E-mail was a novelty when Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) logged on to her laptop in the opening scene of the 1998 hit romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail.” A mere decade later, e-mail is a cornerstone of modern communications. But a growing body of research suggests we’ve yet to adapt our social behaviours to fit with an era where every message we send is next to impossible to digitally erase.
“People don’t quite grasp that aspect of it,” says Charles Naquin, an assistant professor of management at DePaul University in Chicago. The disconnection may help explain why the research he and his colleagues are pursuing shows that e-mail is the most deceptive form of communication in the workplace.
In one recent experiment, the researchers handed 48 business students a hypothetical $89 to divide between themselves and a fictional person who knew only that the amount lay somewhere between $5 and $100 and would accept whatever came his way. Half of the students were told to conduct the transaction via e-mail; the other half with a handwritten note.
A whopping 92 percent of the e-mailers lied about the size of the pot – and how much the other person would receive – whereas less than 64 percent of the handwritten note writers lied. What’s more, the lying e-mailers told more egregious lies about the size of the pot – and felt more justified about their lying, to boot.
“They do not have this social obligation toward the other party when they communicate via e-mail versus pen and paper,” says research team member Liuba Belkin, an assistant professor of management at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. Terri Kurtzberg from Rutgers University also contributed to the study.
The team suspects the rate of lying was nearly 50 percent higher in e-mail than pen and paper due to the perception of handwritten notes as more formal and personal than e-mails. This would fit with earlier work showing that people are more willing to break social norms in an online environment versus face-to-face interactions.
Jeff Hancock is an associate professor of communications at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. He says the level of e-mail lying found in the study is fascinating, especially in an age when people should be aware that e-mail leaves a digital, searchable trail that makes hiding deception difficult at best.
Research conducted in Hancock’s lab indicates people lie most over the phone, which is less personal than face-to-face communication and, presumably, not recorded such as in an e-mail or text message, and thus cannot be used to challenge their honesty.
“We think that people have a sort of unconscious knowledge of when to play it safer,” he says. “But they don’t have a conscious knowledge, and that’s why you see these big, huge errors.”
For example, e-mails pulled from Enron’s servers helped the federal government build its successful cases of fraud and conspiracy against executives at the former energy-trading giant.
“We are used to nothing being recorded,” says Jeff Hancock, adding that soon everything we say and write may be recorded forever. Ultimately we’ll adapt our behaviour to fit the new reality.
