We instantly connect with a person on the other side of the planet using e-mail or SMS, and it seems that the possibilities of communication are endless. But text messages don’t convey everything we wanted to express.
We instantly connect with a person on the other side of the planet using e-mail or SMS, and it seems that the possibilities of communication are endless. But text messages don’t convey everything we wanted to express. American psychologists Justin Kruger and Nicholas Epley (Justin Kruger, Nicholas Epley) asked different people to say and write a few ironic phrases, as well as to assess how many interlocutors/addressees would understand them correctly. It turned out that more than 70% of people perceive irony in personal communication, but in the text of the letter it remains unrecognized in half of the cases. “We intuitively understand the limitations of email, but it seems difficult for us to realize that a letter that we write ourselves may not be understandable to others,” Nicholas Epley comments on the results of the experiment. “Perhaps this is due to our egocentrism — it is difficult for us to imagine that the internal state of someone who reads our text is different from ours.”