New Study Finds You're More Likely to Lie in an E-mail Than When Using Pen and Paper

by Jon Azpiri | September 29, 2008 at 01:43 pm

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Two new studies have found that people are more likely to lie in an e-mail than in a handwritten letter. The two studies, by business professors at Lehigh, Rutgers, and DePaul University, suggest that it's not just Nigerian scammers who bend the truth over e-mail. In fact, people are up to 50 percent more likely to lie via e-mail than good old fashioned pen and ink. And they often feel more justified in doing it.

In one study, 48 subjects were given $89 to split between themselves and a fictitious party who had only a vague idea of how much money was given. The subjects then wrote down how much the other party would get using e-mail and then pen and paper.

The students who used E-mail lied about the sum of the $89 pot more than 92 percent of the time. Students who handwrote their offers lied less than 64 percent of the time. (On average, the students offered slightly more than half of their deceptively downsized total pots to their fictional counterparts. Very generous.)

The second study found that the students tended to be more honest in E-mails to people with whom they were familiar, but they still lied.

One very interesting point:

"These findings are consistent with our other work that shows that E-mail communication decreases the amount of trust and cooperation we see in professional group-work, and increases the negativity in performance evaluations, all as opposed to pen-and-paper systems," says coauthor Terri Kurtzberg of Rutgers. "People seem to feel more justified in acting in self-serving ways when typing as opposed to writing."

Kurtzberg feels that the study can have big ramifications on businesses that rely heavily on e-mail.

"These findings are consistent with our other work that shows that e-mail communication decreases the amount of trust and cooperation we see in professional group-work, and increases the negativity in performance evaluations, all as opposed to pen-and-paper systems," explains Kurtzberg. "People seem to feel more justified in acting in self-serving ways when typing as opposed to writing." Most researchers agree that e-mail is a recent phenomenon and was first widely used in workplace communications beginning in 1994. Since then, organizational norms regarding e-mail use have evolved and are still murky. "The study of industrial psychology and the evolving use of e-mail are presenting some interesting challenges for organizations across the board," says Belkin, who has studied organizational communications over the past few years. "We know it's a socially acceptable way to communicate, but how that translates in the workplace is a different story entirely."