I recently discovered that I've been sending *wildly* different emojis to my Android friends.
A new paper has shown that people interpret an emoji's meaning in a variety of ways, in part because emojis look so different across platforms.
The paper's co-author, Hannah Miller, a Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota, and her team asked 304 people how they felt about different emojis.
One emoji, "grinning face with smiling eyes," is particularly ambiguous.
And that ambiguity leads to confusing cross-platform conversations like this:
In addition to sentiment, the study also asked participants to describe the emojis in their own words.
Not only was sentiment different because of the varying platforms (iOS vs. Android), but users' interpretations of emojis varied within the same platform as well.
"A lot of people reacting to this study are calling for a standard. Well, it does come from a standard — Unicode. There is a title, like 'smiling face with open mouth and tightly closed eyes,' and each company creates their own rendering based on that," Miller said.
"What we see is a more technical solution, where it's automatically computed how you may be miscommunicating based on your input."
The researchers said there were some limitations in the study. First, that surrounding text may disambiguate the emoji's meaning and second, that culture, age, and technical background may be a factor.
Bottom line: Be wary of what your emoji may be saying on a different device. Nothin' wrong with an old-fashioned smiley or frown when in doubt. :) :(
