A few months ago I was talking to some friends about sending emails to lecturers (I know, we’re an exciting lot), and the topic got on to how they start emails. It turned out people would go to great lengths to find out what the official title was (Dr, Prof, Vice Chancellor), and considered it a major faux pas to write the wrong one. I was kind of surprised; To me it seems like such an old fashion Issue, like the type of thing that Jane Austin would be worried about. Not something a 22 year old student in Sydney should be concerned with. Particularly in Australia, which is such an informal country generally. Though, what I’m more curious about is why people maintain these patterns for email, but not for other mediums. What is it about email that makes other (normal?) people keep these patterns in tact for email, but not for other things, like facebook wall posts.

Email has always been a strange beast to me, I’ve never really understood it. It’s the most old fashioned of the online mediums. As such it still resembles it’s older brother, paper and pen mail. It has, whilst adding in a title section, maintained a more modern version of the ‘header.’ In the olden day, would be your address and the date, though now this is automatically inserted, and in turn frequently edited out by email clients. The user still has two write something though, and they will still generally still start with the antiquated  “Dear Paul,” and end with “thanks, Mike.” 

If we compare this to something like Facebook messaging,  we can see a number of further differences. People rarely use ‘Dear’ and generally just get straight into the message, which makes sense, since people (usually) already know who they are. There does, however, still seem to be a strong affinity for signing off, albeit in a simpler form of just “Mike” or “xoxo”. If there was a spectrum this medium would be on the “letter” end.

If we look at another similar web medium, the Facebook wall, we see a move even further away from traditional letter format. But why? In both instances you have your name and picture right next to the message. What is so different in them that it causes people to switch? Most likely it’s a similar reason to why texting is so different from email. Texts leave out these salutations primarily out of a lack of space. By the time you write “Dear Professor Brand, Thanks, Mike Brand” you’ve used up a quarter of your character allowance. As a possible side effect of this, or a mere coincidence, we only use SMSing for our friends and family. It’s a pretty rare occasion that we text our boss, or coworkers “hey I need that TPS report by today at 4:00 pm.” 

So the Facebook message, with it’s spaces for an address and title, and it’s larger text box, skew towards the more formal email genre. Meanwhile the Facebook wall post, with its much smaller text box, skews more towards being like an informal text message. In the end is one of these superior to the other? I like getting straight into it, but I have a feeling I’m in the minority. Most importantly, Is this important? No: I’m just thinking out loud.

As a bonus for this terribly boring post here’s some ‘art‘ that consist of two computers set up with auto reply vacation messages, bouncing back and fourth.

Social psychologists seem to love two types of studies. The ones that either tell us what we already know ‘People like attractive people’ or the ones that tell us the complete opposite of what we thing ‘The more people around, the less likely they are to help’. They like to get down to the nitty gritty of why we do the things we do.

For quite a while many researchers were doing studies like “How long does it take a person to put on or take off their shoes off? Do they do it faster if someone is watching?” (They then compared those times to how long it takes someone to put on and take off huge pink socks with someone watching.)  Basically they found that if you’re pretty good at something, then you’ll do it better if people are around, and conversely you’ll do worse if people are watching you do something you’re poor at.  That seems pretty obvious right? If you’re a billiards master then having a crowd watch you at the bar makes you even better. But if you barely scrape by in pool, you find yourself going from sinking a few balls to no balls, whilst you promise everyone you’re normally not that bad, I swear.

What about Tug-o-war? It’s kinds similar to pool; It’s a physical activity, and there can be people around, pulling alongside you. But in fact the more people there are on your tug-o-team the less the average person pulls (Ringelmann 1913). Of course there could be any number of explanations for this sub par performance. A guy called Alan Ingham set out to prove it more definitively. With his experiment he had people pulling on the rope, blindfolded, and he would tell them they were either pulling by themselves or with others. In reality they were the only person on their team. He found that people pull less when in groups. It wasn’t a huge difference, but still there; They pulled at 90% of their individual capacity if there was one other person and 85% if there were two other people.

So what’s the difference between playing pool and tug-o-war? Well it seems to be all about being able to differentiate each individual’s contribution. with pool people can keep track of each ball you sink, and see when you’re doing your part. With tug-o-war you could be pulling less than everyone else and no one would know. This applies to other areas too, anything where you can’t differentiate an individual’s work. This phenomenon has a fantastic name; Social Loafing.

Why does social loafing occur? There are a few things that can encourage it such as:

• If individual contributions can’t be easily evaluated by other people. No one’s going to know if we pull a little less hard, just as how Ashley the hole digger won’t know that Pat the hole digger shifted a lot less dirt.
• If we feel like our contribution isn’t important. I’m just an individual, what can I do?
• if we feel others are putting in less effort; We ‘match’ how much effort we put in to how much we think others are. Sam wasn’t even breaking a sweat, and here I am straining like a sucker.

How do you minimize social loafing? Just try to get rid of the things that cause it; Make sure that each person’s individual effort is recognized, and that everyone feels like their effort is important. A standard of how much and what type of work is expected can also help. Different groups of people are affected by it differently as well. Collectivist cultures, which emphasize a person’s place in a community rather than as an individual, are less affected by it, as are close knit groups of people, such as friends. No word on if it’s why politicians are so lazy though.

The arrow pointing up shows approximately where Baarle-Hertog is, the arrow pointing right shows approximately where Maastricht is.

When I first looked at a map of where Maastricht, the town I’m studying at, is located I was kind of puzzled about why it was part of The Netherlands. The image on the right shows where Maastricht is, the arrow on the bottom. When you look at the area it’s in you can see that it’s only connected by a very thin strip. The explanation according to Wikipedia is:

When the southern provinces sought independence from the North to form Belgium in 1830, the garrison in Maastricht remained loyal to the Dutch king, though the surrounding countryside came under Belgian control. Arbitration by the Great Powersin 1831 awarded the city and the eastern part of Limburg, despite being geographically and culturally closer to Belgium, to the Netherlands and the rest to Belgium.

I thought this was pretty interesting, It almost seems like a portion of The Netherlands being within Belgium.

On BLDGBLOG today (via Kottke) I found an even more interesting case; The city of Baarle-Hertog, which is indicated by the other arrow. It’s 5 Kilometers away from the main border of Belgium and is where no definite decision could be made on the border so “5732 parcels of land had their nationality laid down separately.” (BLDG BLOG has an awesome diagram of some of the parcels.) But the most fascinating is that some houses and businesses are split over two different nationalities.  At one point The Netherlands had laws requiring restaurants to close by a certain time, so the ones in Baarle-Hertog would shift their tables to the Belgian side of the store to keep business going. There are various markers about the town to show where the puzzle-like border is: Pavers along the side walk have lines to show the divisions and most of the building entrances also have little flags to indicate which country they stand in. 

Coming mainly from Australia I find these sorts of border problems fascinating. They bring to mind questions about nationalism and definitions of countries.  My home country is “girt by sea” (as we say in the national anthem), which makes things a little more obvious; If you’re on the mainland you’re in Australia. Well, There are a few exceptions.