Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media | Hacker News Reader

Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media

plosone.org

44 pointssupo8 comments

It's interesting to see from the graphs how 35 years of age seems to be the "crossover" point where the prevalence of words like "we, family, friends, interview, kind, caring" over take "haha, lol, :P, jk, stupid, ugh". I wonder if 35 is some kind of maturity point.

I'm also rather shocked at the difference between male and female vocabulary. Words in the male category seem outright angry and violent.

Using shorthands and web-conventions to express sentiment doesn't inherently have anything to do with maturity or lack thereof.

When analyzing corporate emails, men use those 'powerful' words (making them seem angry/violent as you mentioned) and women used 'emotional or caring' words. Blame it on gender roles or natural inclinations.

Either that, or people born after 1980, the kind that mostly grew up with the internet and cell phones, express themselves differently from the rest of us, and may continue to do so for the rest of their lives.

So, while "we, family, interview, kind, caring" may become more common in their vocabulary, "haha, lol, :P, jk, stupid, ugh" might never leave. All this is just conjecture, of course. Let's see how things go.

The thing about this is that I am not sure how much of the differences involve inherently different speech and how much involves different subject matter that inherently will involve different vocabulary - ie, it doesn't necessarily show women would talk about the NFL differently than men or that younger people talk about family differently than older people. It might just show some group talk about different topics more.

Interesting that apparently Christians are more emotionally stable, and that "anime" is the single biggest word in the introvert group. The latter wouldn't surprise me.

Also interests me, as a transgender girl, that I don't really use most of the words in "male" or "female" groups much at all, though I seem to lean on the "female" one. I certainly use "shopping", "can't wait", "my hair", "her", "she", "cute", "^_^", "<3", ";D" and "^.^" a lot more than most of the words on the male one, in spite of my interests being more stereotypically "male". Though I do use "fuck" a lot.

Not sure if this is particularly validating or not.

I'm also very definitely on the "neuroticism" side, which is no surprise.

Judging by the F-word, most Facebook users seem to be neurotic 19-22 year old males.

Because nobody born before '95 ever used 'fuck' in casual conversation.

Right.

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