Communicating Persuasively: Email or Face-to-Face?
Our intuitive understanding is that face-to-face communication is the most persuasive. In reality, of course, it's not always possible to meet in person, so email wins out. How, then, do people react to persuasion attempts over email? Persuasion research has uncovered fascinating effects: that men seem more responsive to email because it bypasses their competitive tendencies (Guadagno & Cialdini, 2002). Women, however, may respond better in face-to-face encounters because they are more 'relationship-minded'. But is this finding just a gender stereotype?
Gender stereotypes
Guadagno and Cialdini explain their results in terms of expectations about social roles. Cultural stereotypes have it that men are task-oriented whereas women are relationship-oriented. So, when put in a situation where relationships were important i.e. face-to-face, women tend to follow the cultural stereotype. Similarly, as men are often viewed as more competitive, when they face each other they tend to be more competitive and so less open to persuasion.
Practically, what this research is suggesting is that email could provide a way of side-stepping men's competitive tendencies. But, this research doesn't consider the effects of pre-existing relationships. After all, we react differently to friends than strangers.
In an upcoming article, however, to be published in the journal 'Computers and Human Behaviour', Guadagno and Cialdini (2007) examine the effect of relationships. The problem for researchers is how to manipulate people's relationships experimentally to effectively test the differences. Guadagno and Cialdini use the concept of 'oneness'.
Oneness
Oneness refers to the idea of an interconnected identity. The closer two people feel, the more helping the other person is like helping themselves. So oneness can promote altruistic behaviour. Oneness can also be seen in terms of the classic in-group out-group dichotomy in social psychology. People show a positive bias towards other people who are in the same notional group as themselves: e.g. work colleagues.
Oneness was very simply manipulated in Guadagno and Cialdini's study by encouraging strangers to view each other in one of two ways. In the first manipulation two strangers were shown fictional results of a questionnaire they had completed which showed they had identical personalities. In the second, the fictional results showed they had completely different personalities. In this way, the first groups 'oneness' was encouraged, while in the second it was discouraged.
Then, as had been done in the previous study, participants attempted to persuade each other.
Results
The researchers found that when there were low levels of oneness between men, email was a more effective way to communicate. Conversely, for women, higher levels of oneness made face-to-face encounters significantly more persuasive.
How can these results be explained? Women may not generally be easily persuaded over email because there is less opportunity to form relationships from which attitude changes can be built. Men, however, tend to be less competitive over email and are better able to concentrate on arguments presented, rather than being distracted by seeing the other man as a threat.
Male-female interaction
Bear in mind that this study is ironing out the spectrum of differences amongst both men and women. In other words, clearly not all women are always relationship-focussed and not all men are always task-focussed. It seems an obvious point but it's a mistake often made in mainstream media presentation of psychology research.
Additionally, one of the drawbacks of the study was that it only concentrated on same-sex communication. Although, I would suggest it's better not to think of this study in terms of men and women but in terms of individual relationships.
So, if you want to persuade someone with whom you have a competitive relationship - whatever your and their gender - email might be a better choice. On the other hand, if your persuasion attempt is aimed at someone with whom you have a more cooperative relationship, face-to-face could be a better choice. Unfortunately, it isn't always possible to see someone face-to-face, so it's very useful to be aware of the processes operating in both face-to-face and online interactions.
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I am a slashdot cow. moo moo
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I was actually considering the problem of research claiming that certain traits were either femanine or masculine two days ago. The conclusion I came to in my own mind was that regardless the percentage of the population that may exhibit any particular trait it is always best to work through a process of discovery when dealing with any person. You should never assume that just because you are interacting with a male or female that they will respond in a particular way.
Welcome to people from Slashdot!
For the rest of you, have a look at the discussion developing on Slashdot.
Robert, I couldn't agree more!
Phone calls are commonly a substitute for both email and in-person meetings. So many would find such persuasiveness trends more useful if the study had compared email with phone contact, and phone with in-person contact. Then for more subtlety, compare these with instant messaging and video conferencing.
Good suggestion Brendan, I'll have a look around for a future post...
For more information on gender-associated communications styles, please read Deborah Tannen's "You Just Don't Understand", and "Talking 9 to 5".
Brendan has a good point and the study he suggests is a study my lab currently has in the pipelines. One thing to remember when looking at the psycological research is that our results represent how a group of individuals on average responded so these results do not mean that every woman you meet is less resistant to persuasion via email.
As a long time consultant, your oneness sounds an awful lot like trust, to me. Trust is THE key to business relationships, as it is with personal relationships, and many of the visual & aural cues we get from face to face meetings feed into trust. In my experience, emails can be misread much more easily than body language, so face to face usually works better.
I have Asperger's Syndrome, an extreme male personality. I have always found it easier to discuss issues via email; a few years ago I had to settle an interpersonal conflict between a friend and myself. I chose to use email, as I am better at expressing what I have to say in email. I emailed my friend, despite the fact that we shared an office and sat 10 feet away from each other. This is not gender stereotyping, but the expression of innate subtle neurological variation between men and women. Married Men with Asperger’s are recommended to express emotions and feelings in writing, many are more eloquent in this medium.
Rosanna, let me know when you have some results, there's clearly a lot of interest in this subject.
Randy, thanks, I'll have a look.
Dermot, yes, I'm sure oneness and trust have a lot in common.
David, really interesting, thanks for your comment.
Will do Jeremy.
I enjoyed reading your post here on the blog and the slashdot thread (which I did not post on but have been reading).
I think it is interesting to read the wide variety of responses people have to experimental psychology research and was happy to see that my work stimulated such interest.
I think a lot of people assume that gender researchers believe that men and women are from different planets (to poke fun at pop psychology...). But when you look at the overall picture, men and women are more alike than different in terms of our reactions to social phenomena (much like Robert says above). Unfortunately, when it comes to technology, this is one of the areas where exeriments tend to find these differences in large part because, on average, women tend to be more sensitive to non-verbal cues.
Anyways I could go on and on about this topic and I've dedicated a substanital portion of my career to studying it but I will stop :) Just wanted to pop in, say hi and thanks!
PS. in my above comment, I meant more resistant, not less.
Rosanna, picking up your point about the wide variety of responses - I know what you mean. Reading through the thread on Slashdot there's quite a range. Everything from derision to some really strong observations. I know the guys who write the Freakonomics blog often mention the intelligence of crowds and how the comments are sometimes better than the posts.
Here at PsyBlog I'm often impressed with the quality of the comments. And that's not really because I'm heavily moderating - I publish pretty much everything people post that isn't blatant advertising or completely off-topic. The vast majority of what people say is really interesting.
But one of the best things is when the actual authors of studies pop up from behind the parapets! So, thanks and good luck with the future research!
Why does everybody insist that men and women have to be exactly alike in terms of the way they think.
Read the works of Debra Tannen PhD. There is evidence that men and women think differently.
Treating men and women differently is no different that treating apples and oranges differently.
There are reasons why women value connection somewhat more than they value status. Similarly, there are reasons why men value status somewhat more than they value connection.
A little update about the "upcoming article ... published in the journal 'Computers and Human Behaviour', Guadagno and Cialdini (2007)": the journal name is "Computers in Human Behavior" and the article title is "Persuade him by email, but see her in person: Online persuasion revisited".