Overview
- Psychologists at the University of Ottawa tested how emojis in workplace chats change judgments of a sender, publishing the results in Collabra: Psychology.
- Plain-text messages earned the highest ratings for competence and appropriateness across all scenarios.
- Angry-face emojis cut competence ratings, and a smiley did not beat plain text or soften bad news.
- Women in the study rated negative messages from women as less appropriate than the same messages from men.
- The experiment was small, simulated, and used only two emojis with 243 student participants, so the authors urge cautious emoji use and call for real-world research.