Feelings

New research digs into how patterns in the language people use to describe their feelings can reveal what they really think about other groups of people.

If a participant rated a particular group as one of the most or least evolved groups, they were asked to write their thoughts, feelings, and opinions about the group. In effect, the program turns text into data, he says. “And we know from dehumanization literature there are patterns in language that reveal someone who views outgroups as less than human compared to more human.” The words written by participants were then run through an automated text analysis program called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, which contains dictionaries of categories related to social, psychological, and part of speech dimensions. Markowitz recruited 1,169 subjects for his study through the online research platform CloudResearch. “We know from the deception literature there are language patterns that reveal an honest person from a deceptive person,” he says.