TY - JOUR
T1 - Political psycholinguistics
T2 - A comprehensive analysis of the language habits of liberal and conservative social media users
AU - Sterling, Joanna
AU - Jost, John T.
AU - Bonneau, Richard
N1 - Funding Information:
This article is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Department of Psychology at New York University by Joanna Sterling under the supervision of John T. Jost. We thank the other members of the dissertation committee, namely Eric Knowles, Patrick Shrout, and Jay Van Bavel. This research was supported by the INSPIRE program of the National Science Foundation (Awards # SES-1248077 and # SES-1248077-001) as well as the Global Institute for Advanced Study (GIAS) and Research Investment Fund (RIF) at New York University. John T. Jost also gratefully acknowledges support from National Science Foundation Award #BCS-1627691. We thank Duncan Penfold-Brown, Jonathan Ronen, and Yvan Scher for their invaluable assistance with computer programming and data procurement. Study materials and code for data analysis have been made accessible on the Open Science Framework. The data provided have been deidentified per Twitter’s terms of service: https://osf.io/4fsva/.
PY - 2020/4
Y1 - 2020/4
N2 - For nearly a century social scientists have sought to understand left-right ideological differences in values, motives, and thinking styles. Much progress has been made, but-as in other areas of research-this work has been criticized for relying on small and statistically unrepresentative samples and the use of reactive, self-report measures that lack ecological validity. In an effort to overcome these limitations, we employed automated text analytic methods to investigate the spontaneous, naturally occurring use of language in nearly 25,000 Twitter users. We derived 27 hypotheses from the literature on political psychology and tested them using 32 individual dictionaries. In 23 cases, we observed significant differences in the linguistic styles of liberals and conservatives. For instance, liberals used more language that conveyed benevolence, whereas conservatives used more language pertaining to threat, power, tradition, resistance to change, certainty, security, anger, anxiety, and negative emotion in general. In 17 cases, there were also significant effects of ideological extremity. For instance, moderates used more benevolent language, whereas extremists used more language pertaining to inhibition, tentativeness, affiliation, resistance to change, certainty, security, anger, anxiety, negative affect, swear words, and death-related language. These research methods, which are easily adaptable, open up new and unprecedented opportunities for conducting unobtrusive research in psycholinguistics and political psychology with large and diverse samples.
AB - For nearly a century social scientists have sought to understand left-right ideological differences in values, motives, and thinking styles. Much progress has been made, but-as in other areas of research-this work has been criticized for relying on small and statistically unrepresentative samples and the use of reactive, self-report measures that lack ecological validity. In an effort to overcome these limitations, we employed automated text analytic methods to investigate the spontaneous, naturally occurring use of language in nearly 25,000 Twitter users. We derived 27 hypotheses from the literature on political psychology and tested them using 32 individual dictionaries. In 23 cases, we observed significant differences in the linguistic styles of liberals and conservatives. For instance, liberals used more language that conveyed benevolence, whereas conservatives used more language pertaining to threat, power, tradition, resistance to change, certainty, security, anger, anxiety, and negative emotion in general. In 17 cases, there were also significant effects of ideological extremity. For instance, moderates used more benevolent language, whereas extremists used more language pertaining to inhibition, tentativeness, affiliation, resistance to change, certainty, security, anger, anxiety, negative affect, swear words, and death-related language. These research methods, which are easily adaptable, open up new and unprecedented opportunities for conducting unobtrusive research in psycholinguistics and political psychology with large and diverse samples.
KW - Political ideology
KW - Psycholinguistics
KW - Quantitative text analysis
KW - Social cognition
KW - Social media
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U2 - 10.1037/pspp0000275
DO - 10.1037/pspp0000275
M3 - Article
C2 - 31916812
AN - SCOPUS:85077982360
VL - 118
SP - 805
EP - 834
JO - Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
JF - Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
SN - 0022-3514
IS - 4
ER -