Email avalanche? Here’s why humans are a lot like monkeys
Games Primates Play, by University of Chicago behavioural 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-vacation email pile-up. Some people were trying to head off the deluge with bluntness.
As one auto-response 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 auto-reply or ignore email requests from colleagues or clients. 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.
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