Emoji are often misinterpreted. We all suspected this, and now we've got scientific proof.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota asked a few hundred participants to rate emoji for sentiment from -5 (very negative) to +5 (very positive) and asked for definitions, too. They looked at 22 different emoji on five different platforms.
In the most extreme case — Microsoft's big grin emoji — there was on average a 4.4-point difference in where any two people rated it on the 10-point sentiment scale. Perhaps some people thought it was an angry face.
Below you can see the emoji with the most and least sentiment misconstrual.
If you think sentiment construal is hard, consider semantic construal, where people are asked exactly what an emoji means. Scores range from 0 (most) to (1) least in terms of how similarly they were described.
Tied for most semantic misconstrual here is Apple's unamused face, which people variously interpreted as disappointment, depressing, unimpressed and suspicious. Here are the top and bottom scores:
Even the study authors were struck by how confused people were.
"We expected and hypothesized [misinterpretation] across platforms, but the fact that we found significant within-platform misconstrual was surprising," one of the authors, Hannah Miller, told Tech Insider.
In the paper, they recommend that emoji designers and the governing Unicode Consortium put a little more thought into clear and consistent appearance.
Need some help? Check out our guide to the emoji everyone gets wrong:
