The Effect of Emoticons on Perception

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The Effect of Emoticons on Perception
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Purpose

• The use of technology in education and industry
  provides powerful tools for communication.
  However, since new forms of communication, such
  as email, are not direct, many non-verbal cues
  and clues are not available for sense-making.
• Since such cues are important, many people now
  use emoticons, textual or pictorial
  representations of emotion, to give email
  communication more depth. The purpose of this
  study was to gauge the degree of importance and
  meaning that people draw from emoticons in email.

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Importance

• Since email is used extensively for a variety of
  important purposes, the inferences and meanings
  that people draw from the use of emoticons,
  whether positive or negative, are likewise
  important.
• By studying how people perceive emoticons, we may
  increase the accuracy of electronic communication.

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Method

• Two groups, one a control and the other an
  experimental, were asked to read and answer
  questions concerning a series of email messages.

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Email 1
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Email 2
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Email 3
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Email 4
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Survey
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Analysis

• The use of an ordinal scale limits the validity
  of statistical analysis. The results should be
  understood within this limitation.
• My null hypothesis was that, for each survey
  question ?c ?e
• My research hypothesis was ?c ? ?e

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Results
Question Control ?
Experimental ? t ?c - ?e/?diff
p ? .05?
(n17) (n23)

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Results

• Additionally, the control group thought that Pat
  was a woman 47 of the time, and Dr. Hanes was a
  woman 32 of the time. The experimental group
  thought that Pat was a woman 69 of the time, and
  Dr. Hanes was a woman 58 of the time.

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Conclusion

• The data indicate that emoticons do indeed affect
  perception in terms of professionalism,
  helpfulness, intelligence, quality of advice, and
  gender. No significant differences were seen in
  terms of sincerity, responsibility and age.
• While more research is necessary, these data
  indicate that people do indeed use emoticons to
  help them make some judgments about people they
  electronically communicate with.

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