A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

by Cal Newport

As Newton argued, when the tapper is knocking on the table, they hear in their head all the accompaniment for the song—the singing, the instruments—and have a hard time putting themselves into the mental state of the listener, who has access to none of that information and is instead left grappling with a puzzling jumble of sporadic knocks. Social psychologists call this effect egocentrism, and as a research team led by Justin Kruger of NYU set out to demonstrate in a surprisingly entertaining 2005 paper, appearing in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, it plays a big role in explaining why email drives us crazy.31 Kruger and his collaborators started by studying sarcasm. In their first experiment, they gave a group of participants a list of topics. For each topic, they were asked to write two sentences: one normal and one sarcastic. They then emailed their sentences to participants in another group, who were tasked with identifying which sentences were meant to be sarcastic. “As expected, the participants were overconfident,” the paper explains. The sentence writers predicted that the readers would essentially get every choice right. In reality, they failed nearly 20 percent of the time.