Don’t flame me, bro’

Peo­ple can vastly over­es­ti­mate their abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate unam­bigu­ously by email. We find it hard to take another person’s per­spec­tive when com­mu­ni­cat­ing elec­tron­i­cally. Even worse, our recip­i­ents tend to inter­pret emails more neg­a­tively than other forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, mak­ing them even more likely to respond aggressively.