Something You Should Know - How to Get People to Help You & Our Love/Hate Relationship with Email

Episode Date: March 18, 2021

Everyone know that you should say “I love you” to your mate because it fosters intimacy and connection. It turns out there are 3 other words you should too because couples who say these words have stronger and closer relationships. What are those 3 words? Listen and find out. http://truetowords.blogspot.com/2010/02/i-me-us-we-little-words-big-impact.html Most of us are willing to help others if we can. It feels good to help someone in need. Yet many of us have trouble asking for help when we need it. And sometimes we don’t ask in a way that makes it likely the other person will help. Here with some advice is social psychologist Heidi Grant. author of the book, Reinforcements: How to Get People to Help You (https://amzn.to/2MRA4Ep). Heidi has explored the research and when you hear what she has to say, you will become better and more effective at asking for help when you need it.  It’s hard to imagine life without email. It has become such a central part of our lives and a primary means of communications. Email is also a colossal headache that causes stress and anxiety for many people. Joining me to explain where email came from and why it’s not going away anytime soon is Esther Milne. She is Associate Professor of Media and Communications at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia and author of the book, Email and the Everyday: Stories of Disclosure, Trust, and Digital Labor (https://amzn.to/3qCfRVO). If you use email, you will want to hear this fascinating discussion. How can your first name impact how long you live? Well, like so many things, there is study that says there is a connection. Listen to hear what it is and if you should consider changing your name so you live longer. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07481180903411885 PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Right now, when you purchase a 3-month Babbel subscription, you’ll get an additional 3 months for FREE. That’s 6 months, for the price of 3! Just go to https://babbel.com and use promo code: SOMETHING Truebill is the smartest way to manage your finances. The average person saves $720 per year with Truebill. Get started today at https://Truebill.com/SYSK Take control of your finances and start saving today! https://nuts.com is the simple and convenient way to have nutritious, delicious, healthy nuts, dried fruit, flours, grains and so many other high-quality foods delivered straight to your door! New Nuts.com customers get free shipping on your first order when you text SYSK to 64-000. So text SYSK to 64-000 to get free shipping on your first order from Nuts.com You’re one of a kind—and so are your taxes. Whether you want to file with the help of an expert or let an expert do the filing for you, TurboTax Live tax experts are here to help, giving you the confidence to know that you're one-of-a-kind, uniquely you taxes are done right. Intuit TurboTax Live. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations.

You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, three little words you should say to your mate more often. And they aren't, I love you. Although, those are good too. Then, how to get people to help you when you really need help.

When someone has said no to us for whatever reason, when we've asked for help before, that's the last person we're going to go to, right? We figure, well, they turned me down last time, they're definitely not going to help me this time. In fact, the opposite is true. The research is really clear on this. Plus, your first name may have something to do with how long you live. And email.

Sometimes you love it, sometimes you hate it. And some say email is dead. But it's not. Well, it's funny you should say the death of email. That is probably one of the most searched phrases in terms of email. In fact, people have been predicting its death almost from the beginning. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new

ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today.

Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

Hey, you're just in time. It's time for another episode of something you should know. I'm glad you're here. I'm glad I'm here because I really like doing this. And we start today with some important words in your vocabulary. Saying I love you to your mate is always a good idea. But there are three other little words that can help make your family and relationship stronger, according to research at the University of California at Berkeley. And those three little words are we, our, and us. Couples who refer to their problems, experiences, and even their children in a plural sense tend to be more loving and happier together than those who use words like I, me, and you. Using these together words conveys more of a team effort and helps both people in the relationship

feel as if they're facing challenges together. And that is something you should know. So here's a topic that, for some reason, I've always found fascinating. And the topic is helping people. So when someone asks you for help, and they ask in the right way, you probably try to help if you can. In fact, you might sometimes feel flattered that someone asked you for help. And after you help, you probably feel good that you were able to do so. And yet when you need help, you're probably reluctant to ask. You think the person will think less of you for asking.

It's weird. We like to help, but we're reluctant to ask for help. Heidi Grant is a social psychologist who's uncovered some fascinating information about how people helping people works. I think this will surprise you. Heidi is the author of a book called Reinforcements, How to Get People to Help You. Hi, Heidi, thanks for coming on the podcast. Oh, hi. Good to be here, Mike. So as I said, it's so interesting to me that we generally like to help others and feel good for doing so, and yet we're reluctant to ask for help for ourselves.

