The Effect of Uncertainty in Communication.
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2020-06-26
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en
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This research examined the effect of expressing certainty and uncertainty in communication. We studied whether an email by a manager had a different effect on participants’ perception of the manager when containing either certainty markers (e.g. surely), uncertainty markers (e.g. maybe) or no markers. To study this issue, we administered three different versions of the same email template to participants, one version per participant only, and asked them afterwards to evaluate the manager in terms of authoritativeness, trustworthiness, competence and sociability based on the email they read. Against our expectations, the study did not produce a significant result, meaning that the three versions of the email did not cause different impressions of the manager. These findings could be due to the fact that participants only read one email each instead of all three versions. Furthermore, we can’t be sure if the results were different had we chosen a message that was used in previous research. It is up to future research to clarify these open questions our study provides.
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