How tight or loose are you? Do you relate to Big Bird or Cookie Monster?
The answers to such questions have helped Stanford University professor Michele J. Gelfand understand how individuals and societies respond to common threats.
Gelfand and a team of University of Maryland computer scientists and psychologists now have taken the next step in this research, creating what they call a Threat Dictionary -- a data tool “designed to diagnose threatening language in any text that interests you.”
This might sound like an odd undertaking. But words have never been more contentious. Universities now try to protect students from “microaggressions.” TV shows open with warnings of “triggering language.”
A word is a word, no more or less. Its impact, however, depends on the person on the receiving end of it.
Whether certain words hit you like a hammer or a pillow -- that is, whether or how much they spark your brain’s “fear circuitry” -- is based on your experiences, education and exposure to popular culture, among other factors, the research suggests.
All of this, not surprisingly, is bound up with the hyperpolarization that dominates our politics.
“Adding just a single threat-related word to a tweet about COVID increased the expected retweet rate by 18%,” Sara Harrison writes for the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
How much will threat-related words affect you?
Gelfand, a professor of organizational behavior, created what she calls the Mindset Quiz to find out.
“How intensely you adhere to social norms has major implications for your life,” she writes in the introduction to the quiz. “This level of intensity falls on a spectrum from very loose to very tight. Knowing how tight or loose you are can help you understand yourself and others better.”
The quiz asks respondents to agree or disagree (on a scale) with statements such as: “I keep my emotions under control,” “I don’t like situations that are uncertain,” “I stick to the rules” and “I talk even when I know I shouldn’t.”
Through your answers, you will learn whether you’re an “order Muppet” or a “chaos Muppet.” (Uncertainty makes Big Bird anxious. Cookie Monster revels in mayhem.)
As for the 240-word Threat Dictionary -- with words ranging from “accidents” and “accusations” to “worry” and “worst” -- it can offer individual users some subtle insight and warning as they go about their online lives. You can copy-and-paste news articles and social-media posts into the tool to find out their “percent of threat language.” (For example: The top story on The Washington Post’s homepage Thursday morning, “Ukraine braces for assault in east; Russian talk of civilian killings intercepted,” comes in at 2%.)
But for the academics who created the Threat Dictionary, the usefulness is broader. The database’s algorithm, powered by information about perils the U.S. has faced over the past 100 years (stock-market crashes, wars, natural disasters, etc.), is designed to measure how our society responds to various kinds of threats.
“In all,” the researchers write in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), “the language of threats is a powerful tool that can inform researchers and policy makers on the public’s daily exposure to threatening language and make visible interesting societal patterns across American history.”
-- Douglas Perry
No comments:
Post a Comment