Absolutely. You nailed it right on the nose. And I think, you know, that for me is what was so interesting about the topic in general is that so many of our intuitions when it comes to asking for help are so misguided, even though we all are people who ourselves are helpers. So we know how it feels to be a helper, and yet somehow when we're on the other end of it and we're the ones asking for help, we forget all of that. So there's probably like two, I think two main obstacles to asking for help that people

feel. One is, you know, that feeling of people will think less of me, perhaps like me less if I ask for help. The research on this is really clear. It's actually the opposite is the case that people like you more when they've helped you, not less. So It's actually the opposite is the case, that people like you more when they've helped you, not less. So it's actually something that strengthens relationships. It's something that actually makes people hold you in higher regard, not in lower regard. So that's one. And I think then the other piece that's really important is that we all think that there's a really good chance or a much greater chance that we will be rejected, right, that people will say no, than is actually the case. What the research shows is that we tend

to underestimate the odds of getting help when we ask for it by more than half. So, you know, we're more than twice as likely to get help and have someone yes, than we think. And a lot of that comes from just, again, like a total failure of perspective taking. When we think about asking for help and we're calculating those odds mentally that someone will help us, we only think about sort of how difficult or onerous or unpleasant the thing is that we're asking someone to do, and we don't think about what it's like on the helper side. And first and foremost, it's very uncomfortable to say no when someone asks you for help, right? So people feel guilty saying no. They feel like they're putting the relationship at risk if they say no. So they're very motivated to say yes. But also also helping feels great. Helping is actually one of the most

reliable predictors of well-being, of self-esteem, of positive mood. When you give someone the chance to help you, you're actually giving them an opportunity to feel great about themselves. It's a genuine win-win. And we just, we forget all of that somehow when we're in the position to ask for help and we focus only on the negative. and that's what really kind of stands in the way. Yeah, I've read a lot about the benefits of helping, you know, the helper's high and the fact that when you ask someone to help you, you're actually giving them an opportunity to feel good. You are. And, you know, one of the other things I think that's so interesting when you look at the research is that, you know, who's the last person you're going to go to for help? Probably the person who has turned

you down in the past, right? And again, you know, and that's intuitively true and the research, you know, bears that out that when someone has said no to us for whatever reason, when we've asked for help before, that's the last person we're going to go to, right? We figure, well, they turned me down last time. They're definitely not going to help me this time. Again, in fact, the opposite is true. The research is really clear on this. People who have turned you down are actually much more likely to help you in the future, and that's because they want to actually repair the damage that was done.

So, you know, if I had to say no to you in the past because I was too busy or I just couldn't do the thing that you were asking me to do, and you give me another chance to help you in the future, I'm really motivated to do that. I want to feel better. I might feel guilty about the fact that I said no. It gives me a boost of relieving that guilt, and it gives me an opportunity to repair a relationship that may have been damaged. And I have found this personally to be true using this, that people that may have turned me down for something in the past, when I go back to them, they often sort of jump at the chance to make up for that.

So it's really true. It's incredibly powerful. It's something that we do, helping people is something we sometimes choose to do, not even fully consciously, in order to alleviate bad moods, in order to give ourselves a boost. And there's great data that shows that, you know, there's that adage, you know, does money buy happiness? Well, the answer seems to be, it depends on how you spend it. And there's great research showing that, you know, sort of above kind of putting a roof over your head and food on the table and all the sort of basic necessities of life,

how we spend that discretionary money that we have. If you spend it on yourself, if you spend it on gifts for yourself and things that you want, that doesn't actually seem to predict happiness at all. But if you spend it on other people, if you spend it on gifts and charity, the amount you spend is directly related to how happy people say they are. So really, you know, being a helper is great. And giving people the opportunity to help you

and to mend fences and to repair relationships and to experience that is really one of the nicer things you can do. And that's one of the things I, you know, I really want to kind of unleash onto the world all of these people who can create these opportunities for each other, both to get the support they need and to also have that great experience of helping others. Yeah, the nuance of all of this are things like who you ask, how you ask, all of that makes a big difference in the outcome.

