Uh Oh!

James Roche and Robin Cleveland are old friends. Before Roche was sworn in as Air Force secretary in 2001, and Cleveland took over national security issues at the Office of Management and Budget the same year, they'd worked together and had nurtured a professional friendship for nearly a quarter-century.

But for more than a year, Roche and Cleveland were on opposing sides of a plan to lease fuel tanker aircraft from the Boeing Co. Roche consistently met with opposition from OMB, which objected to the lease's high price tag. The feud was well-known, but that didn't stop Roche and Cleveland from continuing a warm correspondence.

On May 9, 2003, Cleveland sent Roche an e-mail, asking the Air Force secretary to endorse her brother, Peter, for a job with military contractor Northrop Grumman, Roche's former employer. Cleveland noted her brother's pertinent job history and qualifications. Roche, in turn, contacted Northrop, which is the third-largest Air Force contractor. (Boeing is second.)

Roche replied to Cleveland's e-mail, acknowledging he'd done as she'd asked. It was, by all appearances, a friendly favor, which is why what Roche wrote next was so surprising: "Be well. Smile. Give me tankers." Roche immediately softened the statement, writing, "Oops, did I say that?" But two days later, on May 11, Cleveland wrote to her brother that she hoped he found out whether he got the job "before the tanker leasing issue gets fouled up." He ultimately was turned down.

The content of the e-mails was uncovered by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which is investigating whether senior Air Force officials exerted undue influence over the tanker negotiations. The existence and text of the messages were first reported by Congress Daily, a publication owned by National Journal Group, which owns this magazine.

After Roche's remark, "a shift in OMB's position on the tanker lease became apparent," according to Congress Daily. Whether Cleveland took Roche's demand for tankers as a quid pro quo for helping her brother isn't clear. Cleveland hasn't explained the e-mail exchange, and Roche, who will resign this month, declined a request for an interview. But six days after Roche's reply, he, Cleveland and then-Defense Department acquisition chief Pete Aldridge met with two top Boeing executives, according to Congress Daily. One week later, a Boeing executive wrote in an e-mail that "OMB and Robin are on board."

Were the Roche-Cleveland e-mails merely innocent banter, "a lighthearted exchange among friends" as Roche's spokesman called them? It hardly seems to matter. Roche and Cleveland were public officials capable of influencing a lucrative contract. The first rule of avoiding a conflict of interest is to avoid even the appearance of one.

Government ethics officials found the e-mails broke no laws. But the exchange raises an important question. Regardless of any quid pro quo, why would two seasoned, ostensibly savvy government professionals think it was OK to conduct such an explosive dialogue in a permanent, electronic record? Roche was a former Navy captain and a veteran Capitol Hill staffer. Cleveland, too, was an old Washington hand. Did they lose all common sense? Did they think their correspondence would stay private? Does their behavior expose some personal failing?

What if Roche and Cleveland don't share all the blame for what they wrote? What if e-mail itself made them write it?

Writing to Yourself

That idea would seem preposterous if the Roche-Cleveland exchange were an isolated incident. But it's not. Contemporary lore is full of e-mail authors who are guilty, if not of coercion, then of bad judgment.

All e-mail users know classic horror stories: the employee who sent an off-color joke to everyone in the office, or the one who hit "reply to all" and shared her opinions not with the message's sender, but the unwitting audience at large.

Consider a string of damning messages revealed in the past three months. In October, staffers in the office of Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine engaged in apparent political activity over e-mail during work hours, a potential ethics infraction. Discussing how to assist an Auburn, Maine, furniture company that feared a customer boycott after it purchased advertising time from Sinclair Broadcasting Group-the company that aired a highly critical documentary of presidential candidate John F. Kerry-one staffer suggested "an op-ed piece written by a 'friend' that exposes the injustice of these attacks on a local family-owned business." To this, another Collins staffer replied, "You are some smooooth!" and copied the message to an employee of George W. Bush's reelection campaign.

Also in October, an e-mail meant for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida was intercepted by a journalist. It discussed "caging" of voters and included a list of more than 1,800 voters in predominately black or Democratic neighborhoods whose qualifications elections officials speculated would be challenged at the polls.

About a month later, there was a scathing set of correspondence be-tween prominent Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff and public relations consultant Michael Scanlon, who, according to Senate investigators, implicated themselves via e-mail in a conspiracy to bilk American Indian tribes out of millions of dollars in fees for lobbying and PR services. Abramoff, formerly employed by Greenberg Taurig, a lobbying firm in Washington, and Scanlon, former spokesman for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, left little doubt of their intention to fleece members of one tribe, whom they called "moronic" and "troglodytes," with a fake effort to help reopen a casino on their land. "I want all their money," Scanlon wrote to Abramoff.

What were all these people thinking? That's the question that most interests John Suler, a professor of psychology at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N. J. For several years, Suler has studied the psychology of cyberspace, and he has an idea about why we write things in e-mail that we never would say to someone face-to-face. Suler calls it the "online disinhibition effect." It's the belief you have, when writing an e-mail, or posting a message to a Web bulletin board, that your identity is partially hidden, so you won't be held accountable. In the online world, the attributes that identify you in real life-your image, your voice, your mannerisms, your physical location-usually are missing or aren't described. Instead, online you are practically anonymous, little more than an e-mail address or a screen name.

"This unlocks people to say things they normally wouldn't," Suler says. After all, it's harder to feel accountable to an e-mail address than it is to a face. A face can register disapproval, offense, disagreement, any of which might inhibit you from saying what's really on your mind.

