Emojis Can Get Misinterpreted Across Different Phones

Smartphone users probably already know by now that those little smiley faces that they send along with their messages come out differently when they send to someone who uses a different brand of smartphone, but did you know that the difference in design can totally change what you meant to say in the first place?

The University of Minnesota's Grouplens Research Team published a study on the various ways an emoji expression changes meaning depending on the platform— and it is all because each platform has a slightly different design for its emojis.

The study (pdf) titled "Investigating the Potential for Miscommunication Using Emoji," which will be officially published at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Web and Social Media (CWSM) in May, investigates how positively or negatively emoji designs from each platform are interpreted.

In order to determine if there is truly a difference in interpretation with the emojis, the researchers chose 25 different emojis from five different platforms—for a total of 125 emojis— and gave participants a random sampling of 15 emojis each. The participants were asked to say something about each emoji and to rate each depending on how they perceived it.

Surprisingly, Apple's smiley emoji was one of the most negatively interpreted because instead of looking happy, it looks more like a cringe. Take a look at the different smile emojis available in different smartphones below and their average rate for sentiment or emotional perception.

It is true that emojis get used more and more as a creative or even silly way to communicate and that, in spite of supposedly being an embellishment to text-based messages, it sometimes gets used by itself. This only opens up the possibility for miscommunication—intentional or otherwise— like the one below.

"[Fully] understanding emoji's role in human communication will be an important step in developing the next generation of language technologies," study co-author Hannah Miller writes.

Photo: Niels Heidenreich | Flickr