Judging emoji by occupation: A case of emoji-based sarcasm interpretation

The smiling emoji has been claimed to be a marker of sarcastic intention among young Chinese users in computer-mediated communication. However, it is not well understood whether people interpret the emoji differently based on the characteristics or traits of the sender, as conveyed by occupation stereotypes. We investigated the effect of sender occupation on emoji-based sarcasm interpretation in both unambiguous (Experiment 1) and ambiguous (Experiment 2) contexts. The results showed that contextual incongruity was privileged over sender occupation in cueing sarcastic intention. In unambiguous contexts, sender occupation exerted no significant influence on the interpretation of emoji-based sarcastic statements. In contrast, sender occupation played an important role in the interpretation of emoji-based statements in ambiguous contexts. Specifically, emoji-based ambiguous statements delivered by senders in high‑irony occupations were more likely to be perceived as sarcastic than by those in low-irony occupations. However, sender occupation did not affect the interpretation of the emoji; instead, it biased the judgment of emoji in sarcasm interpretation. In a follow-up experiment (Experiment 3), we investigated the perceived characteristics of both high- and low-irony occupations. The results demonstrated that individuals in high-irony occupations were stereotyped with characteristics, including being humorous, insincere, easy to setting up close relationships, and of a lower social status. Taken together, our study suggests that stereotypical information about the sender could drive the interpretation of potentially sarcastic statements, and the contextual information modulates the effect of sender occupation on sarcasm interpretation.