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Any doubts you might harbor that your co-worker was less than honest in his/her last email might be justified by the findings of two studies about email's "trust factor."

Professors at Rutgers, DePaul, and Lehigh universites conducted the studies with 48 full-time MBA students, reported Tom Yencho at Lehigh.

In one study, students were asked to divide $89 between themselves and another fictional party, which knew only that the dollar amount fell between $5 and $100. As a precondition, the latter party had to accept whatever offer was made. Students used either paper communication or email to divulge the size of the pot.

On email, 92 percent of students lied about how much was given to them. In contrast, 64 percent of those that used pen and paper lied about the size of the pot and how much the other person would get.

Hand-written communicators gave an average of nearly $34 to the second-party, claiming a total amount of about $67. The average reported amount from those who used email was just $56 - giving $29 to the unknown recipient.

Moreover, email communicators said they felt more justified in lying.

"It’s not just that emailers were more deceptive," said Lehigh's Liuba Belkin, one of the authors of the report. "It’s that the magnitude by which they lied was significantly greater."

A second study of 69 MBA students showed that if emailers are familiar with each other, they were less deceptive — but still likely to lie.

In the workplace, having email elicit both negative responses in evaluations and cooperation and result in lower levels of trust present challenges for organizations across the board, said co-author Terri Kurtzberg of Rutgers University.

The gap in honesty may come from "false sense of anonymity" in email, she hypothesized. "There's no clear laws established about violations through email."

Image credit: dyanna via Creative Commons. Views expressed in this article do not represent those of the photographer.