So talk about that. So there's a couple of things that are really important. First is that there's some things that we do that keep us from getting the help we need. So let's start with that. One of the things we do is, again, you know, we all know what it's like to feel uncomfortable asking for help. And because of that, we have a tendency to actually not want to ask explicitly. We want people to just offer to help us, right? To spare us the discomfort of having to ask. And we often feel like they should be offering because our needs are obvious. And nothing could be further from the truth.

So this is something psychologists call the illusion of transparency. We all feel that our thoughts and feelings and our needs are very obvious to other people. It's not true. In fact, most of us actually fail to notice that other people need help on a daily basis, right? Because we don't pay attention to everything. We all mostly pay attention to our own things, right, our own goals, our own demands on our time. And so it's very, very easy to miss the signal that somebody else actually could use your help.

So we need to be asking explicitly for help because we cannot just assume that people are going to notice our need. And the other part of it that goes with that is that even if someone knows that you need help, they may not know you want help. And that's really an important distinction because we've all been in that position where you offer someone help that they didn't actually want, and you see how testy people get about that, because they often feel like it's a kind of an insult, right? Like, oh, you think I can't do this myself, which is, of course, not what it meant, but it's how it sometimes comes across.

So people are often reluctant to offer help, even when they see you need it, if they're not sure whether or not you want it. And that's why really the only remedy to this is to actually be asking and to be asking explicitly for help and to be making sure you're asking just one person. One of the mistakes I see people make all the time

is that they'll send out an email to like 10 people or 15 people hoping that one of them will be able to help with something and say, hey, could anybody help me with this thing? You know, you send an email to 10 friends and you say, could any of you help me move this weekend? And like nobody answers. And that's a phenomenon psychologists call a diffusion of responsibility. Basically, the more people who can help you with something, the less likely anyone is to actually do it. They kind of assume one of the other people on the email is going to help you. And so they don't actually take action themselves.

So you want your request for help to be explicit, and you want them to be personal. And then the last thing I'll say about that is another very, very common mistake. We send email requests for help to people that we could ask for that help from in person or on the phone. And, you know, sometimes, yes, you have to use email. That's the only way to communicate with someone. But a lot of times we could just walk down the hall, like if it's a colleague. You know, you could just walk down the hall and ask them. But we choose to do it by email because it's more comfortable for us, right?

We don't have to face them when we're asking for the help. But you know who else it's more comfortable for? It's more comfortable for the person on the receiving end to say no via email. Right. So there was a recent study that showed that requests for help that are done in person are 34 times more successful than requests over email. Basically, you have to send 200 email requests to get the same hit rate of success as six in-person requests. Whoa. Yeah, it's huge. So it's one of those things where, again, that little bit of discomfort you might feel picking up the phone or walking down the hall and asking someone in person is so worth it because the success rates for getting support

go up so dramatically when you have these face-to-face live interactions. My guest today is Heidi Grant. She is a social psychologist and her book is Reinforcements, How to Get People to Help You. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot.

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Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years.

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The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Heidi, one thing I've noticed, and the homeless is a good example of this, where I live in the Los Angeles area, we have a big homeless problem. And I know that as a giver, I feel better giving money to a guy who's just sitting there minding his own business and looks like he could use a meal and I'll give him five or ten dollars and say, you know, go get yourself something to eat. And typically he'll be extremely grateful because it more or less came out of the blue, as opposed to the guy who's got the sign and he's holding it up to my car and saying, please give me something. And when I give him something, maybe he says, thank you. Maybe he doesn't, but he's quickly moved on to the next car, hoping they'll give him something.

You know, you're bringing up, I think, a really important point that happens all the time in everyday interactions when people are asking for help, which is that often we sort of ruin it for the helper. One of the common ways you see this is actually people over-apologizing when they ask for help. So, you know, they say things like, oh, I can't believe I have to ask for this. I feel so terrible. You must think the worst of me that I need to ask you for this. All you're really doing is creating this palpable discomfort in the situation

that's actually spoiling it for the helper. They no longer get to feel good about this because you so obviously don't want to have to ask for help that it kind of ruins the experience for them. So when we make the situation very uncomfortable, when we're very aggressive, you'll see this also sometimes people will say, oh, if you do this for me, then I'll do this other thing for you, right? If you help me with this project, then I'll take you to lunch tomorrow. Now you've reduced it to kind of an exchange where it's sort of like, well, you know, apparently I'm not helping you because I'm a good person. I'm helping you because I'm getting lunch out of it, which doesn't, again, make me feel good about myself. So you're kind of ruining it for me in that way.

