IF YOU really want to know something, don鈥檛 email your question to hordes of people. That鈥檚 the message from psychologists who鈥檝e found that the more people you copy an email to, the more each recipient is likely to ignore it.
Say you wanted to know the date of an upcoming concert. You could email everyone in your address book. However, Greg Barron of the Technion technology institute in Haifa, Israel, suspected that emailing individuals separately is more effective. 鈥淓ach one of these people might assume that another guy will probably help,鈥� he says.
To test this, Barron and his colleague Eldad Yechiam set up a Yahoo account for a fictitious student called Sarah Feldman, and wrote an email from her asking if the Technion has a biology faculty. They emailed it to 240 people at the Technion, mainly researchers, admin staff and students.
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Each person received it either with just their own address in the 鈥淭o鈥� box, or with four others. The team divided the replies into various categories. 鈥淗elpful鈥� responses said simply that yes, the Technion does have a biology faculty. 鈥淰ery helpful鈥� responses included extra information, such as useful phone numbers. But 鈥渦nhelpful responses鈥� included the brusque 鈥淔ind the Web page and look yourself!鈥� Some just tried chatting 鈥渉er鈥� up with some very personal questions.
While half the recipients failed to respond to the email if they saw four others were on the address list, this figure fell to 36 per cent for single recipients. And almost a third of the single recipients sent back very helpful responses, compared to just 16 per cent of the multiple recipients (Computers in Human Behavior, vol 18, p 507).
Barron says this has lessons for everyone. 鈥淚f you鈥檙e an advertiser trying to get hits on a website, or a secretary asking for a volunteer to bring a cake to Monday鈥檚 meeting, then using an automatic email sent to many people might not be the best way to go.鈥�
He likens the effect to bystanders at a crime scene, who feel less obliged to intervene if many others are present, and he plans more experiments to analyse it. 鈥淚n cyberspace, email addresses constitute virtual bystanders and there can be a diffusion of responsibility,鈥� he says.
