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

Curated by Paul Helmick

I’m a Technology CEO and Experienced Entrepreneur. I love helping people use technology to grow their business.

  • A new study finds that people tend to overestimate the power of their persuasiveness via text-based communication, and underestimate the power of their persuasiveness via face-to-face communication
  • Participants who made requests over email felt just as confident about the effectiveness of their requests as those who made their requests face-to-face
  • But the face-to-face requests were 34 times more effective than the emailed ones
  • Here is the full research from published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
  • If your office runs on email and text-based communication, it’s worth considering whether you could be a more effective communicator by having conversations in person
  • It is often more convenient and comfortable to use text-based communication than to approach someone in-person, but if you overestimate the effectiveness of such media, you may regularly—and unknowingly—choose inferior means of influence.