F.D. Flam | (TNS) Bloomberg Opinion
If you’re confronting an endless string of unread emails after a long weekend or summer vacation, try thinking of responding as a game. A status game.
Since reading the 2012 book “Games Primates Play,” by University of Chicago behavioral scientist Dario Maestripieri, I’ve never looked at my inbox the same way. Email, writes Maestripieri, is governed by the rules of dominance hierarchy, which is central to the games we social primates are wired to play.
Monkeys spend a great deal of energy establishing who stands where in the social hierarchy — who has access to the best food and the most attractive mates, and who picks mites out of whose fur. Humans also put hierarchy at the heart of much of what we do, whether at home, at work or online.
The book popped into my mind last week when I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about the dreaded post-summer-vacation email pileup. Some people were trying to head off the deluge with bluntness. As one autoresponse put it, “I am out of the office having way more fun than communicating with you … I will likely forget to email you back.” But readers instinctively picked up on the status imbalance inherent in these tactics in the comments section, complaining that they were not so high in the pecking order that they could afford to put up an in-your-face autoreply or ignore email requests from colleagues, clients or customers.
And indeed, there’s always an uneven burden when it comes to email. The sender wants something from the recipient; the status of the recipient relative to the sender dictates whether and for how long such a request can be ignored.
Usually, the person who wants something must spend more time on the exchange. That’s because they’re likely lower-status primates. When I email experts asking to interview them, I tend to spend more time crafting my notes to high-level professors than to post-doctoral fellows hungry for publicity.
After one such (successful!) exchange, Maestripieri told me that email makes everyone more approachable, so people in positions of power are inevitably going to get more requests for help from the less powerful. So the burden to impress is on the sender. “There’s a certain effort and care that goes into writing an email for a higher-status person,” he said.
In his book, he uses an example from his everyday life: requests from students. While part of his job is to teach those students, the burden is still on them to impress him — to write carefully, without typos. He, on the other hand, has plenty of leeway in when he writes back, and can dash off a response in seconds if that’s his preference.
For me, the inbox dread comes from self-recrimination over a flood of self-imposed spam: newsletters and Substack posts and other things I wish I’d found time to read. It’s hard to toss out things of potential value.
If, after sorting these out, you’re still left with an overwhelming inbox of requests and entreaties, keep in mind most …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
