
window.top.location = '/2006/0515/p13s01-stct.html';> E-mail this
story</cgi-bin/send-story?2006/0515/p13s01-stct.txt>
  Write a letter to the
Editor<http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/encryptmail.pl?ID=CFF0C5E4&url=/2006/0515/p13s01-stct.html>
  Printer-friendly version<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0515/p13s01-stct.htm>
  Permission to reprint/republish <javascript:RightslinkPopUp();>

Morris and Lowenstein are among the scholars studying the benefits and
dangers of e-mail and other computer-based interactions. In a world where
businesses and friends often depend upon e-mail to communicate, scholars
want to know if electronic communications convey ideas clearly.

The answer, the professors conclude, is sometimes "no." Though e-mail is a
powerful and convenient medium, researchers have identified three major
problems. First and foremost, e-mail lacks cues like facial expression and
tone of voice. That makes it difficult for recipients to decode meaning
well. Second, the prospect of instantaneous communication creates an urgency
that pressures e-mailers to think and write quickly, which can lead to
carelessness. Finally, the inability to develop personal rapport over e-mail
makes relationships fragile in the face of conflict.

In effect, e-mail cannot adequately convey emotion. A recent study by Profs.
Justin Kruger of New York University and Nicholas Epley of the University of
Chicago focused on how well sarcasm is detected in electronic messages.
Their conclusion: Not only do e-mail senders overestimate their ability to
communicate feelings, but e-mail recipients also overestimate their ability
to correctly decode those feelings.

One reason for this, the business-school professors say, is that people are
egocentric. They assume others experience stimuli the same way they do.
Also, e-mail lacks body language, tone of voice, and other cues - making it
difficult to interpret emotion.

"A typical e-mail has this feature of seeming like face-to-face
communication," Professor Epley says. "It's informal and it's rapid, so you
assume you're getting the same paralinguistic cues you get from spoken
communication."

To avoid miscommunication, e-mailers need to look at what they write from
the recipient's perspective, Epley says. One strategy: Read it aloud in the
opposite way you intend, whether serious or sarcastic. If it makes sense
either way, revise. Or, don't rely so heavily on e-mail. Because e-mails can
be ambiguous, "criticism, subtle intentions, emotions are better carried
over the phone," he says.

E-mail's ambiguity has special implications for minorities and women,
because it tends to feed the preconceptions of a recipient. "You sign your
e-mail with a name that people can use to make inferences about your
ethnicity," says Epley. A misspelling in a black colleague's e-mail may be
seen as ignorance, whereas a similar error by a white colleague might be
excused as a typo.

If you're vulnerable to this kind of unintentional prejudice, pick up the
phone: People are much less likely to prejudge after communicating by phone
than they are after receiving an e-mail. Kruger and Epley demonstrated this
when they asked 40 women at Cornell to administer a brief interview, 20 by
phone and 20 by e-mail. They then asked a third group of 20, the "targets,"
to answer the phone interviewers' questions. They sent a transcription of
the targets' answers to the e-mail interviewers.

The professors then handed each interviewer what they said was a photo of
her subject. In reality, each got a picture of either an Asian or an
African-American woman (in reality, all were white).

E-mail interviewers who thought the sender was Asian considered her social
skills to be poor, while those who believed the sender was black considered
her social skills to be excellent. In stark contrast, the difference in
perceived sociability almost completely disappeared when interviewer and
target had talked on the phone.

E-mail tends to be short and to the point. This may arise from the time
pressures we feel when writing them: We know e-mail arrives as soon as we
send it, so we feel we should write it quickly, too. On the other hand,
letters depend on postal timetables. A letter writer feels he has a bigger
window of time to think and write.

Psychologists Massimo Bertacco and Antonella Deponte call this
characteristic "speed facilitation," and they believe it influences our
episodic memory - our ability to recall events. They found that e-mailers
wrote shorter messages and were less likely to "ground their communications"
in memories of shared experience than letters writers were.

The brevity of e-mail and the absence of audiovisual cues can endanger
business and personal relationships unless e-mail is supplemented with the
rapport that comes from more personal communication.

"Rapport creates a buffer of positive regard," says Professor Morris, "and
when it's not there negotiation becomes brittle, vulnerable to falling
apart."

