Biases in How We Communicate Can't Be Fixed With Emojis

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The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it. —William H. Whyte

In my previous post, I described a couple of reasons why the use of emojis can result in miscommunication: they render differently on different devices and apps, and several of them, such as “folded hands," are inherently ambiguous.

In this post, I describe some of the research that's been conducted on how people understand what emojis mean, as well as the challenges of communicating online. Some of the earlier studies in this area are problematic because research participants were asked about the meaning of emojis in the absence of supporting context.

Context and Comprehension

In more recent work on this topic, Hannah Miller and her collaborators asked participants to make sense of emojis employed in real contexts, such as Twitter posts, and compared their interpretations to the same emojis when presented alone.

And the result? Surprisingly, the additional context provided by a tweet’s content didn’t make a given emoji’s meaning any clearer than when it appeared by itself. And in the case of one emoji used in the study—"relieved face"—the researchers found there was more confusion about its meaning when it appeared in a tweet than when it did not.

Your reaction to these findings may be to question whether interpreting tweets composed by strangers is really a fair test of understanding. After all, most people exchange social media posts and text messages with friends and family—in other words, with people who they know well. Surely such messages are better understood than those written by strangers. But as it turns out, even this assumption is problematic.

Friends Without Benefits

Monica Riordan and her student Lauren Trichtinger asked research participants to compose email messages conveying a particular emotion and then to rate how confident they were that a friend or a stranger would interpret their emotional state accurately. Not surprisingly, the participants thought that their friends would be more accurate in understanding them. But when friends were asked to interpret each other’s messages, their overall level of accuracy was no higher than when they evaluated messages composed by strangers.

Writing Versus Speaking

Riordan's finding isn’t an outlier. In a classic study conducted by Justin Kruger and his collaborators, one group of research participants composed emails that were intended to be serious or sarcastic. A second group of participants recorded themselves uttering serious or sarcastic statements. Both groups were then asked how likely it would be for someone else to interpret their messages correctly.

Participants in both the email and recorded voice conditions thought that, on average, there was a 78% chance that others would understand them as serious or sarcastic. And when participants heard the recorded serious or sarcastic sentences, their average accuracy approached that level: it was 73%. But in the email condition, the accuracy level was almost at chance—the written messages were interpreted correctly only 56% of the time.

The Sounds of Sarcasm

Why might this be? It’s likely that the research participants exploited the rich set of vocal cues that speakers can employ for signaling sarcasm and other forms of nonserious speech. These cues include changes in vocal pitch, speaking rate, and volume. Sarcastic utterances have been characterized by Patricia Rockwell as typically being “lower, slower, and louder” than serious statements. And these vocal tells may account for the relatively high degree of accuracy of the participants who were able to hear the intonation of the statements.

But how do we explain the relatively poor performance of Kruger's participants in differentiating serious emails from sarcastic ones? This may be due to the relatively impoverished nature of written communication when compared to its spoken counterpart. Ideally, emojis could help to fill that gap by supplying facial expressions that would clarify the intentions of an email. But as mentioned in my previous post, there is no agreed-upon way to signal sarcasm with emojis.

Body Language Essential Reads

A Brief History of Submission

Why Your Body Language Could Be Offensive to Others

The Illusion of Transparency

Finally, Kruger’s study calls attention to an even more fundamental problem lurking in the background: an egocentric bias that blinds us to how easily others might understand what we think and write. When we compose a snarky email, a voice in our heads supplies the necessary intonation that makes us believe others will interpret our sarcasm as intended. But our recipient doesn’t have that same advantage.

This egocentric bias manifests itself in a variety of ways, such as through the curse of knowledge and the spotlight effect. Many examples of the problems caused by these biases can be found in my recently published book on miscommunication. Our deep-seated belief that our thoughts and intentions are relatively transparent to others is simply not supported by the large body of research on this topic. In some situations, emojis may help us to communicate more clearly—but they are rarely as helpful as we think they are or would like them to be.