Ask in Person: You're Less Persuasive Than You Think over Email

The question

People are known to underestimate how often a stranger will say yes. Does that hold when the asking happens over email?

The method

“In two studies, participants asked strangers to comply with requests either face-to-face or over email. Before making these requests, requesters estimated the number of people they expected to say ‘yes’” [1]. Study 1 put 45 requesters in front of 450 targets [2]; each requester asked ten strangers to fill in a personality questionnaire, in person on campus or by email to a directory address.

The findings

The predicted effect reversed depending on the medium: “while requesters underestimated compliance in face-to-face contexts, replicating previous research, they overestimated compliance in email contexts” [1].

The size of the gap is the reason to remember the paper. “Targets asked to complete a questionnaire face-to-face were 34 times more likely to comply than those asked over email” [3]. Face-to-face, requesters predicted 5.08 out of ten and got 7.15 [3]. And they were blind to it: “requesters’ predictions of compliance did not differ between the conditions” [3]. A thirty-four-fold difference in outcome, and no difference at all in expectation.

The authors’ explanation is a perspective failure rather than a persuasion failure. “Requesters, anchored on their own perspectives, fail to appreciate the suspicion, and resulting lack of empathy, with which targets view email requests from strangers” [1]. You know you are a real person with a reasonable request; the recipient sees an email from a stranger.

The limits

The favour asked was small and standardised — a questionnaire — and the requesters were students approaching other students on a campus, where a face-to-face ask is easy to make. The relevant comparison for a working manager is usually a warm introduction versus an email, not a cold approach in a corridor. The direction of the effect travels; the multiplier should not be treated as a general constant.

• You are lining up Calibration Calls and doing it entirely by email. Without this paper, a low reply rate reads as people being too busy. This says a large part of it is the medium, and that your sense of how the email is landing is not evidence.
• You are choosing between sending the questions and asking for the call. Send an email to get onto a call; do not send an email that is the call. The paper is one of two reasons on this page for that rule — the other is that a written answer skips the follow-up question.
• You have a warm introduction available and are not using it because it feels like an imposition. The paper’s mechanism says the imposition is mostly in your head, and the alternative is the channel where the ask is least likely to work.