SMS makes people more honest —US study

Here's an unexpected benefit of text messaging: it could make people more honest in answering sensitive questions, a new study has suggested.

 

The findings have even surprised researchers who worked on the project, according to a news release of the university.

 

"This is sort of surprising, since many people thought that texting would decrease the likelihood of disclosing sensitive information because it creates a persistent, visual record of questions and answers that others might see on your phone and in the cloud," said Fred Conrad, a cognitive psychologist and Director of the Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.

 

He said the preliminary results of the study suggest people "are more likely to disclose sensitive information via text messages than in voice interviews."

 

Conrad conducted the study with Michael Schober, a professor psychology and dean of the graduate faculty at the New School for Social Research.

 

Their team included cognitive psychologists, psycholinguists, survey methodologists and computer scientists from both universities, and collaborators from AT&T Research.

 

Funding the study was the National Science Foundation.

 

Conrad and Schober also found people are more likely to provide thoughtful and honest responses via text messages even when they are in busy, distracting environments.

 

"This is the case even though people are more likely to be multitasking – shopping or walking, for example – when they're answering questions by text than when they're being interviewed by voice," they said.

 

Also, the researchers found people were less likely to engage in "satisficing" when using text messaging.

 

Satisficing is a survey industry term referring to the practice of rounding off numbers such as to multiples of 10 in numerical responses.

 

"We believe people give more precise answers via texting because there's just not the time pressure in a largely asynchronous mode like text that there is in phone interviews," said Conrad.

 

Thus, he said respondents can take longer to arrive at more accurate answers.

 

The findings were to be presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

 

Early stages of analysis

 

For his part, Schober said they are in the early stages of analyzing their findings.

 

"But so far it seems that texting may reduce some respondents' tendency to shade the truth or to present themselves in the best possible light in an interview – even when they know it's a human interviewer they are communicating with via text," he said.

 

"What we cannot yet be sure of is who is most likely to be disclosive in text. Is it different for frequent texters, or generational, for example?" he added.

 

600 iPhone users included in study

 

In the study, the researchers recruited 600 iPhone users on Craigslist, Google Ads, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

 

The subjects were offered iTunes Store incentives to participate in the study.

 

The goals were to see whether responses to the same questions differed depending on variables such as:

 

 

Schober and Conrad said changes in communication patterns and their impact on the survey industry prompted the study.

 

About one in five US households only use cell phones and no longer have landline phones. These households are typically not surveyed even though cell-only households tend to differ in important ways from households with landline phones.

 

More people are using text messages on mobile phones, with texting now the preferred form of communication among many people in their teens and 20s in the U.S. 

Texting is extremely common among all age groups in many Asian and European nations.

 

More honest answers

 

Among the questions that respondents answered more honestly via text than speech were:

 

 

Among the questions that respondents answered more precisely via text, providing fewer rounded numerical responses were:

 

— TJD, GMA News