What language characterizes women the most? What about men? A team of psychologists and scientists from the universities of Stony Brook and Pennsylvania (USA) and the University of Melbourne (Australia) have carried out a meticulous computational analysis of the words used by more than 65,000 users of the social network Facebook , with a total of 10 million messages scanned.
Gender influences the way we express ourselves
The themes expressed through language on Facebook were defined according to their degree of social connection or assertiveness.
The algorithms used by experts have revealed that women use warm, pleasant, subtle, close and complicit language, unlike men who express themselves more aggressively and heatedly. They also got the sex of Facebook users right in 90% of the cases – according to the words used.
Words according to sex
Among the words chosen mostly by women were: wonderful, happy, birthday, nervous, daughter, baby and grateful.
Among the words chosen by the men , were the words: enemy, freedom, win, lose and battle.
“ The study also shows a method for testing psychological theories on a large scale, with a way to visualize the results. With this type of large-scale computational studies, generating thousands of statistical results, visualization is the key. This is a good example of visualization that helps us see the big picture with complex data, ”says Gregory Park, leader of the work.
The study has been published in the journal PloS One.
