The best way to ask someone on a date
It seems Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were onto something in their 1998 rom-com You’ve Got Mail.
Sending an email is more romantic than calling when asking someone on a date, according to a study from Indiana University.
The findings, published in the journal Computers in Human Behaviour, probably comes as no surprise considering just how technologically-reliant society has become.
“Email’s been in the popular consciousness since the 1990s and if you look at the new generation of millennials … they’ve grown up with email and text messaging, so it may not be as unnatural a medium as we at first thought,” co-author Alan Dennis told Phys.org.
Conventional wisdom has it that emails or texting are poor forms of communicating emotion, that a call is a more intimate way to connect, but this new research suggests otherwise.
"When writing romantic emails, senders consciously or subconsciously added more positive content to their messages, perhaps to compensate for the medium's inability to convey vocal tone," the researchers wrote in their paper
Researchers found when writing emails, people took more time to choose their words to ensure that it conveyed what they wanted it too.
"The bottom line is that email is much better when you want to convey some information that you want someone to think about,” Dennis said.
Dennis added their findings run counter to the commonly held belief that the further we get from face-to-face communication, the less genuine and effective it becomes.
"There's a lot of theory that says email and other text communications don't really work very well," he said. "We should probably go back and reconsider a lot of the stereotypical assumptions that we hold about email and text messaging that may not hold true when we take a deeper look at how people react physiologically."
While their research finds email may be the best choice to convey feelings, Dennis says there is clearly still a place for face-to-face meetings, phone calls, and other forms of direct communication.
“If something isn’t really clear and you want to make sure that everyone has the same understanding of what something means, that’s best done in phone calls, face-to-face meetings or video conferencing,” he said.
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