Liar Liar Your Email's On Fire

Link to Lehigh University news article, "Researcher: Workers more prone to lie in e-mail." (One of boing boing's RSS feeds today.)

Excerpt:
Workers are significantly more likely to lie in e-mail messages than in traditional pen-and-paper communications, according to two new studies co-authored by Lehigh’s Liuba Belkin.

More surprising is that people actually feel justified when lying using e-mail, the studies show.

“There is a growing concern in the workplace over e-mail communications, and it comes down to trust,” says Belkin, an assistant professor of management in the College of Business and Economics. “You’re not afforded the luxury of seeing non-verbal and behavioral cues over e-mail. And in an organizational context, that leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation and, as we saw in our study, intentional deception.”

The results of the studies are reported in the paper, "Being Honest Online: The Finer Points of Lying in Online Ultimatum Bargaining." Belkin and her co-authors—Terri Kurtzberg of Rutgers University and Charles Naquin of DePaul University—presented their findings at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management held in August.