> In one part of their study, the researchers approached strangers and asked them to take a made-up survey. Half the respondents were given a pen and paper to fill out the form; the other half were handed an iPad. At the end of the exercise, respondents were asked if they wanted to give their email address to receive information on how to donate to a charity. Those who used paper were much likelier to provide their email addresses.
I don't think that that can be concluded with certainty, or anything else beyond that the people in that survey with pen and paper were more likely to give their email address for charity.
Once I thought about it, I realized that on some lizard-brain level with no logical reasoning present, I am indeed more likely to agree to give someone an email if they asked me to write it down on paper vs. type it in somewhere.
I can think of many different reasons for why, but they are all just guesses at best. One that comes to mind is that writing it on paper feels more "personal", as in "i am giving you this piece of my info", and I instinctively know that a human will have to look at it, read it, or do something else with it. Regardless, a human will have to take a look at it before something else happens to it.
While typing it on the person's device feels much more impersonal and more of a "I am entering my email into this digital form, with no expectations of any real human to ever look at it, with my email probably being sent into some database for some automated processing or spamming me or whatever else".
The latter isn't a real objective concern of mine, both typing and writing it out could easily lead to the exact same outcomes (both good and bad). But just instinctively, I feel that this is one of the main reasons for why it feels different for me on a subjective level in the back of my head.
I think I can relate with this. However I won't give my email in any form to a random charity I haven't researched beforehand, so this sentiment would prevail, paper or tablet. What you said doesn't relate to the questionnaire they had to do before being asked the email so I don't really get what that part of the study is about.
Forgive my ignorance, but what should this mean?