Morris, who studies negotiation at Columbia, led a study that found that
negotiators exchange more than three times the information in face-to-face
interactions as they do via e-mail. Though Morris and his colleagues
concluded that e-mail lets negotiators make "more complex, multiple-issue
offers," they ultimately built less rapport, thereby increasing tensions and
lowering the average economic value of the agreements.

Rapport "is an interpersonal resonance of emotional expression," Morris
says, "involving synchronous gesture, laughing, and smiling together. Once
this rapport exists, it's a buffer against a moment in the negotiation when
there's some friction." This buffer is hard to develop without speaking over
the phone or in person. Those who negotiated by e-mail in Morris's study
trusted each other less and weren't as interested in working together again.

But the pitfalls of e-mail interaction were easily overcome by a single
phone call. Morris ran a second round of negotiations, all conducted via
e-mail, but made half of the corresponding pairs chat on the phone before
negotiating - "just for five or 10 minutes," Morris explains, "and the key
thing is we told them, 'Don't get into the issues. It's just an icebreaker.'
" The result was dramatically improved agreements.

So if you want to buy something on Craig's List, Morris says, "make a brief
phone call, even if it's not practical to do the whole negotiation by phone.
You can establish a favorable bias with someone and then proceed in a less
rich medium, but it's very hard to just get right into the negotiation on a
medium that isn't rich."
  [image: (Graphic)]

SOURCE: KRUGER AND EPLEY,'EGOCENTRISM OVER E-MAIL.'; SCOTT WALLACE - STAFF


Special Offer: Subscribe to the Monitor for just 43 cents an
issue<http://www.csmonitorservices.com/csmonitor/subscription/print_sub.jhtml?I04B02>Special
Offer: Subscribe to the Monitor and get 32 issues
FREE<http://www.csmonitorservices.com/csmonitor/subscription/print_sub.jhtml?I04S01>




*Links of interest*

  *•*  New Orleans' levees: much done, much more to
do<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0530/p02s01-usgn.html?s=u2>

 *•*  Gator cops face increasing
attacks<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0530/p20s01-ussc.html?s=u2>

 *•*  Looking for well-paid work? Check salaries for hundreds of job titles
in dozens of cities <http://csmonitor.salary.com/>





*Most-viewed stories (for 05/29)*

  *•*  Beware Sir Paul: Divorcées are entitled to
more<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0525/p04s02-woeu.html?s=u>
(05/25/06)

 *•*  Riots breach Kabul
'island'<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0530/p06s01-wosc.html?s=u>
(05/30/06)

 *•*  Have the heirs of Barbie hit limit for risqué
dolls?<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0526/p01s04-ussc.html?s=u>
(05/26/06)

 *•*  A Latin leader set to defy leftist
trend<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0526/p01s03-woam.html?s=u>
(05/26/06)

 *•*  Where gas already costs $4 a
gallon<http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0526/p03s03-ussc.html?s=u>
(05/26/06)







 E-mail this story <javascript:daughter =
window.open('/cgi-bin/send-story?2006/0515/p13s01-stct.txt','emailthis','width=300,height=450,toolbar=0,menubar=0,scrollbars=0,resizable=0,status=0,location=0');
window.top.location = '/2006/0515/p13s01-stct.html';> E-mail this
story</cgi-bin/send-story?2006/0515/p13s01-stct.txt> Write
a letter to the
Editor<http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/encryptmail.pl?ID=CFF0C5E4&url=/2006/0515/p13s01-stct.html>
Printer-friendly
version <http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0515/p13s01-stct.htm> Permission to
reprint/republish <javascript:RightslinkPopUp();>



back to top <http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0515/p13s01-stct.html#top>


