"fucking world_cup metal fuckin war album shave"
September 30, 2013 6:33 PM   Subscribe

The words and phrases that distinguish men and women on Facebook. A word cloud visualization taken from a new study exploring personality, gender and age in language used on social media, published in PLOS ONE. posted by dontjumplarry (94 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
Women: Excited, Shopping, Love, Soooo.
Men: Fucking, Fuck, Wishes, Xbox.

(Fucking) beautiful.
posted by Justinian at 6:35 PM on September 30, 2013 [4 favorites]


Another interesting finding from the research: "males prefer to precede ‘girlfriend’ or ‘wife’ with the possessive ‘my’ significantly more than females do for ‘boyfriend’ or ‘husband’."
posted by dontjumplarry at 6:36 PM on September 30, 2013 [6 favorites]


Yeah, this reads like a list of word occurrences which will result in an insta-hide from me. Ugh.

Also, thanks for the awesome new subreddit. I'm still newish to the whole thing. But my work and social lives hate you.
posted by nevercalm at 6:37 PM on September 30, 2013


"Soo", "sooo", "sooooo" etc. all show up separately and are apparently very frequent.
posted by vogon_poet at 6:38 PM on September 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


Really wish I could fucking zoom in more on this shit. Some of the words on the fringes are too tiny.

Nice post.
posted by Noms_Tiem at 6:38 PM on September 30, 2013


Man I talk about my hair way more than the girls I know.

I have pretty awesome hair.
posted by The Whelk at 6:40 PM on September 30, 2013 [4 favorites]


Also, I love how the "introversion" chart in Figure 6 is at least 10% emoticons.
posted by Noms_Tiem at 6:41 PM on September 30, 2013 [2 favorites]


Online, playing cod games. Playin' tag.
posted by mittens at 6:42 PM on September 30, 2013


Also, thanks for the awesome new subreddit.

There's an interesting comment in the thread over on reddit which suggests that one of the reasons there are such strikingly stereotypical gender differences (cute adorable puppy shopping hair! war fuck gaming fuck!) is that young people could be treating status updates on FB as a kind of forum to perform and practice socially valorized gender roles. In other words, playing up to what's expected of them. Just a hypothesis, though. (Importantly, these are from status updates, not comments or photo captions or private chats.)
posted by dontjumplarry at 6:43 PM on September 30, 2013 [23 favorites]


Indeed, it would be fascinating to compare this with a word cloud of men and women's private chats on Facebook. To see if there was any difference in the public image they were projecting, and what they actually choose to spend time talking about.
posted by dontjumplarry at 6:46 PM on September 30, 2013 [4 favorites]


So according to this word cloud, we women don't give a fuck?
posted by Dr. Zira at 6:50 PM on September 30, 2013 [6 favorites]


According to this word cloud, women are all, "My hair can't wait!"
posted by mittens at 6:52 PM on September 30, 2013


Sad that "beard" isn't bigger.
posted by hippybear at 6:52 PM on September 30, 2013 [5 favorites]


If it's discussed in the article, I haven't gotten to that bit yet, but I've noticed that I have some friends whose posts to twitter are auto-posted to facebook, and those are different in flavor and length from their created-on-facebook comments.
posted by rtha at 6:53 PM on September 30, 2013


Presumably this is because I'm a man, but I can't figure out how to refer to your husband or boyfriend without using my. A hypothetical boyfriend sure, but your own? I can't even make my brain talk that way. Interesting to think of that as a gendered thing.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 7:00 PM on September 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'd like to see how the gender splits appear in different age tiers. My guess is the differences probably narrow with age.
posted by JimInLoganSquare at 7:01 PM on September 30, 2013


I'm a female and neither can I. Stupid sexy grammar.
posted by Dr. Zira at 7:01 PM on September 30, 2013 [4 favorites]


On the other hand, females were more likely to precede ‘husband’ or ‘boyfriend’ with ‘her’ or ‘amazing’ and a greater variety of words, which is why ‘my husband’ was not more predictive than ‘husband’ alone. Furthermore, this suggests the male preference for the possessive ‘my’ is at least partially due to a lack of talking about others' partners.