E-mail exchanges also aren't true conversations. They're asynchronous, meaning they don't occur in real time. You can write an offensive or incendiary e-mail and then walk away. You don't have to hang around for the response so there are no immediate consequences for your actions. Suler describes asynchronous dialogue as the equivalent of an emotional hit-and-run.

"You lose the sense of other people being out there," Suler says. As a result, cyberspace is full of scribes unchecked by normal social boundaries who feel anonymous and alone. When you're writing an e-mail, Suler says, "you're thinking or talking to yourself. And you'll say anything to yourself."

'Schmooze or Lose'

Suler isn't the only one who thinks there's something dangerous about e-mail. A young but growing body of psychological research suggests that e-mail reduces people's ability to build rapport and to prevent potentially damaging misunderstandings.

In perhaps the most thorough examination of this phenomenon, a team of psychologists paired law students from Northwestern and Duke universities, in Chicago and Durham, N.C., respectively. The students were instructed to use e-mail to negotiate the purchase of a car. They'd have to settle on the specifics, including how much to pay, without ever meeting each other. But secretly, researchers told half the students to have a friendly chat on the phone before e-mailing to break the ice, or as the researchers put it, to schmooze.

The students who chatted first didn't just find the negotiations easier. They felt better about the process and the outcome. The schmoozers were more than four times likelier to agree on the terms of the car purchase than those who used e-mail alone. They also negotiated deals that were more economically advantageous for both sides. And they were less likely to feel aggrieved or shortchanged in the deal-making.

The researchers concluded that the schmoozing students trusted each other more, a finding that goes to the heart of a communications dilemma felt particularly by modern managers. "E-mail communication is rapidly growing as a medium for negotiations . . . yet the pros and cons of e-mail negotiation are not well understood," they wrote in a paper titled "Schmooze or Lose," documenting the experiment.

E-mail has a number of inherent advantages, they concluded. It's very useful for transmitting complex offers, or detailed plans and proposals. One side can make its case without being interrupted by the other, because e-mail is asynchronous.

But e-mail impedes personalized conversation and contextualization so the rapport and trust necessary for successful negotiations is missing. Something as simple as a telephone conversation can make people feel they know each other a little better. It creates "social lubrication," the researchers wrote, which prevents the interpersonal friction that threatens not only e-mail exchanges, but any negotiation.

Avoiding this friction may be the most important task facing e-mailers today. "Statements made in e-mails often come across more harshly than intended, because they are not accompanied by extra linguistic cues to their meaning, such as facial expression, gestures and a shared context with the author of the statement," the researchers noted. E-mails are read quickly, which increases the chances that a key word might be overlooked. The interpretation of an e-mail also is highly susceptible to the reader's mood, more so than the sender's intention. And because e-mail seems anonymous, it lets writers abandon conventional rules of courtesy and decorum.

As a result of all this friction, e-mail is highly "flammable," the researchers say. E-mail exacerbates the friction inherent in negotiations as each side jockeys for position, or uses tactics to get its way. One negotiator might concede on some points, expecting to win ground on another. He might speak in vague terms in order to needle his opponent, or to make it difficult to be pinned down. This is basic strategy, "but over e-mail, [one side] cannot monitor whether the opponent reads this as a direct way of bringing closure to the talks, or as an attempt at manipulative bullying," the researchers wrote. "In short, the friction of negotiation can easily ignite into flames."

The researchers indicate that these flames could be especially damaging for groups required to share information or engage in cooperative agreements. Considering the number of federal agencies that must now share-electronically-information related to terrorism and other subjects, or that have to negotiate policy issues or internal agreements, it's easy to imagine how the heat of e-mail could spark a conflagration.

Once Burned, Twice Shy

Given e-mail's inherent shortcomings-its asynchronicity, its disinhibiting effects, its lack of verbal and facial cues-and messages' uncanny habit of coming back to haunt their authors, why don't people simply pick up the phone? As recently as two years ago, studies showed that e-mail was the most popular form of work-related communication.

Perhaps, despite the menacing flames of e-mail, not enough people have been burned to have learned a lesson. E-mail is a relatively new workplace tool compared with the telephone or the interoffice memo. "The etiquette of e-mail is just developing," says Anne Kelly, director of the Federal Consulting Group, a federal organization that coaches senior officials on management techniques.

Today, Kelly says, executives who have had e-mail mishaps are censoring themselves, saying as little as possible so nothing can be held against them later. Consequently, their communications are muddier. "They're more careful or cryptic in their messages, instead of just spelling something out very boldly. . . . They write back a two-word response to something."

And now, following the Roche-Cleveland controversy, there's been a similar chilling effect in the Pentagon, says Col. James DeFrank, the Air Force's deputy chief of public affairs. DeFrank says he sees people using e-mail less lately, and this is having a negative impact on the Air Force's business. E-mail is, after all, a great tool for disseminating massive amounts of information quickly. And when people don't use e-mail, DeFrank says, the pace of work slows.

No one doubts, though, that e-mail will continue creeping into more facets of the workplace, and as it does, it has the potential to change traditional notions of culture and organization. Kelly fears that the sense of authority that holds agencies together, even nominally, will be eroded as more people rely on e-mail to speak their minds.

"E-mail has permitted people to write to people any time, anywhere and even to forget the chain of command," Kelly says. "The Internet permits you, as a GS-3, to send something to the secretary of the Treasury. It's kind of bizarre."

Bizarre, maybe. But given e-mail's power to make a GS-3 think it's a good idea to fire off a note to the Treasury secretary, it shouldn't surprise anyone when it happens. And when it does, watch out.