Take a look at the different smile emojis available in different smartphones below and their average rate for sentiment or emotional perception.
Advertisement
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? Taking the “grinning face with smiling eyes” emoji as the benchmark for the study, GroupLens Research has determined that the same emoji can have a different meaning for users on different smartphone platforms, which can obviously lead to miscommunication.
A study by Grouplens looked at popular emoji and how they’re rendered on different platforms, as well as how the recipient interprets them.
The researchers found that people had conflicted interpretations of emoji’s sentiment and semantic (the perceived definition) meanings, whether or not they were looking at a different platforms illustration. On a Samsung phone, this emoji is laughing so hard it’s blushing, while on a Google phone, it’s smiling like it just ate a Thanksgiving meal.
The lesson here: You may not want to rely on that emoji to tell the entire story. This means that “emoji usage may be ripe for misconstrued communication”, the researchers concluded. However, researchers found that emoji can just as easily be misinterpreted even if both people use the same kind of device, and therefore the same set of emoji. You can see how the 22 emoji tracked across platforms, with “smiling face with open mouth and tightly closed eyes”, “face with tears of joy”, “sleeping face”, and “loudly crying face” all having their own issues of interpretation. “However, even within platforms, the average difference is 1.88 points”.
This seems like a fair response: the Apple “grin” is exactly the same as its “grimace”, and the “smiling eyes” are only visible at a large size.
When Abby sends an emoji, she intends a particular meaning. But to be clear, they found that the lack of conclusive interpretation was wider when people looked at cross-platform emojis.
Advertisement
They studied emojis from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and LG.