Personally, when I talk about my husband (heh) on Facebook I'm most likely to just use his name.
posted by wintersweet at 7:03 PM on September 30, 2013 [2 favorites]


What the fuck is this some fucking black ops shit?
posted by orme at 7:03 PM on September 30, 2013 [3 favorites]


young people could be treating status updates on FB as a kind of forum to perform and practice socially valorized gender roles.

Sometimes off-the-cuff comments are just off-the-cuff comments.
posted by codswallop at 7:05 PM on September 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


Presumably this is because I'm a man, but I can't figure out how to refer to your husband or boyfriend without using my.

You can't. Women with boyfriends or husbands talk about each others' boyfriends and husbands as much as or more so than about their own. Also, they refer to their own mates by name, because they can safely assume their audience knows their mate's name, because they've talked about him before. Men hardly ever talk about each others' mates or refer to their own by name. At least, that's my hypothesis.
posted by JimInLoganSquare at 7:05 PM on September 30, 2013 [7 favorites]


There's an interesting comment in the thread over on reddit which suggests that one of the reasons there are such strikingly stereotypical gender differences (cute adorable puppy shopping hair! war fuck gaming fuck!) is that young people could be treating status updates on FB as a kind of forum to perform and practice socially valorized gender roles.

Well... yes? Is there anything we do that isn't performing a valorised gender role of some kind?
posted by Sebmojo at 7:06 PM on September 30, 2013


It would be interesting to do a MeFi version for comparison. I think it would be very different.
posted by Dr. Zira at 7:10 PM on September 30, 2013 [2 favorites]


Well... yes? Is there anything we do that isn't performing a valorised gender role of some kind?

In a Facebook status update, we are very carefully and deliberately staging a version of ourselves in front of an audience of everyone we know. We sometimes even add props and scenery, in the form of carefully curated and sometimes filtered photographs.

To my mind, that is performative in a very different way from a casual private chat with one's best friend.
posted by dontjumplarry at 7:12 PM on September 30, 2013 [15 favorites]


I can't figure out how to refer to your husband or boyfriend without using my.

"The husband," "the boyfriend." Among certain demographics this construction is more commonly female than male, although there are also men who will write, "I'm having dinner with the wife..."
posted by cribcage at 7:14 PM on September 30, 2013 [4 favorites]


I don't like either one of them.
posted by oceanjesse at 7:17 PM on September 30, 2013 [2 favorites]


Not to repeat myself, but to make it clear, the italicized part is directly from the study and answers the question about * husband and * boyfriend.

On the other hand, females were more likely to precede ‘husband’ or ‘boyfriend’ with ‘her’ or ‘amazing’ and a greater variety of words, which is why ‘my husband’ was not more predictive than ‘husband’ alone. Furthermore, this suggests the male preference for the possessive ‘my’ is at least partially due to a lack of talking about others' partners.
posted by wintersweet at 7:19 PM on September 30, 2013 [8 favorites]


Hmm, let's see.......aww...wonderful...cute...amazing...yay...chocolate...

Welp. I guess I must be a woman then.

(I am not a woman.)
posted by rlio at 7:21 PM on September 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


Like the study, don't like the visualization in the first link.
posted by escabeche at 7:22 PM on September 30, 2013


I refer to the wife as "the wife" because she doesn't like giving her name out to the internet due to previous bad experiences.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 7:25 PM on September 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


These word cloud analyses always incorrectly identify me as female on Tumblr. Looking at the visualization, I can see why. The ~female words (except "shopping") appeal to me a lot more. Not as appealing as pictures and animated gifs, of course.
posted by fatehunter at 7:29 PM on September 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


Surely I'm not the only one to find this kind of depressing? Both the "female" and the "male" word-clouds list pretty heavily towards the "oh god, de-friended / hidden from my feed," no? I don't want to conclude that the average facebook user is insufferable, but I feel like I'm being led by the nose to that very conclusion. And I like facebook!
posted by erlking at 7:35 PM on September 30, 2013 [5 favorites]


It would be interesting to do a MeFi version for comparison. I think it would be very different.

