Apparently, people can think you're a jerk when you're actually just being grammatically correct.
According to a new study, people don't like receiving texts with periods at the end. Mashable reports:
"The study, conducted by Celia Klin and her team of researchers at the Binghamton University, found that text messages that end with a period are perceived to be less sincere."
As part of the research, Celia Klin, along with her team, had 126 Binghamton undersograduates as study participants who had to read a series of 16 text exchanges.
The message exchanges first started out with questions like "Wanna hang out?" and ended their replies with one-word answers that either ended with a period or no punctuations at all.
As it turns out, those text messages that had periods at the end were perceived as being more insincere than those that had no punctuation marks at the end of the message.
Celia Klin then explained in a statement that the study results were a clear indication of the role of punctuations in computer-mediated communications:
"Texting is lacking many of the social cues used in actual face-to-face conversations. When speaking, people easily convey social and emotional information with eye gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses, and so on. [...] People obviously can't use these mechanisms when they are texting. Thus, it makes sense that texters rely on what they have available to them - emoticons, deliberate misspellings that mimic speech sounds and, according to our data, punctuation."
Not only that, but as it turns out, texts that had exclamation points at the end were deemed as more sincere, as opposed to being less. Klin explains this notion:
"That's not surprising, but it broadens our claim. [...] Punctuation is used and understood by texters to convey emotions and other social and pragmatic information. Given that people are wonderfully adept at communicating complex and nuanced information in conversations, it's not surprising that as texting evolves, people are finding ways to convey the same types of information in their texts."
