Windows Phone Thoughts: The Psychology of Email

"No new messages. Why is it taking so long? Did they receive it? Did it get put in the junk mail folder? How long should you wait before emailing again? You don’t want to seem desperate…Waiting for an email reply seems to be a common occurance in this day and age of email reliance. We look for contextual clues to why a response may be taking longer than usual, and decide when we should follow up the email. A paper by Tyler & Tang looks at the the email-replying habits of a group of corporate users in this 2003 paper."

Since we all do email to one degree or another, I thought this article was worth posting on. Some of the findings include that most users surveyed claimed their checked their email "constantly", people would leave a voice-mail message to bring attention to their email, and users would reciprocate email behaviours - taking longer to write back to people that took longer to reply back, and responding quickly to email from people that were known to respond quicker to their email. Mind games and human communication always seem to go together. ;-) You can dig into the paper itself for a deeper look. I noticed that the surveys were done in 2003 - email and always-on connectivity has only increased in the past three years, so I wonder if any of the responses would be different today?