by Steve Priest, president of Ethical Leadership Group, a Global Compliance company

People who wouldn’t dream of stealing a CD from Best Buy have no problem downloading music illegally or making unauthorized copies.

And now a small study conducted by researchers from Rutgers and DePaul finds that people lie when they are interacting with those they don’t know on email. Maybe that’s like finding greed on Wall Street or ego in Hollywood. But the percentage is pretty astounding: 92% lie!

You can find further information in this New York Times article. But essentially, graduate students were given a fictional $89, and told they could divide it with another student. They had to communicate the amount they were dividing with the other student. Those communicating via e-mail lied more frequently and to a greater extent than those using pen and paper.

As cited in the Times: “E-mail communication decreases the amount of trust and cooperation we see in professional group work, and increases the negativity in performance evaluations,” said co-author Terri Kurtzberg of Rutgers. “People seem to feel more justified in acting in self-serving ways when typing as opposed to writing.”
Let’s leave it to the social psychologists to unpack the reasons for this. But what does it mean for our corporate cultures? And what does it mean for many of the main tools of ethics and compliance programs these days: online Codes of Conduct with online certifications; online training with online assessments; and online surveys?

I’m not lying to you—these findings trouble me. Of course, since this is an electronic communication, am I telling the truth?

What are your thoughts?