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Whether it’s a friendly smiley face or a cheeky wink, many of us regularly include emojis in our work emails.
But if you want to be taken seriously in the office, a new study suggests that you should rein in the emoji.
Researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel have revealed that people who included pictures and emojis in their emails were seen as less powerful than those who used words.
“Today we are all accustomed to communicating with pictures, and the social networks make it both easy and fun,” the researchers said.
“Our findings, however, raise a red flag: in some situations, especially in a work or business environment, this practice may be costly, because it signals low power. Our advice: think twice before sending a picture or emoji to people in your organisation, or in any other context in which you wish to be perceived as powerful.”
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In the study, the researchers set out to understand whether the use of images in emails affected the perception of people at work.
The team conducted a series of experiments in which various everyday scenarios were presented to hundreds of participants.
In one experiment, participants were asked to imagine shopping at a supermarket and seeing another shopper wearing a Red Sox T-shirt.
Half of the participants were shown a T-shirt with the verbal Red Sox logo, while the other half saw a picture of the logo.
The results revealed that participants who saw the T-shirt with writing rated the wearer as more powerful than those who saw the pictorial logo.
Meanwhile, in another experiment, participants were asked to imagine attending a retreat of a fictional company called Lotus.
Half were told that a woman employee had chosen a T-shirt with the verbal logo Lotus, while the other half were told that she opted for a T-shirt with the company’s logo – a minimalistic picture of a lotus flower.
As with the first experiment, participants said the woman had more power when they’d been told she had chosen the T-shirt with the verbal logo.
Finally, in a third experiment, participants joined a Zoom meeting with two other participants – one who represented themselves with a pictorial profile, and the other who represented themselves with a verbal profile.
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Participants were then asked to choose one of the co-participants to represent them in a competitive game that suited people with high social power.
The results revealed that 62% of participants chose the participant who had represented themselves with a verbal profile.
Dr Elinor Amit, co-author of the study, said: “Why do pictures signal that a sender is low power? Research shows that visual messages are often interpreted as a signal for desire for social proximity.
“A separate body of research shows that less powerful people desire social proximity more than powerful people do.” – MailOnline
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