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In Texting, Punctuation Conveys Different Emotions. Period.

By Christina Passariello for the WSJ

texting-girlsTechnology is changing language, period

The use of a period in text messages conveys insincerity, annoyance and abruptness, according to a new study from the State University of New York Binghamton. Omitting better communicates the conversational tone of a text message, the study says.

As with any study by university researchers, though, it’s not that simple. The study found that some punctuation expresses sincerity. An exclamation point is viewed as the most sincere. (I overuse exclamation points!)

“It’s not simply that including punctuation implies a lack of sincerity,” said the study’s lead author, Celia Klin, an associate professor of psychology at Binghamton. “There’s something specific about the use of the period.”

The study asked 126 undergrads to evaluate conversations that appeared as text messages and handwritten notes (who uses those anymore?). The exchange started with an invitation, such as, “Dave gave me his extra tickets. Wanna come?” The students were asked to react to one-word responses – “Okay, Sure, Yeah, Yup” – with or without a period.

Grammar is evolving as we use new communication tools. Ms. Klin said she suspects periods in email to be more acceptable than in text messages, for example, because email is less conversational. Text messages are often short one-word replies, she said.

“The rapid exchange of text messaging gives it a speech-like quality,” said Ms. Klin. “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.”

Ms. Klin’s study, “Texting insincerely: the role of the period in text messaging,” appeared in the journal Computers in Human Behavior last month.

2 Human Quirks, a Rush of Irrationality & Why People Don’t Buy From You

Every time I resolve to eat healthy and then promptly see all my determination melt away in the buttery goodness of warm crusty bread, I realize how weak and irrational human beings are.

Yes, you can leave it to me to blame my carb addiction on the entire human race.

But seriously, we like to think we are all rational, reasonable, stable-minded creatures but are really no better than Pavlov’s lab mates…. helpless in the hands of our basic human nature…or quirks if you will.

And this post is about two such human quirks that can make your $10,000 site fall flat on its dashboard or turn an obscenely ugly webpage into a million dollar cash churning machine.

Why do these quirks matter so much?

Because human beings have no control over them!

And they aren’t even consciously aware of their existence…which makes them even more lethal.

Ready to find out what these quirks are?

Quirk Number One: Humans can only follow one command or none at all:

I know it’s popular to be a multi-tasking ninja, but the research is clear and conclusive. Human beings actually can’t multi-task well…or at all.

For many years the psychology research has shown that people can only attend to one task at a time.

To be more specific, your brain can attend to only one cognitive task at a time

Yes you can dance and sing at the same time but brain tasks? Not so much

You can either talk or listen

Write or read

Grasp a concept or make a decision

One task at one time

And if the brain is forced to handle 2-3 cognitive tasks simultaneously, it either abandons the tasks all together or does a poor job of all but one.

How this affects your business and what can you do about it?

If you have one of those websites where the home page is a medley of too many things asking for way too many actions, you might be taxing the brain of your visitor to the point where he won’t do anything at all.

Ask them to do one thing and one thing only (sign up, like your page or donate for example). Define your primary objective for each page and just ask for the action that would help achieve that objective.

Nothing else!

Don’t ask them to like, share, subscribe, add to bookmarks or do any of the things that will take the attention away from your primary objective.

Don’t fatigue their brains, period!

Quirk Two: The Bizarre Power of Three:

The Rule of Three suggests that messages that come in threes are inherently more effective than other numbers of things. You can see this principal in action almost everywhere from Goldilocks and 3 bears to the 3 ghosts in Christmas carol and the three blind mice.

Researchers working in the field of decision-making tell us that people can’t effectively choose between more than 3 to 4 items at a time.

How this affects your business and what can you do about it?
If your sales page has 10 different offerings and 5 different payment plans, you are making it almost impossible for the potential buyer to make a decision.
Grouping things in chunks of 3 would make it more brain friendly for the visitors and they would be more likely to explore each group on its own.

For best results you can make categories of offerings based on the problem they solve, chunk your offerings underneath and then use these nifty little tricks to price them so they seem like a bloody steal!

At the end of the day, human beings and their brains crave comfort and ease. If you make a task unnecessarily difficult, the brain would be quick to abandon it even if there are benefits to it.

Websites that adopt this key principal (don’t make the brain do undue work) will always outperform websites that believe in cramming as much information as possible in a web page.

The post 2 Human Quirks, a Rush of Irrationality & Why People Don’t Buy From You appeared first on The Persuasion Revolution.