While huge volumes of video is produced each minute, text remains the bedrock of our virtual world, whether through emails, articles, instant messaging, or other documents. Research from FIU Business highlights the harmful impact all of this text can have on our mental alertness and overall energy levels.
The study finds that when we’re using a lot of text, especially for complex tasks, such as negotiations, it can not only lower our interest in the job but also our performance levels.
“Negotiating or working together to solve a problem is more difficult over email or instant messenger than working in person because text-based communication limits visual, vocal and nonverbal cues,” the researchers explain. “The absence of these cues means that text-based communication takes longer and requires more thought to arrive at a shared understanding. You have to think about what you’re writing, to make sure it’s not misinterpreted.”
Communication type
The researchers wanted to examine the relationship between communication type and our subsequent motivation and performance on a variety of complex reasoning tasks, such as coordination and negotiation.
For instance, in one experiment, participants were asked to interact with one another by either text or in-person to coordinate on a task. They were then asked to read a news story and identify any mistakes in the story that needed to be rectified. The results showed that the people who communicated via text missed considerably more errors than those who had communicated in person. What’s more, the text-based participants were also 19% less effective in terms of their complex reasoning task performance compared to their in-person peers.
This was followed up by a second task in which volunteers spent 20 minutes completing a task that required them to communicate with a colleague while assembling tangram puzzles. They then had to answer six questions from a Cognitive Reflection Test. Once again, those in the text-based condition performed worse on the test than their in-person peers.
As a result, the researchers believe we should be aware that our use of email and instant messaging can affect our performance in crucial tasks, and especially those that require thinking and leading.
“We want to make people better prepared and to keep in mind that using email for these is taxing. Knowing this, you can plan for a break, take a walk before starting a more challenging task,” the authors conclude. “Top management can know the costs and determine what’s better or worse.”
