Phone is better than email?

[toml]

An interesting article on the the perils of email-only communication:

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.

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

[bluejives]

I post heavily on online discussion forums, blogs, etc.

Someone once thought I was a cranky, old Jew.

[Infectious]

The study is flawed in a way. It means people won't think to stereotype people who "speak like (white) Americans", but there are certain people who don't.

All this shows is that the voice information (which didn't account for factors such as regional dialects and such) "overrides" the photo information - which makes sense, since sound is more of a tactile piece of information.

[toml]

^ that's an excellent point.

So I wonder in cases where they person has a thick accent, if it would be better for him or her to communicate by email first, instead of phone.

[Catatonic]

The study is flawed in a way. It means people won't think to stereotype people who "speak like (white) Americans", but there are certain people who don't.

I don't see the flaw. The study confirms that people have prevailing stereotypes about Asians.

[Ike]

Don't think of the study as flawed. Just think of it as having been controlled for accent. Still, it does show that WITHOUT phone conversations, (white) people stereotype AAs as having poor social skills.

[Le Sheng Liu]

i always feel more comfortable with someone i've spoken to over the phone or in person than by just internet. the voice, tone, and gestures tell me a lot about their vibe. also, a lot of people exhibit different personalities in their emails than in real life. Like my homegirl Veronica is always so chill when I'm around her, but on Myspace, she replies to simple emails with long, detailed, complex, ADD-driven messages.