National character stereotypes mirror language use: A study of Canadian and American tweets.

Bryor Snefjella,Victor Kuperman,Daniel Schmidtke,Ryan L Boyd

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0206188

Bryor Snefjella, Victor Kuperman + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206188

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Nov 21, 2018
Citations: 9	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: McMaster University

Abstract

National character stereotypes, or beliefs about the personality characteristics of the members of a nation, present a paradox. Such stereotypes have been argued to not be grounded in the actual personality traits of members of nations, yet they are also prolific and reliable. Stereotypes of Canadians and Americans exemplify the paradox; people in both nations strongly believe that the personality profiles of typical Canadians and Americans diverge, yet aggregated self-reports of personality profiles of Canadians and Americans show no reliable differences. We present evidence that the linguistic behavior of nations mirrors national character stereotypes. Utilizing 40 million tweets from the microblogging platform Twitter, in Study 1A we quantify the words and emojis diagnostic of Canadians and Americans. In Study 1B we explore the positivity of national language use. In Studies 2A and 2B, we present the 120 most nationally diagnostic words and emojis of each nation to naive participants, and ask them to assess personality of a hypothetical person who uses either diagnostically Canadian or American words and emojis. Personality profiles derived from the diagnostic words of each nation bear close resemblance to national character stereotypes. We therefore propose that national character stereotypes may be partially grounded in the collective linguistic behaviour of nations.

Highlights

Stereotypes about national character, i.e., individually held beliefs regarding psychological traits of world nations and cultures, are ubiquitous, stable and influential
Our goal is to establish diagnostic patterns of language use associated with the two cultures under comparison, quantify what personality traits and outlook these patterns convey, and test whether the national personality profiles that emerge from Canadian and American preferences in language use correspond to independent assessments of their respective national character stereotypes
We collected 44,405,347 tweets, of which 37,066,693 yielded usable tokens after our filters were applied. 6061 words passed the critical Bonferroni-corrected z-score at the lower tail of the log-odds ratio informative Dirichlet prior (LORIDP) distribution, i.e. words over-represented in Canadian tweets. 3393 words passed the critical Bonferonni-corrected z-score at the upper tail of the LORIDP distribution, i.e. words over-represented in US tweets

Summary

Introduction

Stereotypes about national character, i.e., individually held beliefs regarding psychological traits of world nations and cultures, are ubiquitous, stable and influential (see [1]). The importance of these beliefs for the functioning of individuals, groups and societies is hard to overestimate. National character stereotypes have the capacity to fuel discrimination and intergroup conflict [2]; they are a salient factor in diplomacy [3], governmental and corporate policies [4], marketing [5], and consumer decision-making [6]. The power of stereotypes regarding national character has put them in the center of prolific psychological and social research.

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