People prefer to lie by email

PEOPLE FEEL it much easier to lie via e-mail than by handwritten communication according to studies at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University.

Liuba Belkin, assistant professor of management at the University’s faculty of Business and Economics reckons that not only do people find it easier to lie using email, but feel justified in doing so.

Belkin’s study involved giving a group of MBA students $89 each and telling them to divide it between themselves and an imaginary person as they saw fit. The students had to write either an email or handwritten note to the fictional other half, telling them how much money was in their possession and how it would be divided.

Results of the study showed that those who wrote emails lied more than 92 per cent of the time, whilst those who handwrote their letters lied about the money just under 64 per cent of the time.

The lying scumbag e-mailers also reckoned they were being entirely justified in giving the other person an average of only $29 out of the $89, even going as far as telling the fictional character the pot total was only approx $56.

Students who handwrote to their imaginary friends were a little less stingy, handing out, on average, $34 and claiming they had only been given $67.

Previous studies on email and modes of behaviour apparently show that typing away and clicking ‘send’ is linked to a whole host of sociopath personality traits like lower interpersonal trust, more negative attitudes and, hardly surprising to us at the INQ, flame mail. *Cue the barrage of rude and insulting flame mails for this article*.

The best the Lehigh University boffins could come up with by way of explanation was that handwritten documents still seem to carry stronger legal consequences than do e-mails, which feel fleeting in nature, despite the fact that they are actually harder to erase or contain."

Harder to erase and contain? No they’re not, just ask Intel or the White House. µ

L’Inq
Lehigh University

See Also
Intel email retention capability just not what it could be
Deadline looms for Intel to produce details of emails missing in AMD case
White House whinges to judge
Whitehouse "lost" email scandal gains traction