Exploring an Emoji-Based Evaluation and Intervention Method for Psychological Safety in Ongoing Co-Creations

Psychological safety is pivotal for co-creation to build an open environment where innovative ideas can flourish. Traditionally, psychological safety has been evaluated from a stable and long-term perspective by implementing psychological scales. Consequently, existing interventions often focus on steadily enhancing psychological safety, which is less suitable for dynamic short-term co-creation settings. The purpose of this study is to introduce the use of emojis as a novel and intuitive interaction during co-creations and assess their effectiveness in evaluating and influencing psychological safety. We performed two experiments with 140 participants in total to test emojis as evaluations and interventions, respectively. The participants watched videos and annotated them with emojis based on their perceptions of emotions. This process allowed us to explore the relationship between perceived emotions and psychological safety. In the next phase, we embedded emojis directly into the videos to observe whether the participants’ emotional perceptions—and, consequently, their psychological safety—could be influenced by visual cues. Our findings demonstrate that positive emojis are positively correlated with psychological safety and negative emojis are negatively correlated with psychological safety. We also revealed that negative emojis significantly decreased psychological safety scores, whereas positive emojis did not lead to a corresponding increase.