Does the medium in which people communication on have an effect on their willingness to be deceptive? Research suggests that it does.
In a study that included three separate experiments, Charles E. Naquin, Terri R. Kurtzburg, and Liuba Y. Belkin found that people are more willing to lie when communicating via email than when communicating via a pen and paper.
The study was published by the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2010.
In their first experiment, Naquin and his colleagues recruited 48 graduate-level business students. These students completed a modified version of the dictator ultimatum bargaining exercise, which was used to assess the participants’ willingness to lie.
In the dictator ultimatum bargaining exercise, a participant is asked to allocate a sum of money between him or herself and another participant. In actuality, no other participant exists. The one real participant, who is the “dictator,” is told to split up $89 between the two participants. In addition, the “dictator” is told that the other participant does not know the total amount of money being split up. The “dictator” is then asked to inform the other participant of the amount of money he or she received to split between themselves and how the money is going to be distributed between them.
The 48 participants in this first experiment were randomly assigned to either inform the other participant via email or inform the other participant via writing a physical letter.
After completing the dictator ultimatum bargaining exercise, the participants completed a questionnaire that assessed their sense of justification in deceiving others.
“In the email condition, 24 out of 26 participants (92.3%) misrepresented the pot size, whereas in the pen and paper condition, only 14 out of 22 participants (63.64%) misrepresented the pot size,” according to Naquin and his colleagues.
Those in the email condition also felt more justified in deceiving others than those in the pen and paper condition.
The second experiment was identical to the first, except that the participants completed the questionnaire before completing the dictator ultimatum bargaining exercise. This experiment consisted of an additional 56 graduate-level business students. It was conducted to insure that the higher sense of justification found in the email group in the first study was not the product of reflective rationalization. The second experiment had similar findings to the first.
In their third experiment, Naquin and his colleagues recruited 177 full-time managers. These managers completed the Federated Science Fund task.
In this task, the participants were split up into groups of three. In their groups, the participants were told that they all worked for the same company, but each participant worked for a different project. Each of these projects, furthermore, was eligible for extra funding. After discussing how to distribute the funds, the group was told that only one of the participants would be given the power to allocate funds.
Similar to the dictator ultimatum bargaining exercise, only the participant who had the power to allocate the funds was told what the total amount of available funds was. This participant was randomly assigned to either inform the other participants of the total amount of funds and how they were being distributed by using email or by writing a physical letter.
Unlike the dictator ultimatum bargaining exercise, the participants in this third experiment received $1 for every $1 million dollars allocated to their project. Also unlike the first two experiments, in the third experiment, the participants were told that the total amount of funds would be disclosed to every participant at the completion of the experiment.
“The fund size to be divided was reported as smaller by those in the email condition than by those in the pen and paper condition” and those in the email condition “took more of the funds for themselves,” even though they knew the total amount of available funds would eventually be revealed to the other participants.
“Combined, our results demonstrate that one’s perception of justification and subsequent unethical behavior can be influenced by the communication media used,” note Naquin and his colleagues.
But what is it about emails that would make people feel more justified in being deceptive?
“The impermanence of online written text can leave the the writer feeling less ownership of the words and diminished concern for the moral and ethical implications of what is written,” Naquin and his colleagues explain. “Thus, because people feel that this medium is less permanent overall than paper text, they may feel subconsciously less accountable for their harmful actions, such as being deceptive.”
“These findings also suggest that people need to be careful when selecting the appropriate mode of communication for a particular task.”
Although the results of the three experiments are interesting, Naquin and his colleagues note that they are limited due to the nature of their research.
“Deception itself is likely to be more complex, and more embedded in ongoing exchanges, than what we were able to capture here.”
Reference:
Naquin, C.E., Kurtzberg, T.R. & Belkin, L.Y. (2010). The finer points of lying online: e-mail versus pen and paper. Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 95, N0. 2: 387-394.