Text Messaging Will Make You Empathic Like Deanna Troi

Posted 10/27/2008 at 2:25pm | by Andy Salisbury

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It just so happens that text messaging isn’t the soulless form of communication that we’d all thought. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Jeffery Hancock of Cornell University has recently run an experiment on using only text messaging as a form of communication to convey feelings, and the results might surprise you.

The study consisted of 44 pairs of participants, all using only text messaging as means of communication for 20 minutes with the goal of finding out as much about their partner as possible. They were also asked to talk about something that was stressing them out. To help promote communication, one member from each pair watched either a scene from Sophie’s Choice (where a mother in Auschwitz is forced to choose which of her two children would be put to death) or a clip that simply involved small talk.

The results came out with astonishingly high accuracy. They showed that every participant was able to accurately convey their partner’s state of mind, mood and felt a real connection with them. Those teamed up with the watchers of Sophie’s Choice were also notably saddened after the chat.

So as it turns out, texting is a very viable form of communication. It allows us more time to formulate an answer to whomever we’re speaking with, and to be more honest with them than they might be over the phone or email.

Image Credit: AmericanJR.com