Salvatore Giorgi, Sharath Chandra Guntuku, Johannes C Eichstaedt, Claire Pajot, H Andrew Schwartz, Lyle H Ungar
{"title":"Well-Being Depends on Social Comparison: Hierarchical Models of Twitter Language Suggest That Richer Neighbors Make You Less Happy.","authors":"Salvatore Giorgi, Sharath Chandra Guntuku, Johannes C Eichstaedt, Claire Pajot, H Andrew Schwartz, Lyle H Ungar","doi":"10.1609/icwsm.v15i1.18132","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Psychological research has shown that subjective well-being is sensitive to social comparison effects; individuals report decreased happiness when their neighbors earn more than they do. In this work, we use Twitter language to estimate the well-being of users, and model both individual and neighborhood income using hierarchical modeling across counties in the United States (US). We show that language-based estimates from a sample of 5.8 million Twitter users replicate results obtained from large-scale well-being surveys - relatively richer neighbors leads to lower well-being, even when controlling for absolute income. Furthermore, predicting individual-level happiness using hierarchical models (i.e., individuals within their communities) out-predicts standard baselines. We also explore language associated with relative income differences and find that individuals with lower income than their community tend to swear (f*ck, sh*t, b*tch), express anger (pissed, bullsh*t, wtf), hesitation (don't, anymore, idk, confused) and acts of social deviance (weed, blunt, drunk). These results suggest that social comparison robustly affects reported well-being, and that Twitter language analyses can be used to both measure these effects and shed light on their underlying psychological dynamics.</p>","PeriodicalId":74525,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the ... International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media","volume":"15 ","pages":"1069-1074"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10099468/pdf/nihms-1854629.pdf","citationCount":"4","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings of the ... International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v15i1.18132","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 4
Abstract
Psychological research has shown that subjective well-being is sensitive to social comparison effects; individuals report decreased happiness when their neighbors earn more than they do. In this work, we use Twitter language to estimate the well-being of users, and model both individual and neighborhood income using hierarchical modeling across counties in the United States (US). We show that language-based estimates from a sample of 5.8 million Twitter users replicate results obtained from large-scale well-being surveys - relatively richer neighbors leads to lower well-being, even when controlling for absolute income. Furthermore, predicting individual-level happiness using hierarchical models (i.e., individuals within their communities) out-predicts standard baselines. We also explore language associated with relative income differences and find that individuals with lower income than their community tend to swear (f*ck, sh*t, b*tch), express anger (pissed, bullsh*t, wtf), hesitation (don't, anymore, idk, confused) and acts of social deviance (weed, blunt, drunk). These results suggest that social comparison robustly affects reported well-being, and that Twitter language analyses can be used to both measure these effects and shed light on their underlying psychological dynamics.