You just got assigned a new project at work and you need to wrangle some help from the rest of your team. While it may be tempting to send out a mass email asking for volunteers, new research suggests you’re much more likely to enlist help by actually asking people face-to-face.

Across two experiments, psychological scientists M. Mahdi Roghanizada (University of Waterloo) and Vanessa Bohns (Cornell University) found that people tend to overestimate the persuasiveness of requests sent over email, while also underestimating the effectiveness of requests made in person.

“Overall, we find people are less influential than they think over email,” Roghanizada and Bohns write.

Across several previous studies, Bohns has found that people consistently underestimate – by a large margin – their powers of persuasion. …show more content…
In the first experiment, 45 college students were each assigned to ask 10 strangers to fill out a short personality survey. Half of the requesters were assigned to a face-to-face condition, approaching 10 unknown students on a college campus, while the other requesters sent emails to strangers chosen out of the university’s directory. In both conditions, requesters used the same script to make the request. Before they got started, requesters were asked how many people they thought they could get to fill out the survey.

The results confirmed the researchers’ hypothesis: Those in the face-to-face condition underestimated their persuasive powers while those in the email condition overestimated their success rate. Both groups of requesters thought they could get around 5 people out of 10 to take the survey. While email requesters convinced around 10% of people to comply with their request, face-to-face requests from a total stranger resulted in around a 70% success