Same face, different meaning: a new study reveals how people interpret emoji

Emoji have been around long enough to become part of our everyday communication culture. A thumbs up means “okay,” heart eyes show approval, and the 2015 Oxford Dictionaries word of the year was “Face with Tears of Joy.“

But depending on who you’re messaging, your emojified text might be drastically misinterpreted.

A study from the University of Minnesota’s GroupLens lab found that people have very different interpretations of what certain emoji mean. The research team, led by Hannah Miller, selected the 25 most popular anthropomorphic emoji — ones that looked like human faces — and asked online survey respondents to analyze five variations for each one, taken from Apple, Microsoft, and Android smartphone platforms.

The survey participants were asked to rate each emoji’s emotional meaning on a scale of -5 (strongly negative) to 5 (strongly positive). They also described each emoji in words.

The results revealed that miscommunication happens both in cross-platform communication — where slight changes in emoji styling can alter their appearances and cause confusion — and in same-platform communication.

“Overall, we see that even when the emoji rendering selected by the sender is exactly the same as what the recipient sees (because both sender and recipient are using the same smartphone platform), there is still plenty of sentiment misconstrual,” the researchers found.

When comparing one platform’s emoji with another, there was about a 2.04-point difference in the emotional scale rating. Same-platform interpretation wasn’t too far behind, with people’s emotional ratings differing by about 1.88 points on average.

The researchers found that “person raising both hands in celebration” (a.k.a. “praise hands emoji”) was in “the top three most different renderings for four of our five platforms, suggesting some Unicode characters are simply more ambiguous than others, leading to within- and across-platform differences.”

The researchers compiled their findings in a comprehensive chart, ranking the median differences in interpretation from greatest to least. The gray bars indicate the variation in interpretation range.

So why do we all interpret emojis differently? The University of Minnesota research team thinks nuances in emoji design, like the range of color shades or the slant of an eyebrow, leave a lot of room for interpretation. But this nuance is also what makes emoji such a powerful language tool. According to the BBC, Emoji may allow us to reincorporate important types of nonverbal communication, like gestures, into our written dialogue. Adding a symbol to text allows us to enhance our messaging.

Emoji come in 10 varieties depending on what platform you’re viewing them from — this can mean the difference between a teeth-baring grimace and an ear-to-ear smile. If you’re worried about a mishap, maybe it’s just better to stick with bitmoji.