I had the same thought because I did not see the word "cat" and "the kitteh" in red (to indicate that it was used with high frequency) across genders and personality types.

I also noticed that introverts used words like computer and internet with high frequency in the study; this also did not seem consistent with mefites because I'm sure "Metafilter" would also have appeared with red letters.
posted by Wolfster at 7:41 PM on September 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


Soo.... my most common post topics, baking and philosophy, aren't common?

Shocking!
posted by oddman at 7:49 PM on September 30, 2013


Just think, your tax-dollars are paying some poor NSA hack to schlep through mountains of this shite, looking for the 'Jihad' and 'Infidels' amongst the Sexy Xbox Kittens.
posted by cacofonie at 7:52 PM on September 30, 2013 [7 favorites]




It would be interesting to do a MeFi version for comparison. I think it would be very different.

In all fairness, I can't usually tell the gender of the poster unless explicitly stated. The word cloud would only have those rare few words like "Husband" that might indicate gender.
posted by gronkpan at 8:20 PM on September 30, 2013


The really depressing part of this to me is how men seem to have a monopoly on the political words. Notice how 'government,' 'economy,' and 'taxes,' among others, fall into the male clouds but not the female ones. There's probably a whole dissertation in there somewhere about the social norms of posting political statuses, and how gender affects both whether you post political statuses and what the content of those statuses is.
posted by ActionPopulated at 8:27 PM on September 30, 2013 [5 favorites]


Not a monopoly -- they're measuring correlations, but the correlations aren't incredibly strong (though they're strong enough to license confident assertions they're nonzero.) So it's just recording that those words are slightly more likely to appear in FB posts by men.
posted by escabeche at 8:32 PM on September 30, 2013


Aww, sooo much fun. Tomorrow, chocolate shopping with my puppy. I miss my hair. My brother loves his dress. Can't wait for uber, doctor. I am so hacked.

Don't mind me, just skewing the stats.
posted by zompist at 8:39 PM on September 30, 2013 [8 favorites]


Ok, so monopoly was a hyperbolic word choice. That's fine, I get that the correlations aren't super strong here. Doesn't change the fact that I find the weak correlations that do exist depressing as hell.
posted by ActionPopulated at 8:41 PM on September 30, 2013


Weird. My friends suddenly look very, very sophisticated. And we're not that sophisticated.
posted by desuetude at 8:42 PM on September 30, 2013 [4 favorites]


Ugh
posted by nathancaswell at 8:52 PM on September 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


I have noticed couples where the woman constantly writes about stuff that happened with her partner, but the man hardly ever mentions that she exists. I always took that as a sign that he just wasn't that into her, but I don't know... maybe it's a thing.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 8:59 PM on September 30, 2013


Well, I am afraid, other than teasing my little sister about a silly picture of her eating a beignet in New Orleans and another friend (when commenting on two year olds using iDevices that when he was two he ate dirt) about how he was supposed to eat playground dirt and not cattle pasture dirt, the rest of my FB posts (if you care, my FB name is the same as my MeFi name) are usually all about internet activism. To me, Black Ops means what the NSA does...
posted by Samizdata at 9:01 PM on September 30, 2013


Ursula Hitler: "I have noticed couples where the woman constantly writes about stuff that happened with her partner, but the man hardly ever mentions that she exists. I always took that as a sign that he just wasn't that into her, but I don't know... maybe it's a thing."

That can be weird. My ex-wife left me for a man we both knew, and, when FB finally got around to saying "You might know this person..." I checked his page and saw nothing about her, although I do now know he likes skeet shooting...
posted by Samizdata at 9:03 PM on September 30, 2013 [2 favorites]


You'd think all the people sharing Elsie Andrew's fine work would drive "fucking" up for the lady's side of things.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 9:06 PM on September 30, 2013


Don't have the time tonight to RTFA, but do the authors mention why they limited themselves to English and how that might affect the data?
posted by runcibleshaw at 9:29 PM on September 30, 2013


I'm somewhere between introverted 13 year old girl and unstable ngry 22 year old male, apparently.

FUCKKKKKKKK =^_^= :P

Shit squee!!!!
posted by symbioid at 10:32 PM on September 30, 2013 [5 favorites]


I wishes I could get some fucking battered cod in his life right now.
posted by smidgen at 10:51 PM on September 30, 2013 [3 favorites]


Grotesque. Is it heterophobic that my first thought was "God, straight people are so boring and predictable"...probably, right? I guess I could say 'sorry' but I definitely wouldn't mean it. Sad.
posted by sexyrobot at 11:04 PM on September 30, 2013 [3 favorites]


I've met so many boring straight people that I just assume straight people are boring until they prove otherwise. But then, I also tend to assume people are queer, so it's likely it's just the ones who put their straightness front and center that are boring.

I saw this and immediately wondered if they collected the data during one of the periods when I changed my Facebook gender back and forth for fun (and because it amused me how much the ads changed).
posted by NoraReed at 11:21 PM on September 30, 2013 [3 favorites]


(I'm guessing those of us who do that are a statistically insignificant outlier, though.)
posted by NoraReed at 11:21 PM on September 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


I don't want to conclude that the average facebook user is insufferable

Facebook is made of people!
posted by jacalata at 11:30 PM on September 30, 2013 [6 favorites]


Shit squee

So, like, the opposite of "shitstorm"?
posted by Now there are two. There are two _______. at 11:31 PM on September 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


do the authors mention why they limited themselves to English and how that might affect the data?

Not that I noticed. This was the only mention of English that I found:

Participants volunteered to share their status updates as part of the My Personality application, where they also took a variety of questionnaires [12]. We restrict our analysis to those Facebook users meeting certain criteria: They must indicate English as a primary language, have written at least 1,000 words in their status updates, be less than 65 years (to avoid the non-representative sample above 65), and indicate both gender and age (for use as controls).
posted by jacalata at 11:36 PM on September 30, 2013


Ah, I missed that. I figured that they just used the genders people listed on Facebook.
posted by NoraReed at 11:46 PM on September 30, 2013


Women: Excited, Shopping, Love, Soooo.
Men: Fucking, Fuck, Wishes, Xbox.

Officially in the men-cloud. Again. *sigh*
If I had a facebook I mean.
posted by ZeroAmbition at 11:47 PM on September 30, 2013


Huh. This prompted me to check my Facebook, I previously identified my "gender" as female though I'm pretty much male. Only two choices are available.

I just now changed my birth year to 1905 which means I am, given my birthdate earlier this year, an 113 year old woman. Go me.
posted by vapidave at 11:49 PM on September 30, 2013 [3 favorites]


I'll let you know if the ads change.
posted by vapidave at 11:52 PM on September 30, 2013 [2 favorites]


108 I mean of course.
posted by vapidave at 12:01 AM on October 1, 2013


I'm listed as "engaged" and when I list myself as a man I don't get any advertisements for bridal diet plans. As a woman it seems like half the ads are "lose weight with this plan so you can fit into your dress" bullshit.

Interestingly, the corset ads stick around. Probably because I actually click on those once, though.
posted by NoraReed at 12:04 AM on October 1, 2013 [2 favorites]


This is pretty neat. However, whenever Reddit is mentioned on Metafilter it feels like seeing an Arrakeen Fremen wasting water.
posted by craniac at 12:29 AM on October 1, 2013 [5 favorites]


Well, that confirms it. I find men and women nauseating.
posted by Decani at 12:46 AM on October 1, 2013 [3 favorites]


I wasn't aware that my extremely foul language was such a marker for gender. Normally I barely register as male, if I manage it at all.

Is anyone else disturbed by how much basketball apparently is correlated with emotional stability? (Lakers is a basketball team, right?)
posted by Scattercat at 1:07 AM on October 1, 2013


You know, in blogs I see women refer to their loved ones with acronyms a lot. So instead of "my daughter passed this class" it is ""dd got an A" and instead of "my spouse is a raging alcoholic" it might be' "dh sure loves to get tipsy!". So maybe that is why we don't see the "my" as much?

[dd = dear daughter! dh = dear husband. Kinda makes me retch, but it is common.]
posted by misha at 1:09 AM on October 1, 2013


I'm finding the age-related graphs in the article even more interesting than the gender-related ones.
Pleased to hear that I'm still at an age where I can say 'fuck shit freakin annoying' more than 'blessed amazing thankful'. The oldest category word cloud is like a paint-by-numbers for glurge.
posted by Gordafarin at 1:50 AM on October 1, 2013


"Soo", "sooo", "sooooo" etc. all show up separately and are apparently very frequent.

I would have thought there were more male pig callers ...
posted by Kirth Gerson at 1:57 AM on October 1, 2013 [2 favorites]


Re: my above comment and I'm not sure I paid attention before but the ads I see now on Facebook since changing my age are, in order; Wrinkle Eraser [she looks 26 years younger]; Wrinkle eraser, for only five dollars, brought to by Dr. O [so subtle] accompanied by a picture of the good doctor and Oprah; Oz's Wrinkle eraser brought to you by another Dr., this one Oz [who I recognize from the tv] and a recommendation that i should pay attention to some woman named Vanessa Hudgens.
posted by vapidave at 2:05 AM on October 1, 2013


I wonder if the difference between men's "My wife" and women's lack of "My husband" could be as simple as women preferring to use an adjective in the phrase? "My darling husband" "My asshole husband", etc. I haven't read the whole paper yet, and I'm not so ept at lexical analysis techniques to necessarily recognize whether they address that.
posted by ardgedee at 3:36 AM on October 1, 2013


Women are like this but men are like this amirite?
posted by the painkiller at 3:59 AM on October 1, 2013


This seems to answer the question:

> ...we noticed ‘my wife’ and ‘my girlfriend’ emerged as strongly correlated in the male results, while simply ‘husband’ and ‘boyfriend’ were most predictive for females. Investigating the frequency data revealed that males did in fact precede such references to their opposite-sex partner with ‘my’ significantly more often than females. On the other hand, females were more likely to precede ‘husband’ or ‘boyfriend’ with ‘her’ or ‘amazing’ and a greater variety of words, which is why ‘my husband’ was not more predictive than ‘husband’ alone. Furthermore, this suggests the male preference for the possessive ‘my’ is at least partially due to a lack of talking about others' partners.

In other words, in two-word phrases including "husband", the word "my" does not appear meaningfully more often than other words do. So it's the word closest to "husband" that they were interested in, not the distance between "my" and "husband". The example of "amazing" implies to me that "my amazing husband" was common enough to be noticeable, but only the "amazing husband" part of the three-word phrase made the cut, statistical-analytically-wise.
posted by ardgedee at 4:01 AM on October 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


Anecdotally, on average, this is pretty spot on for the men in my Facebook feed.

It is not even close to correlated to the women in my Facebook feed.

The men and women in my feed are all mostly the same demographic: middle/upper-middle class white and Asian Americans between the ages of 25 and 40, working in the tech industry or academia. But I suppose that kind of makes sense -- the women in that demographic are bucking cultural norms to be there.
posted by olinerd at 4:11 AM on October 1, 2013


Also, regarding the "husband"/"wife" structure: most women I see posting about their spouses, male or female, are posting the status ABOUT them. "[Name] is such an awesome husband! He made me soup while I was sick!" "[Name], you are the best wife in the world! I am so happy we got married! Happy anniversary!" Usually, if I see a man posting about his spouse or significant other, it's referring to them in order to mention that they were involved with something. "Off to Spain with the wife." "Celebrating two years with my husband." It seems to me the difference is at the level of, "how/why do you mention your significant other and what does that say about men vs women", rather than "men like to use possessive modifiers about their spouses, what does that say about men vs women".
posted by olinerd at 4:16 AM on October 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


The really depressing part of this to me is how men seem to have a monopoly on the political words. Notice how 'government,' 'economy,' and 'taxes,' among others, fall into the male clouds but not the female ones.

I think it's a positive thing. Everybody has one guy in their FB acquaintances set who will not shut the hell up about things he knows so very little about, and that's usually the guy posting about how Obama is a socialist and various other Fox News talking points about govt, taxes, the economy.

Talking politics and religion is better off FB.
posted by discopolo at 5:15 AM on October 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


Shit squee

THis sounds like a product on the worst infomercial ever.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:29 AM on October 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


Took me way too long to figure out why so many men were talking about seafood.
posted by ook at 5:43 AM on October 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


I would have thought there were more male pig callers ...

Water sellers, Muad'Dib.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:28 AM on October 1, 2013


I always thought of saying "my wife" as a statement of affiliation as opposed to possession. Like "my family" or "my team" or "my friend". I guess I am somewhat hemmed in by language there.
posted by history_denier at 6:30 AM on October 1, 2013


Also, I love how the "introversion" chart in Figure 6 is at least 10% emoticons.

:(

Now I understand why those automated thingers that try to guess the gender of the author keep saying I'm female. I just don't talk about fucking xbox enough.
posted by Foosnark at 6:31 AM on October 1, 2013


It would be interesting to do a MeFi version for comparison. I think it would be very different.



DTMFA plate beans snowflake special dicks
mansplaining kittens mods beeeans censorship pony
cocktails new_york IANYL beeeeeeans

(gender: one size fits all)

posted by greenish at 7:23 AM on October 1, 2013 [4 favorites]


Not by gender but by age: 13-18; 19-22; 23-29; 30-65.
posted by Mister Bijou at 7:27 AM on October 1, 2013


13-18; 19-22; 23-29; 30-65.

Thirty to sixty-five as one age bracket? Seriously?

Teenage; college age; young adult; the rest of your goddamn life
posted by ook at 8:06 AM on October 1, 2013 [7 favorites]


You got it: "In general, we find a progression of school, college, work, and family when looking at the predominant topics across all age groups."
posted by Mister Bijou at 8:11 AM on October 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


Yeah, that's pretty circular logic, innit. "In general, we find a progression of school, college, work, and family when looking at the predominant topics across all age groups age groups that were specifically selected to correspond to those life phases (except none of us are over 30 so we just lumped all the olds together)"
posted by ook at 9:08 AM on October 1, 2013 [2 favorites]


Whatever.
posted by Mister Bijou at 9:39 AM on October 1, 2013


So what's the story with the huge "wishes_he" in the men cloud? How would that be used, and why so often?
posted by taz at 9:48 AM on October 1, 2013


The really depressing part of this to me is how men seem to have a monopoly on the political words. Notice how 'government,' 'economy,' and 'taxes,' among others, fall into the male clouds but not the female ones. There's probably a whole dissertation in there somewhere about the social norms of posting political statuses, and how gender affects both whether you post political statuses and what the content of those statuses is.

