Scientists have found what words can never say “real men”
MOSCOW, 15 Nov — RIA Novosti. Psychologists analyzed the millions of messages on Twitter and found out that the stereotypes about how to speak and what do you think men and women are only amplified in the global network and hamper the determination of the sex of authors of certain posts, according to a paper published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.
“Wrong stereotypes that people use to categorize interlocutors, only intensified, not weakened in the virtual world. For example, volunteers who felt that uneducated people often use foul language, also believed that users with a University education never use the Mat, which, of course, absolutely not true,” says Jordan carpenter (Carpenter Jordan) from the Center of positive psychology in Berlin (Germany).
Carpenter and his colleagues found that almost all the words that the majority of Internet users believes 100% a sign that their author is a man or a woman, in fact, are false stereotypes, and made a “correct” list of male and female expressions and words, experimenting on several thousands of online volunteers.
Read tacumshane: Men become angrier, when there are a lot of women
How to tell the scientists, they were able to enlist the support of the Twitter and to access several million messages on the social network left thousands of its users, their gender, age, place of work and other personal data. After analyzing these messages using the algorithms of the so-called “natural speech processing”, scientists have compiled a list of the most frequently occurring words in them, who had used men and women, liberals and conservatives, and other social groups.
After that, the psychologists decided to see if I can capture these differences for volunteers, which scientists have shown these messages and asked to determine whether the author is male or female, or left or right activist, and to justify their opinion, pointing to the words “given” gender or political orientation of their author.
It turned out that those false or true stereotypes that people use to evaluate beliefs or behavior of others, will not disappear when you transfer communication to the virtual world. Moreover, they are even worse.
For example, if men used the word “cute”, “wonderful”, “beautiful”, OMG, or addressed to the interlocutor “on you”, the majority of respondents believed their women. On the other hand, women often wrote about sports, technology or science, often perceived by the volunteers as men. The proportion of errors caused by such false stereotypes, in total, accounted for 25% of the answers of the participants.
A similar situation was observed in other “disciplines” of the Internet-Olympiad — for example, the fascination with politics and business news were perceived by the majority of the volunteers as the exclusive indicator of middle or advanced age, and the typical youth lexicon, the fixation on “I” and the mangling of words as signs of a teenager.
Overall, all this may explain why discussions in the Internet space often have a much more violent motion than political or other disputes in the real world — the tendency to assign labels and stereotyping in the network can interfere with the participants in this “Boxing by correspondence” to perceive the thoughts and personalities of their opponents.