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.
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.
In the January 2005 issue of Government Executive, Shane Harris looks at the phenomenon of smart managers who make dumb mistakes with e-mail. Read the full story here.