The 🙂 Is a Tiny Menace

On first glance, the “slightly smiling face” is a nice, friendly emoji: 🙂

It’s certainly gentler than its unhinged-looking sibling, the “grinning face”: 😀

But watch it at work in this text exchange:

Or here:

And what about in office communication systems like Slack, where it’s sometimes used as punctuation, but the kind of punctuation that can make your words instantly more passive-aggressive, creepy, or snarky?

Indeed, on closer examination, that slightly smiling face is a lie. It mocks us and throws us off balance as it purports to placate.

It’s the nice-to-see-you smile, when it’s not nice at all.

It’s the oh-good-my-ex-is-here-with-their-new-partner smile.

The yes-moving-that-deadline-a-week-earlier-is-a-wonderful-idea smile.

As with faces generally, it’s all about the eyes: These are fixed and empty, like an ill-intentioned robot. Look into those eyes.

Those cold, dead eyes.

Twin caverns gaze straight through you; soulless chasms that render the thin, closed-mouth smile strung weakly below nothing more than a hollow mockery of humanity.

But that’s just my opinion.

Linda Kaye is a cyberpsychologist and senior lecturer at Edge Hill University in the U.K. whose work includes the study of emoji and what they reveal about those who use them. Kaye studies emoji because they’re actually useful in this digital age. As she has written, “[I]t turns out they may be serving a range of important psychological and social functions within human communication.”

Emoji can make it clear that a joke is a joke, that anger is anger. Emoji can even demonstrate deep sympathy for a friend’s terrible news (so long as you remember to use the crying emoji under that news and not the crying laughing one). These very effective shortcuts to goodwill are a kind of emotional contagion, passing on a feeling of warmth and establishing the mood of a room, an exchange, or an interview.

But even Kaye is discomfited by this tiny yellow psychopath. “It’s a little freaky and odd,” she told me when I got her on the phone and she pulled up the emoji on her screen. “The eyes aren’t smiling. It’s like, ‘Everything’s okay but it’s really not.’”

The slightly smiling emoji veers into uncanny valley territory; it is, at its very root, unsettling. And that may well be a feature, not a bug: “Some emoji,” Kaye explains, “and this might be one of them… are about expressing something implicitly and not explicitly.”

A genuine smile — a “Duchenne smile” — reveals itself involuntarily around the eyes, and humans are good at subconsciously spotting the difference. As neurologist Eliezer J. Sternberg writes in his book NeuroLogic: The Brain’s Hidden Rationale Behind Our Irrational Behavior, “When we use our conscious powers to feign a smile, we alter the pattern of muscle activation, and people around us can tell.”

And fake smiling could actually be hurting us. Studies have shown that service workers who were forced to grin all day reported higher levels of heavy drinking after work. It’s no wonder the 🙂 is so unsettling.

Those cold, dead eyes.

As those beady eyes stared back at Kaye from her screen, displaying the total emotional detachment of a child torturing a small animal, she started to come around to my view. “I think you’re right,” she said. “It does look slightly psychotic, actually.”

As humans, we are constantly picking up verbal and nonverbal cues from one another in what sociologist Charles Horton Cooley described as the looking-glass self. We study how we’re coming across in the eyes of others in our everyday interactions — a process that becomes all the harder when they’re online.

But what are our options? They’re limited, if you don’t want to leer creepily at your friends and co-workers with a 😀.

Once again, Kaye provided an answer. In her email correspondence, there was one emoji she used a number of times.

It’s this one: 😊

The crinkled eyes, the blushing cheeks, and the broad smile speak of delight, openness, and encouragement. And most of all, that thing we crave: sincerity.