Lyngo Lab

📖❗Emails & Exclamation Marks❗📖

Can throwing an exclamation mark into your emails make you seem warmer? We conducted an email experiment with 400 people and found that it really doesn’t matter too much—with one exception.

While exclamations do not greatly affect how likable, warm, or smart you seem, on average, nor does the gender of the email sender or recipient matter, the AGE of your recipients does.

To Gen Z, seeing exclamation marks in your emails increases how likable you seem by 22% (p = 0.002).

As one of hundreds of studies run by our award-winning, Harvard-trained team of psychology researchers, the findings demonstrate the importance of rigorous, practical communication research.

Check out our other studies to gain even more insights into how to communicate effectively.

📊 Bar Graphs: Perceptions of Error Bars

Ever wondered about the significance of those "T"-shaped lines on bar graphs? They’re used to report the data’s margin of error. It’s a rigorous practice to include them. But does it come at the cost of understandability?

We tested whether including error bars enhances or hinders the understandability, interestingness, and perceived rigor of bar graphs with a large-scale experiment.

📚 The Experiment:

1,200 people were shown a bar graph featuring data from a survey on men’s and women’s game preferences (table games vs. video games). For the experiment, we randomized whether margin of error bars were either included or excluded for each viewer. Graph viewers then rated how understandable, interesting, and scientifically rigorous the graph was using 1-7 survey scales.

📈 Results:

Although error bars reduced understandability by a trivial 2% (p = 0.054), error bars increased perceived rigor by 8.3% (p < 0.001). They even increased interestingness slightly, by 3.8% (p = 0.057).

Notably, error bars packed the biggest punch for horizontal bar graphs (as opposed to vertical). Including error bars in horizontal graphs enhanced perceived rigor by 16%.

📝 Conclusion:

Error bars aren't just statistical jargon; they boost the objectivity and perceived rigor of your graph. Don't shy away from them, especially if you're working with horizontal bar graphs.

📝 Do Semicolons Make You Look Smarter?

Over the past 200 years, semicolon usage has declined by 69%, according to Google Ngram. The semicolon tends to slip through the cracks between the comma and the period, often substituted by either of these more common punctuation marks.

But might the semicolon’s rarity and nuance make the writer look smarter? In previous studies, we’ve found that big words do. On the other hand, perhaps semicolons just make you look arrogant. Curiosity got the better of us, so we designed an experiment to test it.

🔍 Experiment

1,200 participants from the research platform Prolific read a paragraph, which we designed to either include or exclude semicolons (randomly assigned). We also randomized the context of the paragraph, either a work email or a fashion article, to enhance the generalizability of our findings. After reading the paragraph, participants rated how smart and how arrogant the writer seemed on 1-7 scales (1 = Not at all, 7 = Very much).

📊 Results

Surprisingly, there were no significant differences. Semicolons did not sway perceived competence (p = 0.941) nor arrogance (p = 0.967). Context also failed to yield substantial differences, in this case an email vs. a fashion article (p = 0.113; p = 0.563).

🗝️ Conclusion

In everyday writing, semicolons appear to have a minimal effect on how others perceive you. They don’t make you look smarter, nor do they make you seem arrogant.