A Face-to-Face Request Is 34 Times More Successful than an Email

Research on help-seeking and help-giving conducted by Management Sciences alum Mahdi Roghanizad during his PhD studies was recently featured in the Harvard Business Review.

Dr. Roghanizad (now Assistant Professor at Huron University College at Western University) and his thesis supervisor Dr. Vanessa Bohns (now Assistant Professor at Cornell University) found that asking someone in person to complete a survey was significantly more effective than asking over e-mail. However, most people are likely to believe the text-based approach is more effective. One reason for this discrepancy is that the person sending the e-mail is inherently trusting of the e-mail, whereas the receiver may see an untrustworthy e-mail asking them to click on a suspicious link.

The findings were originally published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.