The reason for this is egocentrism, or the difficulty some people have detaching themselves from their own perspective, says Epley. In other words, people aren’t that good at imagining how a message might be understood from another person’s perspective. —Stephen Leahy —The Secret Cause of Flame Wars (Wired)
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I think there was an article on slashdot today about how people only correctly decipher someone else's tone through an email...
I confess to a big "huh?" when I read this article. Of course, the psychology is applicable everywhere, but he's talking about email and specifically business email. How often do flame wars erupt in email? Is it even a flame war if it's between just two people? Is the author using the term without any knowledge of discussion board flame wars? A totally trivial problem, I suppose. It just happened to bug me.