  [image: Support the
Monitor]<http://www.csmonitor.com/aboutus/p_subscribe.html>

   - Subscribe<http://www.csmonitor.com/aboutus/p_subscribe.html?utm_source=csmonitor&utm_medium=textad&utm_content=Subscribe&utm_campaign=Toptext>
   - Treeless Edition <http://www.csmonitortreeless.com/>
   - Give a gift
subscription<https://www.csmonitorservices.com/csmonitor/subscription/gift_sub.jhtml?utm_source=csmonitor&utm_medium=textad&utm_content=giftsub&utm_campaign=Toptext>
   - FREE sample
issue<https://www.csmonitorservices.com/csmonitor/subscription/sample_issue.jhtml?utm_source=csmonitor&utm_medium=textad&utm_content=freesample&utm_campaign=Toptext>
   - Search the
Archives<http://www.csmonitorservices.com/csmonitor/archivesearch.jhtml?utm_source=csmonitor&utm_medium=textad&utm_content=archives&utm_campaign=Toptext>
   - *Donate to the
Monitor*<https://www.csmonitorservices.com/csmonitor/csm_donation.jhtml?utm_source=csmonitor&utm_medium=textad&utm_content=donate&utm_campaign=Toptext>
   - Free email
newsletters<http://csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/signup.pl?utm_source=csmonitor&utm_medium=textad&utm_content=signup&utm_campaign=Toptext>

------------------------------
 [image: Click Here]<http://ads.addesktop.com/ads/ad10246i-map.cgi/vr=1.0A/SZ=120X600C/kw=KEYWORD/ns>
 [image: Click Here]<http://ads.addesktop.com/ads/ad10246i-map.cgi/vr=1.0A/SZ=125X125B/kw=KEYWORD/ns>
 [image: Click Here]<http://ads.addesktop.com/ads/ad10246i-map.cgi/vr=1.0A/SZ=125X125C/kw=KEYWORD/ns>
------------------------------
 [image: Advertisement]
 Apparel

Buy Shoes <http://www.shoebuy.com/>
T-Shirts - Design Online <http://www.customink.com/>
Financial

Car Insurance <http://www.ukcarinsurancedirectory.co.uk/>
Gifts

Engagement Rings <http://www.sndgems.com/>
Graphic Design

Logo Design - LogoBee <http://www.logobee.com/>
Home Remodeling

Home Renovation Guide <http://www.homerenovationguide.com/>
Legal Services

Find Lawyers <http://www.legalmatch.com/>
Real Estate

Home Loans <http://www.nationalmortgage.com/>
Moving <http://www.vanlines.com/>
Moving Companies <http://www.vanlines.com/moving.html>
Mortgage Calculator <http://www.nationalmortgage.com/calculators/>
Real Estate <http://www.usrealestate.com/>
Self Storage

Self Storage <http://www.moving.bz/ref/?98>
Travel

Book Flights Online <http://www.cheapflightsto.com/>

Hotels <http://www.zoomandgo.com/>
Web Services

Cheap Web Hosting <http://www.ratemyhost.com/>
Dedicated Servers <http://www.superbservers.net/>
Domain Names <http://www.ipower.com/>
Web Hosting <http://www.ipowerweb.com/>
Website Hosting <http://www.startlogic.com/>
[image: Click Here]<http://ads.addesktop.com/ads/ad10246i-map.cgi/vr=1.0A/SZ=1X1A/kw=KEYWORD/ns>
Home <http://www.csmonitor.com/index.html>  |  About
Us/Help<http://www.csmonitor.com/aboutus/about_the_monitor.html>
  |  Feedback <http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/contactus.pl>  |
Subscribe<http://www.csmonitor.com/aboutus/p_subscribe.html>
  |  Archive <http://www.csmonitorservices.com/archive?A-Footer>  |  Print
Edition <http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?printEdition>  |  Site
Map <http://www.csmonitor.com/aboutus/site_map.html>  |
RSS<http://www.csmonitor.com/rss/index.html>
  |  Special Projects <http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/index.html>  |
Corrections <http://www.csmonitor.com/aboutus/corrections.html>
Contact Us<http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/contactus.pl>
  |  Privacy Policy <http://www.csmonitor.com/aboutus/privacy.html>  |  Rights
& Permissions <http://www.csmonitor.com/aboutus/copyright.html>  |  Advertise
With Us <http://www.csmonitor.com/aboutus/advertising.html>  |  Today's
Article on Christian
Science<http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/redirect.pl?csArticle>
www.csmonitor.com | Copyright (c) 2006 The Christian Science Monitor. All
rights reserved.