Smiley emojis in formal e-mails can undermine your ability

New York Aug 14 (IANS) If you have the habit of including a smiley face emoji in your e-mails to your boss to create a positive impression think twice. According to a study the practice may undermine your prowess as well as the information you are sharing.

The results demonstrated that in contrast to face-to-face smiles which increase both competence and warmth the smileys in an e-mail had no effect on the perception of warmth. In fact it had a negative effect and the sender was perceived as less competent.

The smiley also did not influence the evaluation of the sender s friendliness.

"Our findings provide evidence that contrary to actual smiles smileys do not increase perceptions of warmth and actually decrease perceptions of competence " said Ella Glikson post-doctorate student at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Beersheba Israel.

"In formal business e-mails a smiley is not a smile " Glikson added.

For the study published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science researchers conducted a series of experiments with a total of 549 participants from 29 different countries.

In an experiment the participants were asked to read a work-related e-mail from an unknown person and then evaluate both competence and warmth of that person. Some included smileys while others did not.

E-mails that did not include a smiley were found to be more detailed and included more content-related information

"We found that the perceptions of low competence if a smiley is included in turn undermined information sharing " Glikson said.

In addition when the gender of the e-mail writer was unknown recipients were more likely to assume that the e-mail was sent by a woman if it included a smiley.

However this attribution did not influence the evaluation of competence or friendliness the researchers said.

"People tend to assume that a smiley is a virtual smile but the study showed that in the case of the workplace at least as far as initial encounters are concerned this is incorrect " Glikson noted.

--IANS
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