Anything that makes the person feel manipulated, right, so that, you know, that they feel like they have to help, you pin them in a corner, you made it too awkward for them to say no, that feeling of being controlled, like I feel like I have to help almost in this situation because you're not really giving me an out if I want one, that also ruins, again, that person may help you, but they're not going to feel good about helping you. They're not going to give you their best quality help, and they're probably not going to want to help you again. Here's my best worst helper story. Years and years ago when I was very young, I was still in school, high school, I think. I was in New York City, and I was walking through Times Square, and the Hare Krishnas came up to me and put a flower in my lapel and, you know, put their hand out.

And I thought, oh, sure, here's a dollar. And I felt great, because here I'm helping the Hare Krishnas. And they said, oh, thanks, but that's not enough to keep the flower. And they took it out of my lapel and walked away. Oh, wow. That is not a – see, this is how you get a reputation for not being somebody that people want to help. I mean, you know, there's a – so that's, again, just entirely a lack of gratitude, which is, gratitude is important. You know, it's not, and it's important to understand, again, bringing up something really critical, which is that gratitude isn't just about sort of, you know, someone's ego, right? It's not about that. It's actually fundamentally about the fact that we all want to feel effective as helpers.

We all want to feel like we made a difference. And because that's really, really important. When people feel like the help they've given didn't really land or that when you ask them for help, they're not sure really what kind of impact their help will have, it is really demotivating. Part of the function of gratitude is to give people that sense of, you know what, the help you gave really mattered. It had an impact.

And here's the impact that it had. And that's really when people feel that warm glow. And that's, again, what motivates future helping is that feeling of effectiveness. And, of course, when somebody then snaps the flower back, they've completely left you feeling like you were an ineffective helper. And that's going to be really demotivating going forward. What are some of the other mistakes people make or things that people don't really understand about helping? A really common mistake, and for some reason this comes up in my life a lot, is the very vague request for help. And those are incredibly off-putting.

The one I get, because I write books and people may read, or in articles and things like that, and people might read, and I imagine this might happen to you too, people read or are familiar with your work and they're excited about it or there's something they're interested in, and that's great. And then they find you on LinkedIn or they find your email or they find some way to connect with you and they say just that and they say just that, they say, I'd love to, you know, I'd love to set up a meeting with you and, and I'd love to connect or chat or pick your brain. Right. And here's the

thing. They want something, right? There is, they have a specific goal. People actually, generally speaking, don't want to just connect or chat or pick your brain. There's something they want. There's some information that they want. There's maybe perhaps they want to make you to connect them with someone else or, you know, in my case, maybe they're interested in a career in my organization. And all of that's fine. Like all of those are totally perfectly fine things to want my help from. But when I don't know what it is that you want from me, and I know you want something, but I don't know what it is, I don't want to have that conversation with you because I don't want to end up in a situation where I'm uncomfortable,

where you either, it turns out, want something from me I can't give you, or you want something from me, frankly, I don't want to give you. And so I find that a lot of times when people make those requests for me, I kind of ignore them. And I don't feel good about that, believe me, but it feels like even worse to be in an awkward conversation with a stranger. So the requests that I respond to are the ones where people are very upfront and they say, this is why I'd love to meet with you

and this is specifically what I'm looking for and I'm hoping you can help me with, I'm much more likely to respond affirmatively to those. And so I think that's another kind of concrete piece of advice for people to take with them is, you know, be explicit, make very direct appeals to specific individuals and tell them exactly what it is that you want. Because if they don't know they can be effective, they're not going to say yes. Yeah, I love that. Because those requests for let's chat, let's get coffee, let me pick your brain, are hard to say no to because you look like such a jerk.

Why wouldn't you want to just let me chat let's i mean that's not asking much come on you what an idiot to say no to that so you like you say you ignore them rather than respond because how do you respond to that and and you're right i mean what's the benefit of chatting if there's no goal if there's no there's totally and i think most of the time there is a goal and the person is reluctant to there's nothing. Totally, and I think most of the time there is a goal, and the person is reluctant to come out with it, right? They actually think that, you know, they will sort of lull you into, like, the first step will just get in the door, and then I'll ask you, and I think the mistake there, again, is that it's the wrong intuition. On their side of it, they feel like that's very innocuous, right? Like you said, it's no big deal, why can't we just chat?

