Why You Trust Email Way More Than You Should

New York Magazine:

Flynn emphasizes the importance of a clear and well-communicated corporate email policy. Just having one doesn’t do any good if employees aren’t trained on it and given the reasoning behind it. And rules as to what kinds of language are banned and what counts as confidential information should be explicit enough to be closed to interpretation.

But training is not a firewall against human stupidity, as Liuba Belkin, a professor of management at Lehigh University, observed when she qualitatively analyzed thousands of emails from several organizations for her dissertation. “I was amazed what kinds of things people still put in email, even knowing it’s the property of an organization,” she says. “People have been trained in many organizations in how to behave. They still do the same silly mistakes.”

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Nicholas Epley, a psychologist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, thinks many people see email as a less anxiety-inducing form of talking. “I have a colleague, for instance, who sits right next door to me,” he says.

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For a paper in Psychological Science, he and Juliana Schroeder, a management professor at the University of California, Berkeley, videotaped 18 MBA students giving a short pitch about themselves to prospective employers and also asked them to put a pitch in writing. Then, over a series of studies, a team of professional recruiters and untrained volunteers rated the videos, the audio tracks, the video transcripts, and the written pitches.

Read the whole story: New York Magazine