I learned to answer emails from this book about primate behavior

Email is governed by the rules of dominance hierarchy, which is central to the games we social primates are wired to play.

By F D Flam

If you’re confronting an endless string of unread emails after a long weekend or summer vacation, try thinking of responding as a game. A status game.

Since reading the 2012 book Games Primates Play, by University of Chicago behavioral 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-summer-vacation email pileup. Some people were trying to head off the deluge with bluntness. As one autoresponse 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 autoreply or ignore email requests from colleagues, clients or customers.

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.

After one such (successful!) exchange, Maestripieri told me that email makes everyone more approachable, so people in positions of power are inevitably going to get more requests for help from the less powerful. So the burden to impress is on the sender. “There’s a certain effort and care that goes into writing an email for a higher-status person,” he said.

In his book, he uses an example from his everyday life: requests from students. While part of his job is to teach those students, the burden is still on them to impress him — to write carefully, without typos. He, on the other hand, has plenty of leeway in when he writes back, and can dash off a response in seconds if that’s his preference.

For me, the inbox dread comes from self-recrimination over a flood of self-imposed spam: newsletters and Substack posts and other things I wish I’d found time to read. It’s hard to toss out things of potential value.

If, after sorting these out, you’re still left with an overwhelming inbox of requests and entreaties, keep in mind most of these come from lower-ranked primates. One need not spend more than a moment skimming the request and deciding whether it’s beneficial or reasonable and writing a quick reply.

It takes more effort to manage emails from someone above us in the hierarchy. Maestripieri says it’s problematic if you’re getting barraged by a micromanaging boss you can’t afford to ignore. Then the problem isn’t your inbox — it’s your job.

But emails from higher-status primates aren’t always a nuisance. Sometimes they’re opportunities. If it’s Taylor Swift who wants you to be her interior decorator or financial adviser, you might not mind so much if she’s a little too imposing, because the rewards could be substantial.

The trickiest emails are those where the status relationship is unclear. Consider an independent consultant dealing with requests from clients or customers. Or two colleagues trying to resolve a dispute. Who’s in charge? In those cases, it helps if you’re high in extraversion, said Maestripieri. Then whatever conflicts arise can be offset by the enjoyment extraverts get from interacting with people.

Frustration with too many emails usually arises, we assume, because they take more time than we have. But the real problem is usually that they’re lower-status correspondents asking for more time than we think they deserve. They’re going to test what they can get away with — that’s part of the game.

The good news is that, while other primates tend to bite and claw at each other under such circumstances, we can potentially deploy other ways to work out conflict — like humor, a great tool to deflect tension.

We can also look at the game from outside. We can’t opt out completely; no social primates can. But it’s more fun to play when we see it for what it is.