Overview
Whether you use emojis or avoid them altogether, they have become a staple in text-based communication. Emojis offer the writer a degree of self-expression that can be difficult to communicate through words alone. However, we know little about the psychological effects of emoji use on senders and their recipients.
On the one hand, emoji use could make the sender seem warmer and friendlier, signaling higher EQ through an expansive communication toolkit. On the other hand, not everyone appreciates emojis. To those recipients, emoji use could make you look silly or less competent.
Of course, context matters. How emojis are perceived could depend on whether they’re used in an email or on social media, whether the sender is male or female, and whether the recipient uses emojis.
To investigate this potential nuance, we designed a factorial experiment testing how emoji use affects a sender’s perceived warmth and competence, and how context, gender, and readers’ emoji use shape these perceptions.
The Experiment
1,200 people were recruited from Prolific to read a short block of text about a hypothetical person’s positive experiences at a summer festival. The text either contained a smiley face emoji 😊 or did not contain the emoji, randomly assigned. We also randomized two other features of the text, gender and context.
To test the possible effects of gender on emoji use, we randomized whether the email or Facebook post was credited to “Jon” or “Jen.” To test whether context matters, half of respondents saw the text as an email, while the other half read the text as a single paragraph, similar to a typical Facebook post. The email and Facebook post versions of the text are illustrated below.
Imagine you receive the following email from a colleague at your company:
From: [Jon J. / Jen J.]
Subject: Social Event
Hi everyone,
Just letting you know that I had a great time at the summer street festival yesterday! 😊 A lot of good food and music. Definitely would recommend it for anyone considering going.
[Jon/Jen]
From: [Jon J. / Jen J.]
Subject: Social Event
Hi everyone,
Just letting you know that I had a great time at the summer street festival yesterday! 😊 A lot of good food and music. Definitely would recommend it for anyone considering going.
[Jon/Jen]
Imagine you’re scrolling Facebook and see the following post from an acquaintance, [Jon / Jen]:
"Had a great time at the summer street festival yesterday! 😊 A lot of good food and music. Definitely would recommend it for anyone considering going."
"Had a great time at the summer street festival yesterday! 😊 A lot of good food and music. Definitely would recommend it for anyone considering going."
After reading the text, participants rated how nice and how smart the email sender seemed using a 1-7 survey scale. Participants also provided their gender, age, and frequency of emoji use, so we could test whether any of the results differ based on these variables.
Results
Overall, using an emoji didn’t make much of a difference in how others perceived our communicator. Statistical analyses showed only a 2% increase in perceived warmth (i.e., niceness) when using an emoji (avg. = 6.04) relative to not using an emoji (avg. = 5.91), (p = 0.027). There was no effect of emoji use on perceived competence (i.e., smartness).
There was some nuance, however, albeit only marginally. The trivial boost in perceived niceness from using an emoji was predominantly driven by our female sender, who received a 4% boost relative to our male sender who received barely one-third of a percent (p = 0.076).
We also noted that using emojis in email makes the sender look slightly smarter than in a social media post, by about 4.4% (p = 0.053). Again, however, this is a very small effect and may not replicate if the experiment were conducted again.
Additional causal analyses revealed even less nuance. We found no interaction effects of emoji use on perceived warmth or competence with context (email vs. social media post), gender of the sender, gender of the reader, age, or reader’s emoji use habits.
There were a few non-causal, yet interesting findings. Approximately 75% of our sample use emojis on a regular basis (i.e., daily or weekly). Only 20% indicated that they rarely or never use emojis. Women reported more frequent emoji use, with 83% using emojis daily or weekly, and only 14% rarely or never using them (p < 0.001).
Conclusion
Using emojis, in this case a smiley face, doesn’t seem to affect your image all that much. It generates only a trivial increase in how nice you seem, and this effect is largely reserved for female communicators. There was also a trivial increase in how smart emoji users seem when using them in an email. But that’s about it. Perhaps the most surprising finding of all was just how little nuance there was in how emoji use affects one’s image.
Methods Note
We used ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis to test for significant differences in warmth and competence (i.e., how nice and smart our message writer seemed) between the emoji and non-emoji conditions. For significant differences, the coefficient would be large, and the corresponding "p-value" would be small (p < 0.05). We also conducted OLS regression analyses with interaction terms to test whether these differences varied across context (email vs. social media), gender of the writer, gender of the participants, age, and participants' own emoji use frequency.
Additional details are available on our methodology page. Data and survey materials are available upon request.