Overview
Do you send back-to-back texts? Or do you prefer paragraphs? It may sound trivial, but with text messaging now one of the predominant modes of communication, different styles of texting like emoji use, slang, and typos can significantly affect how recipients perceive you. And yet, it’s an open question whether sending multiple back-to-back texts or larger paragraphs affect how others perceive you.
On the one hand, sending multiple texts back-to-back may be annoying to some, given the near-constant ping or vibration from each notification. On the other hand, large blocks of text may come across as overwhelming in their own way, especially when there’s a lot of information to communicate.
It’s also an open question how age may affect such perceptions. For example, if younger generations tend to text in block paragraphs or back-to-back, perhaps they prefer to receive texts the same way.
Naturally, we were curious about how texting style affects the image of the sender. So, we conducted an experiment to test whether sending texts back-to-back or in one paragraph affects likability, and whether these perceptions vary between different age groups.
The Experiment
For our study, we recruited 805 participants from two separate research platforms at two different points in time. 403 people were recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) in July 2021 and 402 people were recruited from the research platform Prolific in January 2022. All study materials, including all activities and survey questions, were kept identical for both groups.
Participants were invited to take part in a survey that we discreetly designed as an experiment. Each participant was shown a screenshot from a hypothetical co-worker who’d texted either in one block paragraph or multiple back-to-back lines (randomly assigned), then indicated how much they liked this co-worker on a 1-7 survey scale.
Participants were instructed as follows: "Imagine you get the following text from a co-worker who has been away for a few months." Participants were then randomly shown one of the images below and asked, "To what extent do you like this person?" (1 = Not at all, 7 = Extremely).
Results
The findings revealed a very significant difference in sender likability between the two text styles. Our texter who sent multiple texts back-to-back received a lower likability score, an average of 4.31, compared to our texter who sent one block paragraph, an average score of 5.36. This 19.6% reduction in likability was statistically significant (p < 0.001), indicating that sending back-to-back texts may hurt your likability relative to sending just one block paragraph.
This negative effect of texting back-to-back appears to be driven by younger people. Whereas Gen Z and Millennials liked our back-to-back texter substantially less (25.6% less for people under the age of 40), older participants liked both texters about equally. According to an OLS regression model, each additional year of age reduced the negative perceptions of texting back-to-back by 0.039 points on our 1-7 scale (p < 0.001). As an example, while we’d expect a 60-year-old to like our back-to-back texter only 2.6% less than our paragraph texter, we’d expect a 20-year-old to like our back-to-back texter 31.4% less. That’s a large difference.
Finally, on a less important yet noteworthy note, we did find a significant difference in the results between our two samples. Whereas Amazon MTurk participants liked our back-to-back texter 14.1% less, Prolific participants liked our back-to-back texter 25.4% less (p = 0.004). This seems to be due, at least in part, to our Prolific sample being about 4 years younger, on average (p < 0.001). Accounting for this explains about a quarter of the difference between the two platforms.
Conclusion
If you frequently send multiple back-to-back texts, especially to Gen Z or Millennials, you may want to consider consolidating that information into a single text. Utilizing a single paragraph format could very well enhance your likability among these recipients.
Methods Note
We used ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis to examine significant differences in likability between the block paragraph texter and multiple back-to-back texter. 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 assess whether these differences varied across research platforms or age groups, the latter of which we categorized into generations, including Gen Z ages 18-26, Millennials 27-40, Gen X 41-56, and Baby Boomers 57 or over.
Data and survey materials for this study are available upon request.