Researchers at Binghamton University in NY and Rutgers University in New Jersey were examining whether punctuation can provide “pragmatic and social information”. A follow-up study concluded that messages concluding with an exclamation point appear more honest than those without any form of punctuation.
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The exchanges consisted of a statement followed by an invitation posed as a question.
‘When speaking, people easily convey social and emotional information with eye gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses, and so on’.
“Texting is lacking numerous social cues used in actual face-to-face conversations”, lead researcher Celia Klin, an associate professor of psychology, said in a press release.
Those undergraduates were put face to face with a few back and forth conversations framed as either handwritten notes or text messages.
The receiver then gave a one-word response like “Okay”, “Sure”, “Yeah” or “Yup”.
New research has found that ending text sentences with a period can cause the message to be perceived as insincere. These mechanisms aren’t available for people who are texting, so texters are aided by emoticons and the option to deliberately misspell words to mimic sound and punctuation. Even the much-hated exclamation mark was seen as more honest than the abhorred full stop. That’s because only jerks, or the non-digitally adept, end their text messages with periods.
Participants read two versions of each exchange, one with a period [full stop] after the response and one without.
I’ve always been the kind of person to write out text messages with good grammar, full punctuation and certainly never any txtspk. It has produced acronyms (BRB, LOL, IKR) and a huge selection of emojis and other icons to convey thoughts and feelings, which Klin said have become useful tools.
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The study, ‘Texting insincerely: the role of the period in text messaging, ‘ was published November 22, 2015 in Computers in Human Behavior.
