On May 11, 2009, at 11:30 AM, Tuszynski, Stephanie wrote:
Is it really that onerous a task to manually include the entire list into your reply fields when you want to?
Obviously the answer is no. And it's not really necessary to cut and paste or rearrange the addresses, really, unless you have an extraordinary need to keep someone from getting more than one copy of a post. But I don't think that's what the real issue is. Rather, I think that people have invested the "reply" and "reply-all" buttons in their email programs with particular meanings. (This particular example reminds me of what Reeves and Nass' report finding, in The Media Equation, regarding people's orientation to TVs. Among other things, they found that people who normally watched news on one TV and entertainment on another tended to treat news reports as more credible when received via the TV on which they most regularly watched the news.) Due in large part to previous experience, they have come to regard hitting reply-all to replying to a number of individuals and regard hitting reply to replying to a singular entity, whether one individual or a group. Why should their present actions be driven so powerfully from past habit? Perhaps, as Langer's research suggests, this has a bit to do with our supposed cognitive miserliness and a concomitant desire to operate as mindlessly as possible. Perhaps, too, it has something to do with the power of ritual and the security it provides, as suggested by Durkheim and many who have followed. That's my .02$ on the subject, anyway. --Christian Nelson