Email Signatures
I’m not sure about everyone, but I seem to pay pretty much no attention to email signatures. Now, I’m not a psychologist, but I think this has something to do with operant conditioning (see Joyce… I do listen).
To quote from Wikipedia:
Extinction is the lack of any consequence following a response. When a response is inconsequential, producing neither favorable nor unfavorable consequences, it will occur with less frequency.
So, in this case, the response is reading the signature. Reading the signature is inconsequential (and often full of disclaimers about receiving this email in error, yadda yadda). Every time I read an email signature, I get neither a positive nor negative (well, sometimes) response. Hence, according to the concept of extinction, I’m going to read email signatures with less frequency.
Oh, and the fact that I get many emails where the signature is longer than the body of the email itself, doesn’t exactly motivate me to read them at all.
Do you read signatures every time you get an email? Do you actually “notify the sender of this email and delete this copy” every time you receive an email in error? Feel free to drop a comment on your response to email signatures.
I never read email signatures, but I do go into the effort of emailling the sender if they sent something to me that was meant for someone else (and I know that the “someone else” didn’t get it) just as an act of courtesy.
But it hardly ever happens, since no one in my company has a surname that even resembles mine.