Now a day’s email is the most basic need to everyone and
everyone thinks that by using email they only gets the benefits but it is not
true according to one psychology study.
Email is a fantastic tool, but these ten psychology
studies remind us of its dark side.
Like the telephone or the TV, email is a technology so
embedded in our lives, we think nothing of it. Both help and hindrance, on one
hand it's the internet's original 'killer application' and on the other it's a
spam-spewing slave-driver.
We're used to hearing about the negative side of the
balance-sheet, about email's addictive nature and the unnecessary stress it
injects into the modern worker's life, but we downplay these problems because
it's so incredibly useful.
Now that email is well into middle age (the first emails
were sent in 1965), let's take stock of what we know about the darker side of
email.
A1.
Email eats a quarter of the working day
When Czerwinski et al. (2004) carried out a diary study
of people in various different occupations they found that, on average, people
spent 23% of their working day dealing with email.
This is because people are not just using email to
communicate, they are also using it as a way of tracking tasks—one study has
found that workers are managing an average of 65 tasks in 10 different spheres
at any one time (Gonzalez & Mark, 2004).
A2.
You check more often than you think
Participants in a study by Renaud et al. (2006) claimed
to check their email, on average, once an hour. However when the researchers
spied on them, it turned out they checked their email every five minutes.
Despite the small sample size in Renaud's study (6
people), further research has suggested people do set their email program to
check their email every 5 minutes (Jackson et al., 2002) as well as
significantly underestimating how often they check their email. As a
consequence we also underestimate how disruptive it can be.
A3.
It takes 64 seconds to recover from an email
We often react quickly to incoming email, almost like the
phone ringing. In one workplace study, Jackson et al. (2002) found that 70% of
emails were reacted to within 6 seconds of their arrival, and 85% within 2
minutes.
The problem is that it took participants in the same
study 64 seconds to recover their train of thought after an email interruption.
Add this to the fact that Gonzalez & Mark (2004) have
found that people spend an average of only 3 minutes on each task before they
switch to another, and it's difficult to see how anyone can achieve the
psychological state of 'flow' necessary for complex tasks.
A4.
59 per cent check email from the bathroom
You don't need to be an expert on Pavlov's drooling dogs
to work out why email is so habit-forming. Most of it is humdrum, but
occasionally we get something exciting and that's what we're hoping for when we
check our email. In psychological terms email is a 'variable-interval
reinforcement': we don't know exactly when the good stuff is coming so we have
to keep checking.
It's no wonder, according to AOL's 2010 survey, 47% claim
to be hooked on it, 25% of people can't go without email for more than 3 days,
60% check email on vacation and 59% check email from the bathroom.
A5.
Stressed emailers
Given the effort we put into email and all the
task-switching that's going on, it's unsurprising that it generates stress. Of course
we each deal with email in different ways, Hair et al. (2005) have identified
three types of emailer:
Relaxed responders treat email almost like snail mail.
They refuse to let it control them and get back to people when they feel like
it.
Driven responders try to reply instantly to email and
expect others to do the same.
Stressed responders don't find email useful, to them it
is mostly an irritation.
My survey revealed 57% of people consider themselves
relaxed, 32% driven and 11% stressed emailers, but this may well underestimate
the actual number of stressed emailers.
A6.
Email kills sarcasm (and emotional communication)
People consistently overestimate their ability to
communicate effectively with email. A series of studies by Kruger et al. (2005)
found that both senders and receivers don't realise how poor email is for
communicating things like sarcasm.
In one study participants thought that their sarcasm
would be communicated 80% of the time. Face-to-face this was accurate, but over
email the actual figure was 56%.
This overconfidence was also seen when people tried to
communicate anger, sadness, seriousness and humour in an email. Without body
language cues, it's hard to communicate more than literal meanings. Sorry,
emoticons don't cut it :-(
A7.
People feel less co-operative
Email negotiations often feel difficult, especially with
people we don't know well. When Naquin et al. (2008) compared them with
face-to-face negotiations, they found that people were less co-operative over
email and even felt more justified in being less co-operative.
Part of the reason negotiations are difficult is that
people tend to be more negative on email. For example, Kurtzberg et al. (2005)
found that when people evaluated each other in performance appraisals using
both pen-and-paper and email, they were consistently more negative about their
colleagues when using email.
A8.
Low rapport on email
Another reason negotiations can be difficult over email
is that when negotiating with a stranger, because email is so short and
to-the-point, there is little or no rapport
to fall back on. So if negotiations hit a problem, they can quickly fall apart.
Morris et al. (2002) have found that even a single
telephone call can create enough good feeling between the parties to bridge the
rapport gap.
A9.
Lying feels more justified
People will lie in any medium, but compared with
pen-and-paper, they lie more over email and feel that lying is more justified.
In Naquin et al.'s (2010) study, participants lied 50% more when they
negotiated over email compared with pen-and-paper. They propose three reasons:
Emails are less permanent: it feels closer to chatting
than writing a letter.
Less restrained: people feel freer online because of the
online disinhibition effect.
Lower personal connection: over email we feel
psychologically distant, resulting in low trust and rapport.
A fluffly AOL survey has classified the most irritating
types of emailers by the type of emails they send (Woffenden, 2004). In order
of how irritating, from most to least:
The
cryptic: rated the most irritating type of emailer, this person
fills their emails with unexplained acronyms, mostly to try and impress the
boss.
The
author: thinks they are writing a novel not an email.
The
forwarder: sends on every idiotic chain letter and joke they
receive, apparently without exercising their judgement.
The
player: claims not to have received your email. Quite
irritating; but in these days of spam filters, hard to prove.
The
smiley: emoticon users were amongst the least irritating types
of emailer.
The
succinct: the least irritating type of emailer keeps it short and
to the point.
Email
cold turkey
The practical up shots of this research are nothing you
won't have heard before: check you email less, remember the costs of
task-switching, keep email succinct. Finally, remember it can be difficult to
maintain relationships online because people feel psychologically distant from
one another, so make a call every now and then.
Because email isn't the all-powerful application it once
was, with the advent of texting, Facebook, Twitter and the rest, we tend to
forget both how useful email is and how dangerous it can be. I've avoided
overblown talk of addiction, but given this research there's certainly a case
for going email cold turkey every now and then.
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