Weird World

New study confirms that people who end text messages with full stops are awful and heartless

A study in the US has proved that people who end text messages with full stops are perceived as being less sincere, probably because the people sending them are heartless, reports the Washington Post.

Apart from proving that full stops are the new equivalent of eye-rolling, the study, by Researchers from New York’s Binghamton University also found that using exclamation marks to end your text may make your messages seem more sincere than no punctuation at all.

“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,” said head researcher Celia Klin.

“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.”

In short, full stops make you sound a bit aggressive or sarcastic. They can also make you sound like Christopher Walken.