We exchange the highest volume of email with those people we know the least, a new study finds, but we don’t respond to them quickly:
What makes this study noteworthy is that the researchers had access not only to the complete email records of a midsize company — nearly 1.5 million messages sent by 1,052 employees over a six-month time span — but also to a detailed map of social relationships. (The employees were asked to list all of their personal contacts.)
By comparing these two data sets, Messrs. Wuchty and Uzzi developed an algorithm that let them predict the nature of a given relationship based solely on the details of an email exchange. “We didn’t need to read the messages or anything like that,” Mr. Uzzi says. “Just looking at the speed of a reply was more than enough.”
People reply to their close friends, on average, within seven hours of getting the email, the data show. Professional contacts take a bit more time: We don’t hit send for nearly 11 hours. But the biggest difference came when the scientists looked at those people we barely know. On average, it took us 50 hours to reply. In other words, there’s a surprisingly easy way to figure out how you feel about someone — just count the hours before you hit the “reply” button.