why I need an NT

[Guest guest]

This (see article below) is why I am glad my (very NT) co-worker is

willing to go with me when I need to meet with other staff on campus.

I greatly prefer to handle everything by email, but I've discovered

that some people (people who are " gatekeepers " in certain other

offices and whose help I need on a yearly basis) are much more

willing to be helpful after a personal meeting. That wouldn't be true

if I met with them on my own (given that I come across as unfriendly

and aloof etc.), but my co-worker warms them up for me. ;-)

Jane

from the May 15, 2006 edition -

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0515/p13s01-stct.html

It's all about me: Why e-mails are so easily misunderstood

By Enemark | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

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. 's ire.

Tempers flared.

" It became very embarrassing later, " says , 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. "

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. Kruger of New York University and 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 ,

" and when it's not there negotiation becomes brittle, vulnerable to

falling apart. "

, 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 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, "

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 '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. 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, "

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, 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. "

[Guest guest]

It was 6 Jun 2006, when rhndroberts commented:

> Um, first off I probably owe an apology to everyone, because I

> said " Waah, now I will never be normal! " which I guess could be an

> insult. Although at many times I am glad I am myself and if that's

> not noraml, too bad.

I had the same feeling when I stumbled across info on AS. When I was busy

assuming I was ADD, well, they have Pills for that. When I figured out I

was AS, there are no magic pills to make it All Better, and I was a bit

shook by that. Still am, somewhat.

> I was not upset by your comments but by the article you quoted,

> because most people I know who are NOT aspies/auties (these are

> called NTs, right?) think it's a good idea to NOT email, and I really LIKE

> it, I think I get more " social contact " by doing it. By social contact I

> probably mean sharing IDEAS, which are more interesting to me than

> feelings, in a way. And since most people I know are NTs, the pool of email

> buddies just got shorter. Or, I guess I could never have a real " email

> relationship " with an NT person, even though it seems to be NT people that

> I think I want to " be friends " with. And when I talk with people in social

> situations I want it to be about THINGS we are passionately interested in.

AS or not, in the final analysis, you are you. You live the life you're

living. Sometimes you enjoy it, sometimes you struggle with it. But the

whole point of being you is being you. (Hard to explain this without

sounding like a self-help book...)

Sure there are other folks who'll tell you that some things you enjoy

aren't what you're supposed to enjoy. There's nothing wrong with them

enjoying other stuff that you don't, and not enjoying what you do. That's

them, that's who they're supposed to be. You don't have to do what they

do, or want what they want, and there's nothing wrong with that, either.

> I think that since the whole idea is new to me I will have some

> trouble getting used to the concept. Although I am 45, I was still

> holding out some hope that if I just found the right way to approach

> it, I could " fit in " better. (If I would just drop everything I want

> to do instead and actually work on the fitting in!) Part of that is

> because I grew up in a family where " fitting in " was one of the

> highest priorities. Having a mom who always said " What will the

> neighbors think!? " does not help if one can't know or even care what

> said neighbors think!!!! It made me very self-conscious and still

> does.

Yeah, well, nothing wrong with being conscious of yourself and your own

preferences. Trouble comes when you decide there's Something Wrong with

your own desires and preferences. If you aren't hurting other people, and

you aren't hurting yourself -- the latter's hard to be sure about -- then

there's nothing wrong with your life being different from theirs.

> It's true I can be very lonely even with my husband around. And a

> child, too! I think that they both are wonderful, but sometimes I

> yearn for some other kind of connections, and am not even sure what

> they would be. It might be something I think I " should " do even

> though if I look at what I actually DO do, I don't go out of my way

> to cement friendships or to even follow up on the overtures people

> sometimes make to me.

I suspect you're assuming there's more you should be doing. Maybe there

isn't. It may seem inane to say it, but the relationships you have are

just fine. By definition, they are successful. I mean, hey, you've

established a relationship where somebody is willing to spend the rest of

his life with you. Not everybody achieves that, so that's a demonstrable

success.

Your child is -your- child, and your relationship with you child is, by

definition, the one you're supposed to have. June Cleaver is not your

child's mother, you are, and June Cleaver's (presumed) behavior is not

what defines the right relationship, your behavior is. (One might wonder

what June Cleaver was like off-camera. ;-))

> Also, people have tended to laugh at me at various times in my life,

> starting in early school when I daydreamed and couldn't find the

> place in the stupid book we were supposed to be reading aloud, etc.

> etc. I am just very sensitive about being laughed at. I think that's

> maybe not an autie characteristic but comes from the way my family

> was.

Lots of folks on the spectrum (not all) have experienced bullying.

Doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you, just that some people's kids

aren't brought up to understand diversity, or to understand that life is

not " Leave It To Beaver. " Wasn't till my senior year in high school that

I figured out that most folks treated me the way they treated me because

they had no F___ing clue what I was about, and acted based on their (not

necessarily offensive) assumptions.

> That's why I want some resources, so I can fit in if I HAVE to, like

> at work or a social situation, without feeling like I'm doing the

> wrong thing AGAIN. I don't think I want a cure, just a better way of

> faking it when I have to!

In my (not necessarily definitive) experience, faking it is only a short-

term option, and it's even second-rate for that. If you fake it, and

people desire a long-term relationship because of your fake behavior, you

have to -continue- faking it, or show yourself up as a liar. If you show

your real self, they can either cope with you as you are, and thus might

be worth knowing long-term, or they can't, in which case you and they are

better off finding other folks to associate with, no harm done on either

side.

Oddly enough, this even applies in job interviews. First, of course, you

have to restrain yourself to job-appropriate behaviors. Fine. Work

includes some necessary behaviors.

You don't pretend you're somebody else, you show that you are who you are,

but that you are capable of controlling your behavior at work to the

extent necessary. If you present some phony at the interview (beyond the

extent that -all- job interview behavior is somewhat phony), you'll be

expected to fake it for the rest of the job. And you'll fail. And you'll

get fired.

That's a fine-line sort of issue, and I don't feel equipped to expound

further. But that's how I feel.

--

B. , another satisfied user of

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