Well, the big deal is, I don't know what's coming. That's the big deal. Right. And people do not like uncertainty, myself very much included. Well, we should get coffee sometime so I can pick your brain. Let's chat. Let's chat. Let's chat up a storm.

My guest has been Heidi Grant. She is a social psychologist and author of the book, Reinforcements, How to Get People to Help You. There is a link to her book in the show notes. Thanks, Heidi. Thanks so much, Mike. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong?

Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love

our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic,

check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Can you imagine life without email? I mean, think about it. How often do you check your email every day? Probably a lot. And how great does it feel when you clear out that inbox? You've replied to everybody. You have no more emails to deal with. It feels great, like you've got your life under control. But there was a time when there was no email. I remember a time when, yeah, you might get an email or two or three every day. But those days are long gone. And interestingly, people have been talking about the death of email for a long time, but it never seems to die. It's just as important today as ever.

So, since email is a big part of our lives, it's a good idea to try to understand it better. And here to help is Esther Milne. She's an Associate Professor of Media and Communication at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. And she is author of the book Email and the Everyday, Stories of Disclosure, Trust and Digital Labor. Hi, Esther. Hi, Mike. So I remember when there was no email. And now I can't imagine what that would feel like to have no way to email somebody.

Where did this all start? Maybe just like a brief history of email is a good starting point here. Well, actually, it's 50 years old this year. It was invented in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson. With the internet and, I guess, inventions in general, people are often reluctant to name an actual date or one person. And certainly with the internet community, it was a kind of a gradual and collective invention. So there was network mail in the 1960s, but Ray Tomlinson is the one that's

credited with choosing the at sign, which is probably how we all recognize email. There were obviously various inventions from then on. The attachment was in 1992. I know a lot of people find that the bane of email existence. People who tell you they're sending an attachment and then forget to attach it or people that send such large attachments that your computer can't read it. So that was 1992. I suppose it entered the mainstream in 1998 with the Tom Hanks film, You've Got Mail. Gmail launched in 2004. And so I guess those are the, yeah, those are the milestone kind of dates in email history. And why do you suppose?

Because people have talked about, you know, the death of email and that it's never going to last and it's already gone. But it isn't gone. It's still here. Everybody checks their email every day. So what is it about email that makes it so sticky? Well, it's funny you should say the death of email. That is probably one of the most searched phrases in terms of email. In fact, people have been predicting its death almost from the beginning.

In, I think it was 1989, there was a academic article about the death of email and that the fax machine would be killing it off. But as you say, very sticky and it has lasted. I think one of the reasons is because it's relatively open protocols, so non-proprietary, even though of course we have Gmail and we have proprietary systems, the email system itself, like the internet, is designed to be decentralized and accessible. So that is, I think, one of the key reasons why it's lasted. And people complain about email a lot, even though they can't live without it. And one of the complaints is there's too much of it. There's too much junk. There's that Nigerian Prince guy that keeps sending me emails every once in a while. And why is it that it never seems to get under control? I mean, one of the biggest complaints about email is spam. For my book,

I conducted a number of international surveys to ask people how they dealt with information overload and how they dealt with spam and not as many people as you would think use filtering software so you know there are a lot of ways that you can actually filter spam but funnily enough people don't use that and tend to put up with spam or as a couple of my interviewees told me they almost treat it like a sport and then try and answer the spammers. So with perhaps the Nigerian example, actually sort of take them on face value and start and enter into a conversation with the spammers. And actually that does work. People,

you know, they don't like to be questioned. They want to, just like telemarketing, people who ring you up in the middle of dinner, I suppose. If you start saying to them, I'm going to ring you up during your dinner, they don't like that. I would imagine that spam must work, that the Nigerian prince must get somebody every once in a while or they'd stop doing it. Totally. And there are lots of studies of these kinds of things and we're laughing about it. But in actual fact, people do get hoodwinked into these kinds of things and phishing, you probably heard of with a PH, which is emails that purport to be from, say, your bank, and they look like they're coming from a reputable source, and then they ask for your password. And, you know, it really is surprising how many people can get caught by that. And

