Have you heard of the “QWERTY effect?” Well, it seems that the distribution of the letters on conventional keyboards –they are called “QWERTY” by the first six keys in the top row– influence the emotional assessment of what we read in a surprising way: words that contain many pressed letters with the right hand they elicit more positive evaluations than the words where the letters on the left half of the keyboard predominate. In theory, we will prefer “chicken” to “strawberry”. Rare, but it does happen somehow, as proven by various experiments with Dutch, English and Spanish speakers .
Now, David García, from the Federal Polytechnic School of Zurich (Switzerland), and Markus Strohmaier, from the Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences (Germany), have undertaken the first serious investigation of this strange effect on the Internet , now that more and more the Human communication –both in our condition as senders and receivers– is based on the pulsations of our fingers.
García and Strohmaier have not taken this lightly: they have analyzed the ratings of Internet users of millions of product names and titles of movies, books and videos on eleven websites , including Amazon, the film database IMDB, the compilation from Rotten Tomatoes reviews, YouTube, and high-traffic porn sites like RedTube and Pornhub.
The massive crossover of data makes them conclude that the QWERTY effect is indeed manifested in user reviews, both in the stars they award and in the actual wording of the comments . “Our study can be interpreted as an example of lateralization , not only in the metaphorical sense but also as a psychological phenomenon”, summarize the authors of the work.
A possible explanation for the QWERTY effect is that the letters that we press with the right hand are easier to write, but it remains a mystery, since the arrangement does not respond to any emotional or psychological reason : they were arbitrarily placed in 1868, to separate the most used keys in the first and rudimentary typewriters as much as possible and thus avoid jams .
