Learn about how a ghosted email causes different stress than a rude response does, the 15-year grudge match between rival dino hunters known as The Bone Wars, and crown shyness, the forest’s version of social distancing.
Learn about how a ghosted email causes different stress than a rude response does, the 15-year grudge match between rival dino hunters known as The Bone Wars, and crown shyness, the forest’s version of social distancing.
Ignoring someone's email and drafting a rude response stress people out in similar but different ways by Kelsey Donk
The Bone Wars Were a 15-Year Grudge Match Between Rival Dino Hunters by Reuben Westmaas
Crown shyness is how trees practice social distancing by Steffie Drucker
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/the-stressful-psychology-of-a-ghosted-email
ASHLEY HAMER: Hi. You're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com. I'm Ashley Hamer.
NATALIA REAGAN: And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today, you'll learn about how a ghosted email causes different stress than a rude response does. The 15-year grudge match between rival dino hunters, known as the Bone Wars, and crown shyness, the forest version of social distancing.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's satisfy some curiosity. In the coronavirus work-from-home era, some say that impolite emails are on the rise. But not every rude email exchange involves caps lock and exclamation points. Sometimes it involves never responding at all. It turns out that this kind of remote working rudeness can have consequences on workers' health.
New research shows that both ignoring someone's email and drafting a rude response stress people out, but in slightly different ways. First of all, let's label the two types of rude emails that researchers looked at for this study.
The first is active rudeness. This one's probably what first comes to mind when you think about rude work emails. We're talking derogatory remarks or negative feedback given in all caps or with lots of exclamation points, and not in a good way.
Passive email rudeness is another kind, when someone just ignores your email. That passive rudeness is a different beast, because it's so uncertain. It's hard to know whether the person just forgot to answer you, or whether they meant to ignore you. Both kinds of impolite emails can cause stress and put people in a bad mood that carries over into their home lives.
In a previous study, participants who got rude emails from their bosses experienced more negative emotions, had a harder time focusing on work, and made more mistakes on math problems they were asked to solve than people who hadn't gotten the rude message. And this new study found that when people get actively rude messages while at work, the stress and bad mood they cause carry over into the evening and even the next morning. But passive rudeness was the only type of email incivility to cause insomnia.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been up late at night wondering if my boss was ever going to respond to my big important email. Of course, not at this job. Rude email exchanges have lasting effects, because they're always accessible even after we hit delete.
The research shows that people tend to revisit nasty emails from their bosses or constantly check back for a response to an email that's gone ignored. That checking behavior only makes the emotional impact even worse. What's to be done? Well, the researchers say managers should set clear expectations for email exchanges between employees. But those expectations shouldn't involve pressuring employees to check their email all the time or respond to emails immediately.
Employees should also try to psychologically detach themselves from work when the day is done. And now that you know about the effects of email rudeness, maybe give your next email an extra read. Be mindful and stay away from all caps.
NATALIA REAGAN: Look, scientists are human, and they make enemies and clash with rivals, just like the rest of us. Ask anyone who's been to a paleoanthropology conference, trust me, usually those clashes are restrained and mostly academic. But in the late 1800s, rival paleontologists started a 15-year grudge match that was the real deal.
We're talking espionage, sabotage, physical violence, and occasionally, dynamite. And no, that's not a dinosaur pun. I'm talking like real explosives. Here's the story of the Bone Wars.
At first, Othniel Charles Marsh, say that 10 times fast, and Edward Drinker Cope were friendly colleagues. They exchanged letters and fossils and even named new species after one another. Unfortunately, that was just when the double-crossing began.
Cope named an amphibian fossil after Marsh. And to return the favor, Marsh used Cope's name for a fossilized marine creature, a fossil that he obtained through a secret deal with the owner of a quarry Cope had shown him. But the moment that most consider the true beginning of the Bone Wars stemmed from Cope's less-than-stellar paleontology skills. Cope had unearthed and mounted a massive skeleton of a marine reptile. Marsh told Cope correctly that he had put it together backward, with the head at the end of the tail.
Cope was so embarrassed, and he tried to buy all the copies of the journal in which he published his erroneous findings and vowed to embarrass Marsh, if it was the last thing he did. So from about 1877 to 1892, the two paleontologists, each went to great lengths to discover more dinosaurs than the other and to prove their rival a fool and a charlatan along the way. They'd bribe each other's workers, hire spies to do reconnaissance, and even blow up dig sites to keep them from each other.
They each found so many fossils during this time that their respective institutions ran out of storage space. Eventually, Marsh got the government to cut off Cope's funding. And Cope commissioned a newspaper article accusing Marsh of plagiarism and financial misdeeds. By the end, both of them had driven themselves into poverty. So it's hard to say that either of them won.
The field of paleontology certainly notched a victory, though. Between them, Cope and Marsh discovered triceratops, stegosaurus, apatosaurus, allosaurus, and more than 100 previously unknown species. Thus, proving sometimes bitter rivalries are to the world's benefit. That was a dynamite story. See that was a pun. That was a pun. OK.
ASHLEY HAMER: There you go.
NATALIA REAGAN: I'm wearing tricera socks right now to read that story.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, I love it. When you see a forest from above, it looks like a vast, unbroken sea of green. But if you were to look up from the forest floor, you might see something different. In some forests, channels of sunlight perfectly outline the edges of each tree, like the gaps between ice floes on a frozen river.
Somehow the trees grow just enough to avoid touching. This forest version of social distancing has an adorable name, crown shyness. And there are a few reasons for it. Crown shyness has been observed in forests around the world, usually among trees of the same species, but not always.
Researchers first noticed it in the 1920s. But it took several more decades before they began to figure out why it happens. It turns out that different forests may have different reasons for being shy.
