Why Text Fights Get Worse, and How to Calm One Down

You read "fine." with a period, and your stomach drops. Is it fine, or is that a door slamming? The sender knows. You do not.

Text hides your tone

In 2005, Justin Kruger, Nicholas Epley, and two colleagues asked people to send short lines by email or by voice. Half of the lines were sarcastic and half were serious. In one test, email readers named the tone right about 56% of the time, close to a coin flip. The senders expected about 78%. Listeners who heard the same lines by voice did better.

The senders were not careless. They heard their own tone in their heads and assumed the reader heard it too. The researchers called this egocentrism.

So the other person reads your text in their own voice and their own mood. If they expect a fight, they will find one in your words.

An angry draft feeds the anger

"Get it off your chest" sounds healthy. Brad Bushman tested it in 2002. He made people angry, then had some of them hit a punching bag while they thought about the person who annoyed them. That group came out angrier and more aggressive than a group that hit the bag while they thought about exercise. A third group sat still and did nothing, and it did better than the group that vented.

A furious draft works the same way. Each line rehearses the anger. Write it if you need to. Do not send it.

The first lines set the course

Sybil Carrère and John Gottman filmed 124 newlywed couples as they talked about a conflict, then followed them for six years. The first three minutes of the talk predicted which couples divorced. Those couples opened with more negative feeling and less warmth than the couples who stayed together.

A text thread has a first three minutes too. Open with "You always" and the reply will defend. Open with the plain fact and how it affects you, and the other person has room to answer.

Name the feeling

In 2007, Matthew Lieberman and his team at UCLA scanned people's brains while they looked at angry and scared faces. When people picked a word for the feeling, activity dropped in the amygdala, a part of the brain tied to threat.

You can do this for the other person. "It sounds like this landed on you at the last minute." You do not agree with them when you say that. You show that you heard them. In a 2014 study, Harry Weger and his colleagues found that people who got this kind of reply felt more understood than people who got advice.

A calmer reply, step by step

1. Wait before you reply. Ten minutes is better than ten seconds.
2. Read their message again and guess the feeling under it.
3. Say that feeling back to them in one line.
4. Give your point as a fact about the situation, not a verdict on them.
5. End with a question that they can answer without losing face.

Their message: "Seriously? You knew about this for weeks and you tell me now?"

A reply that adds heat: "I told you last week. You never listen."

A reply that lowers it: "Sounds like this caught you off guard, and that is fair. I mentioned it last week, but I can see it got lost. What would help most right now?"

Softn does these steps for you. Paste the thread or a screenshot, and it tells you what is going on and gives you one message to send.

Sources

• Kruger, J., Epley, N., Parker, J., & Ng, Z. (2005). Egocentrism over e-mail: Can we communicate as well as we think? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89(6), 925–936. Figures as reported by the American Management Association.
• Bushman, B. J. (2002). Does venting anger feed or extinguish the flame? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(6), 724–731. doi:10.1177/0146167202289002
• Carrère, S., & Gottman, J. M. (1999). Predicting divorce among newlyweds from the first three minutes of a marital conflict discussion. Family Process, 38(3), 293–301. doi:10.1111/j.1545-5300.1999.00293.x
• Lieberman, M. D., et al. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x
• Weger, H., Castle Bell, G., Minei, E. M., & Robinson, M. C. (2014). The relative effectiveness of active listening in initial interactions. International Journal of Listening, 28(1), 13–31. doi:10.1080/10904018.2013.813234