Using Emojis at Work? You’re Not Going to Like This Study 😮

So, crying-laughing emoji, you’re not going to believe this—but, spiral-eyes emoji, a psychological experiment has found that incorporating emojis into your workplace communiqués might be leading your peers to perceive you as incompetent. But not always: the mercurial purple devil emoji, as always, is in the details.

Researchers at the University of Ottawa tested the reactions of 243 adult volunteers (134 men and 109 women) to a battery of hypothetical corporate instant messages, some with emojis, some without, to gauge the average response to the inclusion of these pictographic symbols. While messages without emoji were, far and away, deemed to be the most professional, emojis with a clear positive vibe paired with a positive or neutral text message also tended to enhance the test subject’s assessment of the sender’s competence.

There were gender dynamics at play, too. Women were more likely to judge negative IMs with emoji more harshly if they were ostensibly sent by women, compared to similar negative messages and emojis sent by men. But this trend was also seen in workplace IMs sent without emojis.

“Emojis are not simply neutral add-ons to text messages; they can influence how others perceive us, particularly in terms of competence and appropriateness,” the study’s lead author, Erin L. Courtice at the University of Ottawa’s School of Psychology, said in a statement.

“By understanding the nuances of emoji use,” Courtice opined, “professionals can leverage these digital tools to enhance their communication and build stronger workplace relationships.”

Repressed emojis

Courtice and her colleagues exercised strict controls on their study to ensure that they were uncovering real and broadly generalizable psychological phenomena. Their emoji selection (unlike many you’ve probably witnessed in the workplace) was limited to only three options: a positive “grinning face” emoji, a negative “angry face” emoji, or no emoji at all.

“We deliberately selected these emojis to represent positive and negative emotional valence because these simple and unambiguous facial expressions minimize interpretive variability, representing clear positive and negative emotions,” the team wrote in their study, published in the journal Collabra: Psychology.

Highly subjective and potentially inflammatory emoji—including the tumescent eggplant (or aubergine) emoji, the water (or unspecified fluid) droplets emoji, the lip-biting emoji, and the succulent ripe peach emoji—were excluded from the team’s experimental framework.

So were all off-brand Google Android and Microsoft Teams emojis. “All emojis were from iOS,” the team stated.

Courtice and her fellow psychologists crafted a matrix of workplace IMs that varied between positive, negative, and neutral sentence content; positive and negative emojis, or no emoji content; and sender gender. Their study participants were asked to rate these messages both in terms of the hypothetical sender’s “competence” and “appropriateness,” which provided some additional nuance.

Far and away, the presence of a negative emoji led subjects to deem a workplace message as inappropriate and, worse, led respondents to perceive the sender as less competent, particularly when the emotion was misaligned with positive or neutral message content. Positive emojis, the study noted, “do not soften bad news or critical feedback,” instead heightening suspicions of the sender’s “dishonesty and insincerity.” So, don’t do this if you can help it.

Emoji-nal rescue

Courtice had a silver lining for those of us who innately love adding a chipper emoji to keep up morale: Positive emojis can “enhance perceptions of competence when used with neutral or congruent messages,” her study found.

“Future research should consider how emojis function within broader communication patterns,” Courtince said, “examining outcomes such as conversation flow, rapport building, conflict resolution, and team cohesion in digital workplace environments.”

Much was left on the table, her team noted, suggesting further examination of “a wider range of emojis and their use in more naturalistic settings.”

“Although our use of validated stimuli is a strength of our design,” they wrote, “we acknowledge that workplace communication involves a broader range of emojis.”

Sophisticated juxtaposition of the clown face emoji, the nail-painting emoji, and/or the casket emoji while conveying office gossip might, in fact, rocket your own coworker’s perception of your competence into the stratosphere. Diamond emoji? Flying cash emoji? You might get a raise.