Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

Jewish Business News

Canadians are more polite on Twitter, Americans more negative

“The word choices of Americans and Canadians on Twitter paint a very accurate and familiar picture of the stereotypes we associate with these nations.”

Canadian stereotypes

Canadians tend to be polite and nice while Americans are negative and assertive on twitter, a new study found

Linguistic experts from McMaster University builds on earlier research from 2016 when they analyzed 3 million tweets. In their recent study, the same team examined nearly 40-million tweets. They isolated words, emojis, and emoticons used most disproportionately on Twitter by people from the US and Canada.

Please help us out :
Will you offer us a hand? Every gift, regardless of size, fuels our future.
Your critical contribution enables us to maintain our independence from shareholders or wealthy owners, allowing us to keep up reporting without bias. It means we can continue to make Jewish Business News available to everyone.
You can support us for as little as $1 via PayPal at office@jewishbusinessnews.com.
Thank you.

The bottom line, they say, national stereotypes are reflected even if those aren’t necessarily accurate.

The researchers used Twitter, one of the world’s most popular social media platforms, to better understand national identity on a mass scale and where stereotypes might originate.

Published in the journal PLOS ONE, the findings show national stereotypes are grounded, at least partially, in the words we choose to use.

“The most distinctive word choices of Americans and Canadians on Twitter paint a very accurate and familiar picture of the stereotypes we associate with people from these nations,” says Daniel Schmidtke, co-author of the study.

Canadians were far more positive on Twitter, using words such as thanks, good, amazing, great, and happy.

Americans use more negative words like hate, tired, miss, swear, mad, feel. Americans also used more netspeak like ‘lol’, ‘idk’, and ‘af’. While Americans preferred emojis, Canadians preferred emoticons.

“It’s tempting to think that Canadians tweet more nicely than Americans because they really are more nice than Americans,” says Bryor Snefjella, the lead author who was supervised by another co-author of the study, Victor Kuperman.

“But when we put all the data together, it suggests that something more complicated is happening,” he says. The wrinkle is that other studies which have surveyed large numbers of Canadians and Americans have consistently shown that such national stereotypes are not accurate. There isn’t any hard evidence to support that an average American’s and average Canadian’s personality traits are different.

“The Twitter behaviour we observe doesn’t actually reflect the real underlying personality profile of an average American or Canadian,” says Schmidtke.

To explore further, the team exposed the participants to the most typical words and emojis from each nation. They were not told how the words were chosen.

The results? Someone who uses very Canadian words has a personality matching the stereotype of a Canadian, and someone who uses very American words has a personality matching the stereotype of an American.

The team argues that Canadians and Americans may create their national character stereotype through their language use.

In the future, researchers hope to continue to compare other stereotypes between people in different countries.

Newsletter



Advertisement

You May Also Like

World News

In the 15th Nov 2015 edition of Israel’s good news, the highlights include:   ·         A new Israeli treatment brings hope to relapsed leukemia...

Entertainment

The Movie The Professional is what made Natalie Portman a Lolita.

Travel

After two decades without a rating system in Israel, at the end of 2012 an international tender for hotel rating was published.  Invited to place bids...

VC, Investments

You may not become a millionaire, but there is a lot to learn from George Soros.