Some scientists think it's the trees way of being courteous. Research suggests that leaves can detect far red light reflecting off of neighboring plants. It makes sense that branches would avoid growing in the shade of neighbors that would impair their own growth. But studies in small plants have shown that they sometimes reposition their leaves to avoid casting shade on their kin, even if it puts them in the dark.
That might be true for trees too. But in windswept areas, crown shyness probably comes down to damage. When branches collide in the wind, the trees lose leaves and branches that took energy to grow.
Crown shyness could either be the direct result of this damage or a sign of the trees getting smart. Maybe they realize they're going to get hurt in a wind collision. So they preemptively stop growing. It's not worth expending the energy to grow that far out, when they know they'll lose their leaves.
In 2006, scientists actually tested this idea by using rope tethers to keep groups of lodgepole pines from colliding in the wind. And without the threat of damage, the trees weren't as shy. They grew longer branches that covered more of the canopy.
No matter what causes crown shyness, personal space has perks. Gaps in the canopy support the whole ecosystem by allowing sunlight to reach the plants and animals living on the forest floor. Isolating from neighboring trees protects individuals by preventing bugs and microbes from spreading disease and damage.
Seeing as a virus is currently spreading among us humans, it seems like we could take a lesson from crown shyness. Let's all make like a tree and leaf each other some distance.
NATALIA REAGAN: Let's recap what we learned today to wrap up, starting with, well, we learned that rude emails can come in two different, well, sizes or shapes or forms. And it could be an outwardly active email that's just really rude and makes you feel bad, or just being ignored can leave people up late at night with insomnia.
So I feel like during quarantine, we can just be a little kinder and maybe err on the side of just being nice and email back your employees. Maybe avoid all caps and exclamation points, if you want to send a nasty email. Because those things hurt. We're sensitive right now.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, I think both of us probably have the experience of being ghosted by like an important figure that you were kind of shooting your shot for. Like maybe I wanted to have someone important on the show, or maybe I'm going out for a big opportunity. And I just don't hear anything. I mean I'm used to it by now. But it does occupy your mind.
NATALIA REAGAN: So I was an actress before I became a scientist. And so one of the notorious things anytime you have an audition, if you don't hear anything, you know you didn't get it.
And so one of the sweet things my mom used to always do, or even friends or partners would always ask, oh, did you get it? And it's like, look, you'll know I'll be screaming from a rooftop if I got the lead in the new Star Wars franchise.
No, I didn't get it. You know what I mean? I was auditioning to be like chick number two or groupie number three, so no, it wasn't a lead in a Star Wars film. But yeah, I mean it's-- I'm used to getting go sit quite a bit. So they don't bother me as much. Freelance life prepares you for feeling bad.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, we also learned that science can be rife with competition. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, especially in the case of Cope and Marsh, two paleontologists who are at war with one another, and by trying to outdo each other, kept discovering more and more dinosaurs. And there are a couple of factoids that we couldn't include for space.
But I do want to say that we talked about a mistake that Cope made. But we didn't talk about the huge mistake that Marsh made. And that's because it wasn't discovered until after he died. And he's the reason we have two names for the same dinosaur, Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus.
He found an Apatosaurus skeleton without a head and then found another skull. And he's like, this must be Apatosaurus. And so he's like, this is Apatosaurus. Then he found another Apatosaurus with a skull, didn't realize it was the same species and named it Brontosaurus, and said it was a different species.
And the other factoid that I feel like everyone needs to know is that James Gandolfini, before he died, actually signed on to star alongside Steve Carell in a Bone Wars movie. I cannot believe we're not going to get that. It's so sad. I want to live in the alternate universe where that movie exists.
NATALIA REAGAN: I feel like we could-- I mean obviously, James Gandolfini would have been fantastic in it. But I'm just trying to think of another actor who could probably step up and fill that void. Because that needs to happen.
ASHLEY HAMER: It does. There needs to be a movie of this. It's amazing. Maybe even a miniseries. HBO, let's do it.
NATALIA REAGAN: Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime. Who needs the Clone Wars when you got the Bone Wars? I mean, I'm all about this.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes.
NATALIA REAGAN: Yeah, this is something this is something I would tune in for.
ASHLEY HAMER: Absolutely.
NATALIA REAGAN: We also learned that crown shyness is a phenomenon when trees will actually limit their growth to avoid collisions caused by wind. And it seems like it's a little bit more self-preservation than being courteous, but I still think that humans can learn a thing or two from these trees and just wear a mask, keep some distance. And we can maybe head the next wave of COVID off at the past.
No, I definitely think humans could learn a thing or two from-- well, we really can learn a lot from trees. Create some deep roots, branch out. Yeah, work out.
ASHLEY HAMER: Put a ring on it.
NATALIA REAGAN: Put a ring on it. That's what I'm talking about. I don't know, but I thought this was a really sweet story. Because I like that they first thought they were like doing it for like, oh I don't want to, I don't want to get in your way. I don't want to get in your way. It's like, no, they don't want to hurt themselves.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, right. It may be both of those things, depending on-- because there are some forests that just don't have that much wind, and so that might be why they're doing it. But I love that this is still a mystery. That's what I love. I also love that they tied some trees down to keep them from hitting each other in the wind and then watched how far their branches grew. It's amazing.
NATALIA REAGAN: It's really sweet actually. Today's stories were written by Kelsey Donk, Reuben Westmaas and Steffie Drucker, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting was by Natalia Reagan and Sonja Hodgen. Today's episode was edited by Jonathan McMichael, and our producer is Cody Gough.
NATALIA REAGAN: Reply to that email and try to be nice, and join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until, then stay curious.