Daniel Willingham--Science & Education
Hypothesis non fingo
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What does your Facebook status say about you?

1/13/2014

 
Most of us don't put a lot of thought into our Facebook status updates--we broadcast bits of daily news to our friends. Here are a few from my feed as I write this:
  • "I now have a tattoo."
  • "It's kind of sad that we are wasting valuable time paying a babysitter to buy a new TV."
  • "Neat do it yourself Ideas in this link."
  • "Stunning sunset off the deck!"

I'm guessing most people don't think more than a few seconds about the snippet of prose they offer their friends. But even if a lot of thought doesn't go into an update, do they, in aggregate, say something about our personalities, our relationships, our lives?

Looking at the status updates above, do you think you could guess the age of each writer? The
sex?

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Cambridge University thought status updates might prove useful to social science, a new way to use "big" data.
They call their method "differential language analysis."

First, software searches for
words (including emoticons and hashtags) and phrases (e.g., "happy birthday," or "like about you"). Researchers then analyze which words and phrases tend to differentiate groups of people--"groups" in this case might be defined in any number of ways: sex, gender, religion, politics, etc.

Researchers
also took note of when certain words and phrases tended to cluster together within individuals, forming a category. For example, the words "university," "professor," and "campus" might co-occur, obviously demonstrating some connectedness of experience.

The researchers applied the method to 70,000 Facebook users who had previously consented to have their status updates and some other data anonymously available for research purposes.

The researchers
present their results mostly visually (and in fact claim that visualization is critical to help make sense of the many positive correlations obtained) in the familiar word cloud format.

Picture
Here's a much more detailed version, separated by age and gender. (Click to expand.)
Picture
What do we make of this sort of data? Well, there's certainly face validity. The words match our stereotypes (or at least, mine) of the sort of thing we'd expect from these age groups. But can this method do anything beyond a cute demonstration?

The authors suggest it can be a tool to test hypotheses. They provide the example of the "age positivity effect": older people are generally happier than younger people, even though both young and old view old age negatively
(Carstensen & Mikels, 2005). This phenomenon has already been tested via other methods.

The graph below shows word frequency in status updates as a function of age.
Picture
Could this method be put to good use in education? If we view it as a another window, however imperfect, into the mind of users, it would certainly seem so. What is on the minds of students who succeed in school? Of those who don't succeed in school, but succeed in life? Of those who love mathematics but hate school?

References
Carstensen, L. L., & Mikels, J. A. (2005). At the intersection of emotion
and cognition: Aging and the positivity effect. Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 14,
117–121.


Kern, M. L. et al (2013) From "Sooo excited!!! to "So proud": Using language to study development. Developmental Psychology. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0035048
Tim H
1/13/2014 12:50:18 am

Is the word, "grateful," or just the concept of gratitude being tracked? If the former, I think you'd have to somehow control for language use. My (high school) students would never say, "grateful," even in a thank you letter. They'd use words like "thank you," "happy that," etc. -- or even drop a positive emoticon. Just a thought.

Similarly, I suspect the frequency of "hate" to be a marker of how different ages use social media. College students complain about their classes, but working age users often have coworkers and even bosses on their newsfeeds. Self-censorship.

Dan Willingham
1/13/2014 01:42:58 am

Tim, on the first point it's a little hard to tell from the description in the article, but I can almost guarantee they analyzed word families; that would be abs. standard in this sort of analysis.

Your second point strikes me as really important; the differences may reflect differences in how people use FB, nothing broader about attitudes, personality, whatever.

Mike G
1/16/2014 12:07:51 am

Admittedly off-topic, but request for you to blog the John Gabrieli study.

WaPo lede "In a finding that should give pause to backers of standardized test-based school reform..."

Then WaPo favorably cites you a couple paragraphs later. But I wonder your big picture take on this.

Why would Gabs' finding that shows "you can help kids learn more knowledge, but not affect IQ so easily" undermine testing?

Were pro-testing folks out there claiming schools with high student growth are changing IQ? I haven't seen them myself, though that doesn't mean they haven't been out there.

Ellie Kesselman link
1/18/2014 03:29:15 pm

Hello Mike G!
Thank you so much for mentioning John Gabrieli's study. I wasn't aware of it. I just read the Washington Post article, and had the very same thoughts as you. It IS odd, the logical implication that pro-testing groups were claiming that schools with high student growth result in increased student IQ.

I looked around a bit more, found the original press release from the APA where Gabrieli's research was published. That didn't help, as WaPo mostly lifted from that. However, Boston NPR online had better coverage, including a lengthy interview, with annotations between each Q & A. I hope this comment system allows URLs
http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2013/12/standard-test-fluid-skills

Nevertheless, I echo Mike G's sentiment. I would be most appreciative if you, Daniel Willingham, might be so kind as to blog i.e. critique/ explain the implications of Gabrieli's study for your readers.

Ellie Kesselman link
1/18/2014 03:29:42 pm

Hello Mike G!
Thank you so much for mentioning John Gabrieli's study. I wasn't aware of it. I just read the Washington Post article, and had the very same thoughts as you. It IS odd, the logical implication that pro-testing groups were claiming that schools with high student growth result in increased student IQ.

I looked around a bit more, found the original press release from the APA where Gabrieli's research was published. That didn't help, as WaPo mostly lifted from that. However, Boston NPR online had better coverage, including a lengthy interview, with annotations between each Q & A. I hope this comment system allows URLs
http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2013/12/standard-test-fluid-skills

Nevertheless, I echo Mike G's sentiment. I would be most appreciative if you, Daniel Willingham, might be so kind as to blog i.e. critique/ explain the implications of Gabrieli's study for your readers.

Ellie Kesselman link
1/18/2014 04:02:24 pm

Hello Mike G!
Thank you so much for mentioning John Gabrieli's study. I wasn't aware of it. I just read the Washington Post article, and had the very same thoughts as you. It IS odd, the logical implication that pro-testing groups were claiming that schools with high student growth result in increased student IQ.

I looked around a bit more, found the original press release from the APA where Gabrieli's research was published. That didn't help, as WaPo mostly lifted from that. However, Boston NPR online had better coverage, including a lengthy interview, with annotations between each Q & A. I hope this comment system allows URLs
http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2013/12/standard-test-fluid-skills

Nevertheless, I echo Mike G's sentiment. I would be most appreciative if you, Daniel Willingham, might be so kind as to blog i.e. critique/ explain the implications of Gabrieli's study for your readers.

Ellie Kesselman link
1/18/2014 12:35:16 pm

For the 13 to 18 year olds, I would have expected to see "lol" and "lmao" As for "prom", maybe, but pr0n seems more likely. The Bieber made an appearance, as expected.

After reading this, I finally had the flash of insight that should have occurred to me months ago, when Facebook introduced standardized emoticons with a surprising level of fanfare, or so I thought at the time. Now I understand! It was done in order to more accurately mine sentiment in text.

vattenskada link
1/21/2014 08:36:02 pm

Interesting to see ... thank you it's well done :)


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