Flame on in the office

Flaming: "the act of posting messages that are deliberately hostile and insulting"
- Wikipedia

Anybody who works in an office will know how e-mail is the perfect breeding ground for "flame wars" - those exchanges where banter goes overboard and things get nasty. But why is that?

We're all reasonable people - decent, civilised human beings, right? Right?

Well, according to research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, office workers have only an evens chance of correctly identifying the tone of an e-mail message.

And that's just the jazz before the rumble: it turns out that "people" (you know who you are) think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.

"That's how flame wars get started," Nicholas Epey of the University of Chicago, tells Wired News.

"The reason for this is egocentrism, or the difficulty some people have detaching themselves from their own perspective, he adds.

It also can't help that, as Nancy Flynn, the executive director of the e-Policy Institute, comments: "people write absolutely, incredibly stupid things in company e-mails."

Comments

[Tom]

Research has shown that mediated communication (that which is done through a medium rather than face-to-face) is much more likely to be violent and overtly hostile. It is the nature of the beast.