It reminds me of an old joke about gender roles:
A longtime happily-married man was asked how it was that he and his wife never fought or argued with each other. He replied "It's simple - we've divided the decision-making. I get to make all the big important decisions - such as who ought to win the election, where our tax dollars should go, who is going to take the world cup, and so forth - and she gets to decide all the little things, such as what kind of food we eat, which school the kids will go to, all that stuff."
posted by anonymisc at 10:22 AM on October 1, 2013 [2 favorites]


anonymisc, that's a very telling joke, especially when it comes to the concept of "Economy" originally comes from the roots of "Manage House" and political economy comes later. It also is interesting to see the process of Primitive Accumulation of Capital as it worked its way not just in the political economy and circumstances outside the home, but also the way it captured the home industries as well.

See also The Invention of Capitalism.
posted by symbioid at 11:14 AM on October 1, 2013 [2 favorites]


> So what's the story with the huge "wishes_he" in the men cloud? How would that be used, and why so often?

Vestigial perhaps -- from people (like me) who still post their statuses in third person?
posted by desuetude at 12:43 PM on October 1, 2013


vapidave: "Huh. This prompted me to check my Facebook, I previously identified my "gender" as female though I'm pretty much male. Only two choices are available.

I just now changed my birth year to 1905 which means I am, given my birthdate earlier this year, an 113 year old woman. Go me.
"

You look SO well preserved, if hairy....
posted by Samizdata at 12:45 PM on October 1, 2013


I find myself really bothered by Figure 6: "Words, phrases, and topics most distinguishing extraversion from introversion and neuroticism from emotional stability." I was a psych major in college, and moved away into sociology in part because of my ongoing frustration with the way psychologists frame what are clearly socially-produced phenomena "personality traits." Just look at the findings relating to extroversion/introversion. Since personality test questions supposedly meant to measure extroversion so frequently have to do with how one behaves at parties, it's no surprise that the number one word found to correlate between FB posts and personality tests of extroversion is "party." But the fact that introversion measures correlate most strongly with FB posts of japanese-style emoticons and the word "internet" belie the idea that some timeless, stable, universal personality trait of shyness or internality is being measured. ^_^ can hardly be the eternal indicator of inward-orientation.

When it comes to the neuroticism/emotional stability comparison, I have trouble just pushing past the lumping of so many disparate phenomena under the umbrella of the negative term "neurosis" (anxiety, hostility, depression, self-consciousness, impulsiveness and vulnerability according to the manual for the NEO-PI-R test used in this study), and then terming feeling none of these "emotional stability"--which we might as well term "emotional narrowness" (not feeling vulnerable or self-conscious/aware or sad or spontaneous or sad or angry). Anyway, the "neurosis" measure unsurprisingly links with negative emotion terms (most centrally the ever popular "fucking"), since many of the "personality trait" questions for it are about feeling frustrated and depressed. But the "emotional stability" measure links to FB posts about sports or church attendance ("the Lord," "team," "basketball," "praise," "Lakers"). The authors of the article conclude that "an active life implies emotional stability," but one could frame this very differently: people who report a narrow range of emotions and little spontaneity are drawn to organized sports and organized religion.
posted by DrMew at 1:28 PM on October 1, 2013 [2 favorites]


You need to run analysis of MeFi vs. AskMe, as the latter gets a fair number of stereotypically "girly" questions (and questions that skew younger, as in using "awesome" non-ironically).

(For those dreading ANOTHER WEDDING QUESTION,you can screen out the categories that attract them.)

Recently I had the dubious experience of picking up Real Simple magazine and feeling as if most of its question and answers had been pirated frim AskMe. Real Simple skews upscale yet practical and less femme than most of those mainstream women'smagazines.
posted by bad grammar at 5:23 PM on October 1, 2013


Facebook no longer lets users hide from search
I.e. you cannot prevent your employer from finding your facebook profile anymore
posted by jeffburdges at 5:31 AM on October 11, 2013


Yes, I can - by not having one.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 6:45 AM on October 11, 2013


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