The lost e-mail method: Milgram's lost-letter technique in the age of the Internet

Pie examined Milgram's (1977) lost-letter technique using e-mail. In the first experiment, 79 college faculty received mock lost e-mail messages; Nineteen percent of those who received the messages responded, in all cases by returning the message to the ''sender'' instead of forwarding it to the ''recipient.'' In the second study, attitudes toward presidential candidate Ross Perot were examined by sending out two different messages to 200 randomly selected e-mail addresses in the United States. Although there was no differential response rate: examination of content revealed attitudes consistent with concurrent poll data.