Penn Psychologists Tap Big Data, Twitter to Analyze Accuracy of Stereotypes | Penn News
Penn Psychologists Tap Big Data, Twitter to Analyze Accuracy of Stereotypes | Penn News
What’s in a tweet? People draw conclusions about us, from our gender to education level, based on the words we use on social media. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, along with colleagues from the Technical University of Darmstadt and the University of Melbourne, have now analyzed the accuracy of those inferences. Their work revealed that, though stereotypes and the truth often aligned, with people making accurate assumptions more than two-thirds of the time, inaccurate characterizations still showed up.
They published their research findings in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.
Using publicly available tweets, lead researchers Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, a postdoc in Penn’s Positive Psychology Center and former Penn postdoc Jordan Carpenter, now at Duke University, aimed to show where stereotyping went from “plausible” to wrong.