Researchers at Tel Aviv University’s Coller School of Management recommend that you reduce or give up using emojis when communicating with your colleagues. Emojis, they suggest, signal a lack of power to your subordinates, your colleagues and your boss and may lead to them think less of you.

The researchers note that employees who use pictures and emojis in their emails or Zoom profiles, or wear T-shirts with company pictorial logos on them, are seen as less powerful than those who opt to communicate with words.

The study was conducted on American subjects and measured their responses to verbal vs pictorial messages in different contexts. The results were clear-cut: “In all experiments the respondents attributed more power to the person who chose a verbal vs a visual representation of the message.”

The researchers are Dr Elinor Amit, Prof Shai Danziger from Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University and Prof Pamela K. Smith from the Rady School of Management at UCSD. The paper, titled “Medium is a powerful message: Pictures signal less power than words” was published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

They say that "Today we are all accustomed to communicating with pictures, and the social networks make it both easy and fun. 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.”

The researchers go on to recommend using fewer or no emojis if individuals want to appear authoritative: “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."

The authors presented everyday scenarios to hundreds of American subjects in a series of experiments to see if their hypothesis was correct. One of the experiments involved a shopping experience in which the participant came across another shopper wearing a Red Sox T-shirt. The participants who were shown a T-shirt with a pictorial logo of the sports team believed the wearer was less powerful than the participants who were shown a T-shirt with a verbal logo.

Other experiments yielded similar outcomes. In another experiment, participants were asked to imagine themselves at a retreat of a company called Lotus. Half of the subjects were told about a female employee who was wearing a T-shirt with the verbal logo LOTUS while others were told she was wearing a T-shirt with a minimalistic picture of the lotus flower as a logo. The researchers found that once more the respondents “attributed more power” to the employee who was wearing the verbal logo.

During the lockdowns caused by the pandemic, the use of communication software such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams has skyrocketed. The researchers looked into the effects of picture vs word use in this significant organisational context as well.

Participants were asked to select representatives in a competitive game “that suited people with high social power.” One of the representatives had used a pictorial profile while the other used a verbal profile. Sixty-two percent of the participants went with the co-participant that had chosen to represent themselves with a verbal profile. Once again, a verbal profile trumped a pictorial one, suggesting employees who signal power by using words are “more likely to be selected to powerful positions” as opposed to those who signal weakness by using pictures.

Dr. Amit summarises: "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.”

She adds: “Consequently, signalling that you’d like social proximity by using pictures is essentially signalling you’re less powerful. It must be noted that such signalling is usually irrelevant in close relationships, as in communications between family members. However, in many arenas of our lives, especially at work or in business, power relations prevail, and we should be aware of the impression our messages make on their recipients. Our findings raise a red flag: when you want to signal power, think twice before sending an emoji or a picture."