Why do electronic conversations seem less polite? the costs and benefits of hedging

Abstract

Electronic conversations often seem less polite than spoken conversations. The usual explanation for this is that people who are not physically copresent become depersonalized and less inhibited by social norms. While this explanation is intuitively appealing, we consider another possibility, based on the costs of producing "polite" utterances when speaking versus when typing. We examined a corpus of conversations generated by 26 three-person groups who interacted either face-to-face or electronically to do a collaborative memory task. We coded hedges (which mark an utterance as provisional) and questions (which display doubt or invite input from others), as people presented their own recollections, accepted, modified, or rejected those of others, and tried to reach consensus. Both of these devices are associated with politeness. For most people, hedging is more difficult when typing than when speaking because additional words are required, while marking an utterance as a question is equally easy in both media. The two groups made somewhat different use of these devices: Face-to-face groups hedged more than electronic groups, but both groups used questions just as often. We discuss how these and other differences emerge from the costs and affordances of communication media.