Researchers at the University of Ottawa tested the reactions of 243 adult volunteers (134 men and 109 women) to a battery of hypothetical corporate instant messages, some with emojis, some without emojis, to assess the average response when these pictorial symbols were included. While messages without emojis were, by far and away, considered the most professional, emojis with a clearly positive vibe paired with a positive or neutral text message also increased the test subject’s evaluation of the sender’s competence.
This also included gender dynamics. If women sent explicitly negative IMs with emojis, they were more likely to be judged more harshly, compared to similar negative messages and emojis sent by men. But this trend was also seen in IMs sent without emojis at work.
The study’s lead author, Erin L., of the School of Psychology at the University of Ottawa. “Emoji are not just neutral add-ons to text messages; they can influence how other people perceive us, especially in terms of competence and appropriateness,” Courtice said in a statement.
“By understanding the nuances of emoji use,” Courtice said, “professionals can take advantage of these digital tools to enhance their communications and build stronger workplace relationships.”
repressed emoji
Cortis and his colleagues maintained strict controls over their studies to ensure that they were uncovering genuine and widely generalizable psychological phenomena. Their emoji selection (unlike many of the ones you’ve probably seen in the workplace) was limited to just three options: a positive “smiling face” emoji, a negative “angry face” emoji, or no emoji at all.
“We deliberately chose these emojis to represent positive and negative emotional valence because these simple and clear facial expressions reduce interpretive variability by representing clear positive and negative emotions,” the team wrote in their study published in the journal Collabra: Psychology.
Highly subjective and potentially inflammatory emojis – including the tumescent eggplant (or eggplant) emoji, the water (or unspecified fluid) drops emoji, the lip biting emoji, and the juicy ripe peach emoji – were excluded from the team’s experimental framework.
All off-brand Google Android and Microsoft Teams emojis were as well. “All emojis were from iOS,” the team said.
Cortis and his fellow psychologists devised a matrix of workplace IM that varied between positive, negative, and neutral sentence content; Positive and negative emoji, or no emoji content; and gender of the sender. Their study participants were asked to rate these messages in terms of both the “competence” and “appropriateness” of the hypothetical sender, which provided some additional nuance.
Far and away, the presence of a negative emoji led subjects to perceive the workplace message as inappropriate and, worse, led respondents to perceive the sender as less competent, especially when the emotion was falsely associated with positive or neutral message content. Positive emojis, the study said, “do not soften bad news or critical feedback”, but rather increase suspicion of the sender’s “dishonesty and insincerity”. So, don’t do it if you can help it.
emoji-cord rescue
Courtice did have a glimmer of hope for those of us who naturally prefer adding a chipper emoji to keep morale up: Her study found that positive emojis can “increase perceptions of competence when used with neutral or consistent messages.”
“Future research should consider how emojis function within broader communication patterns,” Courtins said, “examining outcomes such as conversation flow, relationship building, conflict resolution, and team cohesion in digital workplace environments.”
His team noted that much was left on the table, suggesting further investigation of “a wider range of emojis and their use in more natural settings”.
“Although our use of validated stimuli is a strength of our design,” they wrote, “we acknowledge that workplace communication involves a wide range of emojis.”
A sophisticated combination of the clown face emoji, nail-painting emoji, and/or casket emoji when conveying office gossip can, in fact, send your coworker’s perception of your competence skyrocketing into the stratosphere. diamond emoji? Flying cash emoji? You may get a salary increase.
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