Last week, my friends and I shared our first impressions of each other in an afternoon tea talk. I was surprised that their comments are quite accurate. And they told me one of their major judging method is my social network page. So I was wondering, does what we you say in social network really indicate who we are?

According to Scientific American, Dr. Pennebaker gives a logical potential explanation.

“It is how an author expresses his or her thoughts that reveals character, asserts social psychologist James W. Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin. When people try to present themselves a certain way, they tend to select what they think are appropriate nouns and verbs, but they are unlikely to control their use of articles and pronouns. These small words create the style of a text, which is less subject to conscious manipulation.

Pennebaker’s statistical analyses have shown that these small words may hint at the healing progress of patients and give us insight into the personalities and changing ideals of public figures, from political candidates to terrorists. “Virtually no one in psychology has realized that low-level words can give clues to large-scale behaviors,” says Pennebaker.

A STUDY performed by Karolina S further confirms the conclusion. The researchers hypothesized that “the language used by liberals emphasizes their perception of uniqueness, contains more swear words, more anxiety-related words and more feeling-related words than conservatives’ language. Conversely, we predicted that the language of conservatives emphasizes group membership and contains more references to achievement and religion than liberal language.” Then they analyzed more than 10,000 followers of 3 Democratic Party Twitter accounts and 3 Republican Party Twitter accounts. And concluded that twitter words do relate to people’s personalities and offline behaviors.

The number of participants involved in the study is big enough, so it is unlikely to be happen by chance. It seems like that we get really strong evidence to the original hypothesis. However, there are some potential problems that I concern. First, twitter language sometimes do not express one’s own thoughts. Since twitter is an open platform that everyone can read your word, people sometimes tend to pretend a certain figure in twitter, especially on political issues. Absolutely apolitical person like my sister would say something quite Democratic to raise awareness and gather likes in her Facebook page. The Crack gives The 7 Most Obnoxious Fake Personalities on the Internet. I just wonder whether this will be a third variable that affect the results. Second, for people who use a language as a second language, I think things will change a lot. It is really difficult to erase all the culture clues of a person’s mother language. And for language speaker that are less proficient, conveying a right sentence is far more important, they don’t care about the word they use.

To conclude, no matter how much a person pretend, he or she cannot say something that they don’t know. Thus, at least the social network page shows a person’s knowledge specializations and interested domains. And it represents a person’s own ideas or what a person think is good idea. Back to the beginning, this information definitely will help us know a totally new person. By the way, remember this, when somebody is talking about profound scientific research in Twitter, most possibly he would be a science major student, or, a super-clever SC200 student (all of us), or both.