Are you one of those that would love to comment on somebody’s English on social media, without considering that English might not be their first language? Well then, you’re quite the jerk.
Studies have shown that people who tend to criticize others for the way they text or write are not broad-minded and can be contemptible individuals.
A research paper published in 2016, in the journal PLOS One, theorizes that someone’s personality and characteristics can determine how they behave or communicate online. According to the main author, Julia Boland, from the University of Michigan, personality indicates how you interpret language itself.
The paper was based on an experiment that saw 83 participants judging a writer based on what they were presented to read. The given material was an ad for a housemate and the subsequent emails. They were edited and controlled grammatical mistakes, and typos were added, to determine what the readers saw, analyzed, observed, and believed.
These 83 people also reviewed the email based on the attributes of the sender and how applicable, and suitable was the person as a housemate. These people were then asked whether the typos or syntax errors bothered them.
After that, the people were subjected to a Big Five Personality Assessment– one which determined how open and agreeable and extroverted/introverted they were while communicating online. Apart from this, they were also asked about their birthday, address, and location, and also how they saw language- was it just a tool for communication, or something more?
Once those were filled, the overall results were that the typos and spelling errors were a nuisance compared to the ones that didn’t have those typos. But obviously, certain personality types judged the typos more harshly than anything else.
Extroverts did not see much of a problem with the typos and let it slide. They wanted to go deeper than these superficial mistakes. However, introverts did judge the applicants based on their mistakes.
People that were more conscientious, but not as open were also troubled by typos, while people with less agreeable personalities got offended by grammatical errors. According to one of the researchers, this could be because people who were not more open found it more difficult to deviate from the norm.
The thing is, according to Truth Theory, that the entire test was merely hinged on personality. One’s education or age wasn’t taken into account. Another problem with the study was that the sample size was small. So, we shouldn’t take it very seriously. Instead, we should wait until researchers connect the dots with larger sample sizes and come up with a proper conclusion.
The truth is that typos and mistakes are human errors; if you judge somebody’s intelligence based on that, then you’re a jerk. Don’t be that guy.
COMMENTS