‘omg rly’: Text abbreviations lower perceived sincerity

If you often abbreviate words and phrases in your texts, you're far from alone. An estimated 90% of texters do it, using 'thx' instead of thanks, for example, or 'hru?' in place of 'how are you?'. Most people assume that the recipients of their messages won't care about these abbreviations — or even like them, according to new research in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

However, the work on a total of more than 5,000 people from around the world — including some who used the app Tinder — also found that this is not true. In fact, texters who use word abbreviations seem less sincere, and the recipients are less likely to message back.

David Fang at Stanford University and colleagues used a mixture of online experiments, surveys and an analysis of field data (the Tinder messages) in their research. Initial online studies revealed that participants not only felt that someone who used abbreviations was less sincere, but that the more abbreviations they used, the less sincere they seemed to be. This led the recipients to put less effort into creating their replies.

The team then ran a lab-based experiment in which pairs of young, heterosexual, American adults went on text-based speed dates. In each date, one person was asked to use eight terms while texting (but not to reveal this instruction to their partner). The eight terms were either all full words or all abbreviations.

The results showed that the partners of people who used full-text terms versus abbreviations rated them as being more sincere and as having gone to greater effort. These partners also reported a stronger desire to text them back and (in a marginally significant finding) they were more likely to share their contact information.  

For the Tinder element of the study, the team sourced outgoing messages from 686 users from 37 countries across five continents, who'd taken part in more than 200,000 conversations. The researchers analysed these messages, quantifying the level of abbreviation use in each one. They found that when more abbreviations were used, the Tinder conversation tended to be shorter. This finding held even when the team took into account a range of other factors, including the user's age, gender, and level of education.

In their final study, which they ran online, Fang and his colleagues found that 80% of participants predicted that other people would be indifferent to texting abbreviations, and 4.2% believed that the response would be positive. Only 15.8% predicted what the team had consistently found — that the impact was negative. It seems, then, that the vast majority of people are unaware of the undesirable effects of this common practice.

There are some limitations to this work, one being that the texters were mostly English-speakers, which may have affected the findings. Also, the team didn't explore whether using abbreviations might be more damaging in some contexts than others — perhaps they might affect 'getting to know you' or more emotional conversations more than fact-based exchanges, for example. But the fact that, across a series of studies of people of different ages, the team consistently got the same patterns of findings suggests that these results are worth bearing in mind. 

Read the paper in full:

Fang, D., Zhang, Y. (E.), & Maglio, S. J. (2025). Shortcuts to insincerity: Texting abbreviations seem insincere and not worth answering. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 154(1), 39–57. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001684

Want the latest in psychological research, straight to your inbox?
Sign up to Research Digest's free weekly newsletter.