By analysing the language of 65,000 Facebook users, researchers have found that females used language that was characteristic of compassion and politeness, while masculine language was more hostile and impersonal.
The study also found, for the first time, that males and females used equally assertive language.
The study was published in PLOS One today as part of The World Well-Being Project (wwbp.org) – a team of researchers comprised of psychologists and computer scientists, tackled the question of how and men and women express themselves differently on social media.
Computational analyses were used to automatically identify differences in the types of words used by women and men.
One of the study authors, Dr. Margaret Kern said that algorithms are capable of correctly predicting one’s gender over 90% of the time.
“We found that women mentioned friends, family and social life more often, whereas men swore more, used angrier and argumentative language and discussed objects more than people,” she said. Read more