companies obviously have to guard against that kind of thing a lot. Since you did some surveys, what is it you found people struggle with or have pain points about with email? Well, in many, many different ways. They also have different ways of dealing with the well-known kind of email regret. So for example, say, please see attachment and then you forget to attach something or when you send an email in anger. So a lot of people were talking about in my surveys, emails that they have regretted sending. So those are the emails where you send it

straight off the bat and often in a work situation and then you regret it as soon as it's gone and a number of my respondents told me about ways strategies that they had so that they would stop themselves from sending an email in error and some of those were writing draft emails so that's where you vent an answer but you just leave it in draft so you don't send it. Others would send emails to themselves like to another email address so that they would get rid of that venting. But actually on the flip side of that and I was surprised to find a number of confessions of people about email and how they actually regularly read other people's emails

more than you would think. And in a organizational context, one person, an IT person, said that they just regularly read staff emails as an entertaining pastime. So while the protocols themselves, you can do something about the security, you can't actually stop people doing those kinds of things with email. So you mean that you might work for a company and the person in the IT department might be flipping through your emails to see what you're writing and you would never know and there's not much you can do. Exactly. And I was very surprised and interested. I mean, one of the things I wanted to hear about were all the different stories that we might have about email. As you said, it's sort of the underpins so much of what we do online, but the dominant story is just complaints about it. So I

wanted to find out some more interesting stories, some varied stories. And yeah, one of the more shocking discoveries I found was just the casual reading of other people's emails when the opportunity presented itself. What else did you find? I found that people use emails for a lot of areas that we would think that social media has taken over. So group discussions, people still use email for group discussions, for organizing events, for circulating news. So I was surprised that even in this era where we just assume that email is dead and social media has taken over, there are a lot of situations where people are using email and for personal reasons, not just

at work. And I also discovered, and I was very interested, that there's quite a dedicated cohort, group of people who we can actually sometimes dismiss, and these are the over 80s. So my survey was completed by a number of people over 80 who said that email was their preferred method of communication for keeping up with their family and for keeping up with the news, keeping up with their friends, a lot of that group could understand email in a way that they can't understand social media. And so I think that that's important in terms of digital inclusion and making sure that everybody or as many people as possible

have access to being online. Do young people use email because the image is they don't, but I bet they do. Yes, well, that is definitely the image. Millennials turning against email that they are some also some popular headlines. I mean, one of the things about email is that it's still a method of identification for so many online services. And it's kind of ironic really that social media still often needs an email address to grant you a social media account. So yes, but it's also true to say that I guess millennials, for want of a better term, use a variety of applications and online services. So they don't just stick to one.

One of the cautionary things people have said about email is that if you put it in an email, you better be okay with the whole world seeing it because once it's out there there there's no bringing it back that's absolutely true the long tail of email and one of the areas that I was really interested in was the so-called Enron emails which that the power company that spectacularly crashed in the early 2000s. Part of the legal process meant that their emails, the internal emails of the Enron employees were published online by the Federal Energy Regulation Commission

in the US. And these weren't emails just of the people at the top who had been charged and had gone to jail. These were ordinary people, just like you and I, in a ordinary work situation. We don't always, I mean, this is another discovery, and I'm pretty sure about this, that most people will occasionally use their work email for something personal. And that was the case with the employees in Enron. And so these were published, 1.6 million emails. And when they were first published, they were not cleaned at all. They were not filtered. They had social security numbers, phone numbers. Over the years, that data set has been analysed because it is the biggest, most complete set, data set that can be mined of emails. So I was interested in tracking down some of the people whose emails had been made public to see what they had felt over the years. So that was 2003 or something. And to my

knowledge, no one else has bothered thinking about the actual people whose emails have been analysed and used for all of these different purposes, kind of with, well, definitely without their permission and maybe without their knowledge. So I was very interested to talk to those people. And for most of them, it had been a pretty painful experience. Since so many emails have been written and analyzed and studied and researched, is there any takeaway about what email is good for and what it's not? What makes a good email and what makes a lousy email? Yes, there are definitely takeaways.

