Lying with at-issue and not-at-issue emojis

Abstract

Drawing on the commitment based definition of lying, we hypothesize that emojis can be used to lie if and only if they cause speaker commitment. We test the three-way relation between emojis, commitment, and lying in two experimental rating studies. In experiment 1, we ask participants whether a writer is lying when they use a pro-text, at-issue emoji, a message-final, not-at-issue emoji, or no emoji in the control. In experiment 2, participants rate the writer’s commitment, operationalized as accountability and restricted deniability, for the same message types. The results show that participants rate messages with final, not-at-issue emojis significantly lower on the lying scale and higher on the deniability scale than messages with pro-text emojis or without emojis. We conclude that writers are seen as similarly committed to their pro-text, at-issue emojis, as to their textual content. In contrast, message-final, not-at-issue emojis trigger less commitment and are less likely to be seen as lies. Our findings indicate that emojis can indeed be used to lie, and that their usage (pro-text vs. message-final) matters for the extent to which emoji content is identified as a lie. These findings are compatible with a view where different emoji uses map onto different types of semantic content, such as at-issue assertion (pro-text emojis) vs. not-at-issue supplemental meaning (message-final emojis). They closely align with a commitment-based definition of lying.