Why Miscommunication Happens
Miscommunication happens when people have different contexts, assumptions, or interpretations even when using the same clear words.
What was corrected
The article stated: 'Kenneth Savitsky and Thomas Gilovich at Cornell conducted experiments in which subjects performed an emotionally evocative task... and then tried to conceal their emotional reaction... Subjects consistently overestimated how successfully they had hidden their emotional state - they believed they were significantly more emotionally opaque than observers rated them.' It described 'a 2015 study, researchers at the University of Chicago' on text-message tone with senders overestimating clarity 'by roughly 20 percentage points', and called the resulting gap 'the Semmelweis problem at everyday scale'. It separately attributed email-tone findings to 'Research by psychologist Nicholas Epley and colleagues on egocentrism and miscommunication (2003, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)'. It reported that Keysar and Henly found speakers 'believed their messages were understood correctly 90% of the time when listeners understood the intended meaning only 67% of the time' and that 'The gap held across different types of messages, different speaker-listener relationships, and different communication modalities'. It said 'A study by David Grossman... found that organizations with 100,000 employees lose an average of 2 million per year', later '2.4 million - approximately 24 per employee per year', identified 'the most common source of costly miscommunication' as unstated assumptions about priorities, and claimed effective communicators 'delivered meaningfully higher total shareholder returns'. It said communication failures contributed to about 70% of sentinel events, 'a higher proportion than equipment failures, staffing inadequacies, or technical errors'. Of Tenerife it concluded 'The words were clear. The channel was functional. And the communication failed.' It presented 'The Meaning Reconstruction Model' and 'six mechanisms' as established research, with a summary table listing different mechanisms from the numbered sections.
The illusion of transparency now states the finding in its actual direction, that people overestimate how visible their internal states are to others, cited to Gilovich, Savitsky and Medvec 1998, with the note that someone concealing a reaction typically believes observers detect more than they do. The email-tone research is corrected to Kruger, Epley, Parker and Ng 2005 and separated from Epley, Keysar, Van Boven and Gilovich 2004, which is now described as the anchoring-and-insufficient-adjustment mechanism predicting larger errors under time pressure. The Keysar and Henly percentages were removed and the finding limited to the task tested. The Semmelweis label, the 2.4 million figure and its per-employee derivation, the most-common-cause ranking and the shareholder-return claim are all gone. The sentinel-event statistic is now framed as historical analysis of voluntarily reported events that does not represent all medical error, without the comparison against equipment and staffing failures, and SBAR is described as having moderate and variable evidence. The Tenerife opening is now a multi-factor chain, and the claim that the words were clear is replaced with an explicit statement that the phraseology was non-standard, one transmission was garbled by interference, and the parties held incompatible models of the runway, making it a case of ambiguous encoding and failed confirmation. The article's thesis is now stated as clear wording being necessary but not sufficient. The framework and the six-cause taxonomy are labelled WNF synthesis, the two incompatible mechanism lists were unified into one, Grice is described as a pragmatic theory rather than a demonstration, the curse of knowledge is qualified as bias rather than inability and shortened with a link to the dedicated article, and new material covers read-back versus teach-back versus closed-loop confirmation, limits on channel richness, cultural frameworks as tendencies, and the point that not every disagreement is a misunderstanding. Length went from about 4,070 to about 2,390 words.
Suggested change
Corrected the illusion of transparency to state that people overestimate how visible their internal states are, cited to Gilovich, Savitsky and Medvec 1998, and removed the reversed concealment interpretation. Corrected the email-tone research to Kruger, Epley, Parker and Ng 2005 and separated it cleanly from Epley, Keysar, Van Boven and Gilovich 2004 on egocentric anchoring and insufficient adjustment. Removed the unverifiable Keysar and Henly percentages while keeping the direction of the finding, and limited its scope to the task actually tested. Deleted the Semmelweis label, the 2.4 million estimate with its per-employee derivation, the unsourced most-common-cause ranking, and the shareholder-return claim. Reframed the Joint Commission sentinel-event figure as historical analysis of voluntarily reported events rather than a proportion of all medical harm, removed the invented comparison against equipment and staffing failures, and restated SBAR evidence as moderate and variable. Rewrote the Tenerife opening as a multi-factor chain and removed the assertion that the words were clear, since the phraseology was non-standard and one transmission was garbled by interference. Labelled the meaning-reconstruction framework and the six-cause taxonomy as WNF synthesis, replaced the two incompatible mechanism lists with one, reframed Grice as a pragmatic theory rather than an experimental demonstration, qualified the curse of knowledge as bias rather than inability and cut that section down with a link to the dedicated article, softened the Toyota kaizen account, replaced weak ambiguity examples, added limits on channel richness and cultural frameworks, corrected the Camerer citation to the Journal of Political Economy, removed decorative references, merged both research appendices into the relevant sections, and reduced the article by about 41 percent.
Why this is better
This page had already received one correction, but a claim-level re-review found that several of its study descriptions still did not match their sources. The most serious was a reversal: the illusion of transparency was described as people overestimating how well they had concealed their feelings, when the documented finding is that people overestimate how visible their internal states are. Readers taking away the inverted version would draw the opposite practical conclusion. Two further studies were misdated or attributed to papers that do not report what was claimed, exact percentages could not be confirmed against the cited paper, and a widely circulated organizational cost figure was presented with a derived per-employee calculation its methodology cannot support. Corrections restore each finding to what its source establishes and label the article's own framework as editorial synthesis.
More by Emir Baycan in Communication
- Correction Active Listening: What It Is, How It Works, and How to Practise It
- Correction Narrative Transportation: How Stories Influence Beliefs and Behavior
- Correction The Ladder of Abstraction: Understanding Communication Gaps
- Correction The Curse of Knowledge: How Experts Struggle to Explain