Do emoji mean the same thing to the other person?
A 2019 systematic review of the emoji literature reports that the same character is read differently across platforms and cultures, and puts a number on the gap between sender and receiver.
Often they do not, and the research literature has put numbers on the gap. A 2019 systematic review in Frontiers in Psychology of emoji research reports that interpretation is influenced by platform, individual characteristics and cultural background, and that for the same negative emoji the sender’s feeling can be 26 per cent different from the receiver’s.
The question comes up when a message lands badly and the only thing either person can point at afterwards is a small yellow face. It is a reasonable thing to wonder about, because the picture you tapped and the picture the other person saw were drawn by two different companies, and because the words around it carried less of the meaning than you probably intended.
The same character, drawn differently on each phone
Emoji are graphic symbols with predefined names and a Unicode code point, which is what lets them travel between devices at all. The review records that the first set was released in 1999 by its Japanese originator Shigetaka Kurita, and that the word is a transliteration of a Japanese compound meaning picture, write, character.
A shared code point is not a shared picture. The review reports that although emoji use Unicode, the presentation style differs across iOS, Android, Microsoft and other systems because different developers draw them, and it cites work finding that emoji on the iOS platform were rated more aesthetically attractive, familiar, clear and meaningful than those on Android. It then states the consequence directly: this difference in platform display leads to misunderstanding and divergence in the emotional and semantic interpretation of emoji during cross platform use.
A 26 per cent gap between what was meant and what was read
The sharpest figure in the review comes from work by Berengueres and Castro, reported there as finding that for the same negative emoji, the sender’s emotional feelings can be 26 per cent different from the receiver’s.
That number deserves its limits stated in the same breath. It is one finding about negative emoji, reported inside a review rather than measured by it, and it describes a difference in rated feeling rather than a rate at which people misunderstand each other. What it supports is narrow and still useful: on the negative end of the range, the two ends of a conversation are not reading the same thing.
Faces are misread more often than objects
The review also reports work by Riordan finding that the degree of misunderstanding of facial emoji is higher than that of non facial emoji. The emoji people reach for when they are trying to soften a sentence are, on this evidence, the ones least likely to land as sent. A picture of an object carries a narrower range of readings than a picture of an expression.
This sits alongside what the wider literature on written tone already says, and it is why a page like why text messages get misunderstood and the arithmetic behind the 7 38 55 rule keep arriving at the same place from different directions.
Where the official meaning and the used meaning part company
Every emoji has an official name in the Unicode standard. The review reports that the specific meanings users want to express may differ from those official definitions, producing different interpretations of the same emoji, and it gives a worked example: some people read one particular emoji as prayer and others read it as clapping hands.
That is the whole problem in one character. Neither reading is a mistake about the picture. They are two conventions that grew up in different places and now meet in one chat window, and the review notes that in such a case it is difficult for the two sides to understand each other, which reduces the efficiency of communication.
What an export keeps of an emoji, and what it loses
A chat export is a text file. An emoji survives in it as the code point you sent, so a tool reading that file can count it, place it and see what you wrote around it. What does not survive is the drawing: nothing in the file records which platform rendered the character on the other person’s screen, or which of the two readings above that person brought to it.
Portraitor reads the written messages in the file you upload and nothing else. Its privacy policy states that chat exports often contain photographs, videos and voice recordings, that the service never opens them and never transmits them, and that only the written messages are read, on your device. An emoji therefore reaches the analysis as text while an attached picture of a face does not reach it at all.
The published pages stop short of one thing a careful reader will want, so this page stops there too. The policy lists what the masking replaces before anything is transmitted, namely names, email addresses, telephone numbers, postal addresses and credentials, and emoji are not on that list. Beyond that, neither the home page nor the privacy policy says anything about how emoji characters are handled by the analysis, and we are not going to infer it from the mechanism.
What follows is modest and worth knowing before you upload anything. A portrait built from your side of a conversation can report how you use a character. It cannot report what the other person saw, because that was never in the file. If that distinction is the one you care about, what a chat analysis cannot tell you is the more useful page, and reading your own WhatsApp chat with Portraitor is what the product actually offers. The uploader is on the Portraitor home page.
One punctuation mark carries the same problem as one character, and the full stop is the mark that has actually been measured: what a full stop does at the end of a text message goes through that work.
Frequently asked questions
Frequently asked questions
Do emoji look different on iPhone and Android?
Yes. The review reports that although emoji share a Unicode code point, their presentation style differs across iOS, Android, Microsoft and other systems because different developers draw them, and that this difference leads to divergence in how they are interpreted across platforms.
How often is an emoji misunderstood?
There is no single rate, and the review does not give one. The figure it does report is that for the same negative emoji, the sender’s emotional feelings can be 26 per cent different from the receiver’s, which is a difference in rated feeling rather than a frequency of misunderstanding.
Which emoji are misread most?
Facial ones, on the evidence the review cites. It reports work by Riordan finding that the degree of misunderstanding of facial emoji is higher than that of non facial emoji.
Does a chat analysis read my emoji?
Portraitor reads the written messages in the export you upload, and an emoji is part of that written text. The privacy policy lists what masking replaces before transmission, and emoji are not on that list. Neither published page says more than that, so neither do we.
The character is shared. The picture, and the reading, were never guaranteed to be.
Your conversations, read the way you would read someone else’s.
Portraitor takes a chat export you already have, anonymises it in your browser, and returns a structured reading of how you come across. Identifying details are removed in your browser before anything is sent.
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