I mean, none of it is probably that surprising, but not writing too much. One idea per paragraph, no more than three paragraphs. Also, yeah, not writing, not responding in anger and being clear. One of the things I know people sometimes struggle with is how to sign off on an email. You know, you don't want to be too familiar, but you don't want to be too formal. It sounds ridiculous, but there's a lot of contention around how to best sign off an email. Some people hate the signature best for example. Cheers is often regarded as being sort of British Australian. Yours

sincerely is often thought to be too formal. So yeah there are lots of different points of view but the basic basic point is to make it short and concise and not written in anger or annoyance. And the salutation, you know, in email, we usually put a hi in front of the name, which I never really understood. In fact, I never really understood why the salutation in the first place, because it's going to Bob. I don't really need to say hi, Bob, because it's already going to Bob. He knows it and he knows his name. So why? That's funny because, so you just start talking to you? No, no, I go with convention, but I always think it's a kind of a waste, especially the hi,

because in a letter, the same thing I would write on a piece of paper in a memo or a letter, I wouldn't say hi, but in an email, the same thing I would write on a piece of paper in a memo or a letter, I wouldn't say hi. But in an email, I say hi. Yeah, right. Well, the sort of general thought about that is because the normal cues aren't available because it's online and you're not going to see the person. So you have to try harder than you would in person to make it friendly. But as you say, a letter is also,

you're not seeing that person. I think it's also that even though 50 years seems like a long time for email to have been around, in terms of communication technology, that's not that long. And I think that we're still kind of grappling with the conventions and with the norms of email. I mean, people who say, hi, John, are very different from the people that say, John, comma, and then talk. And there

are different reactions to that, just as there are reactions to different ways of communicating. Some people find if you don't say hi, you are being too direct. And especially, I suppose, in a work situation, often if you're wanting to ask someone for something, you want to try and be as friendly as possible. So when you look back at the history of email, what do you see ahead? I think that goes back to that the predictions about the use of technology are notoriously wrong. You know, email is one of those as well, where it wasn't in the early days of the internet, it really was supposed to be a resource sharing technology. It wasn't expected that people would actually communicate personally with each other.

It was supposed to be a way to send files, for example. So just in that same way, I think it's hard to predict what the future of any technology, but I mean, I'm invested in it staying around for a while, I guess. And I would say that, you know, there's a lot of consternation at the moment internationally about the reach of big players in the social media space like Facebook. And I think email is still presenting to people an alternative to those proprietary areas that we know, sell your data. So people, I think, are rediscovering email in a time where we are becoming worried about how our data is being used.

Well, it's really interesting because, you know, so many people view email as so old-fashioned, and yet I don't know anybody that doesn't use it. I mean, maybe they use it less than they used to, but because texting is real fast and easy and immediate, but I can't imagine life without email. No. And I think that just for those reasons, again, is that people are in a way, yeah, rediscovering it. I know a few of my respondents talked about the privacy of email, even though, as we've just been saying, I mean, there's hardly anything that's online that's private, but the relatively, the less visibility. So social media, people are visible all the time. And people in my survey actually talked about the fact that email actually offers you a little kind of haven.

Not everyone knows that you're online, for example. And you can have a conversation that not everyone else is privy to. But I think that email will develop, adapt, change. Our uses of email will change. It's still probably the preferred communication of an organisation. So that was one of the things that my survey was very interested in finding out and it was confirmed that even though there are alternative organisational communication systems like Slack, these aren't being taken up by organisations as fast as people would think.

And I think that's because of the accessibility of email. If I can email anyone in another country, whereas I might not be able to find another system that was as accessible. So email is alive and well. It's not dead and it's not dying anytime soon. Esther Milne has been my guest. She's an associate professor of media and communications at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

The name of her book is Email and the Everyday Stories Stories of Disclosure, Trust, and Digital Labor. And there's a link to that book in the show notes for this episode. Thank you, Esther. Thanks for being here. Thanks very much, Michael. It's great to talk to you. Your first name could have something to do with how long you live, at least according to a study, which none of this makes any sense to me, but see what you think. If your name starts with a D,

well, you might want to find a nickname, like really fast. The study examined two groups of people, professional athletes and doctors and lawyers. And regardless of sport, athletes whose first name started with the letter D had shorter lives than those starting with all the other letters, from E to Z. The study of doctors and lawyers showed that in people whose first names begin with A, B, C, or D, the A names outlive the D names substantially. The study also indicated that baseball players with nicknames live longer than baseball players without nicknames.

Go figure. And that is something you should know. The reason our audience grows, and it always grows, is because people like you tell your friends and then they listen and tell their friends. It really helps us to grow the audience and bring our message to more people. So please share this podcast with someone you know. Send them a link. It's easy. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook,

where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church

for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family.

But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.