My brother’s text messages can read like fragments of an ancient code: “hru,” “wyd,” “plz”—truncated, cryptic, and never quite satisfying to receive. I’ll often find myself second-guessing whether “gr8” means actual excitement or whether it’s a perfunctory nod.

This oddity has nagged at me for years, so I eventually embarked upon a series of studies with fellow researchers Sam Maglio and Yiran Zhang. I wanted to know whether these clipped missives might undermine genuine dialogue, exploring the unspoken signals behind digital shorthand.

As we gathered data, surveyed people and set up experiments, it became clear that those tiny shortcuts—sometimes hailed as a hallmark of efficient communication—undermine relationships instead of simplifying them.

Most people type “ty” and “brb” (for “thank you” and “be right back”) without batting an eye.

In a survey we conducted of 150 American texters ages 18 to 65, 90.1% reported regularly using abbreviations in their daily messages, and 84.2% believed these shortcuts had either a positive effect or no meaningful impact on how the messages were perceived by the recipients.

But our findings suggest that the mere inclusion of abbreviations, although seemingly benign, start feeling like a brush-off. In other words, whenever a texter chops words down to their bare consonants, recipients sense a lack of effort, which causes them to disengage.

It’s a subtle but pervasive phenomenon that most people don’t intuit.

We started with controlled lab tests, presenting 1,170 participants ages 15 to 80 with one of two........

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