People’s tweets predict their decisions
People spend a lot of time on the internet: they write on social media, shop for products, listen to music, and click on ads. In my research with Dr. Phillip Wolff at Emory, I ask how much these incidental activities may reveal about people’s psychology, especially focusing on people’s writing on social media.
It seems clear that your social media posts should reveal your explicitly held attitudes. For example, if you write a lot about sports, you may be a person who likes sports. Less clear, however, is whether your social media posts could reveal deep facts about your psychology, even though you never explicitly wrote about them. Others have found that your social media posts may be predictive of your personality (Youyou, Kosinski, & Stillwell, 2015) and whether you have a mental illness (Eichstaedt et al, 2018), even if people never explicitly wrote sentences such as “I am an extravert” or “I am feeling depressed.” Building on these results, we asked whether your social media posts might be predictive of your decision-making.

First, we asked people to play decision games where they chose between rewards (or potential risks) in the present and future. We asked those same people for access to their tweets. We found that the text of people’s tweets was predictive of their decisions. In particular, we found that people who tended to tweet about the distant future – had a long future temporal horizon – were more likely to wait for future rewards, and were more likely to avoid future risks.
Second, we generalized these results beyond individuals to US states. US states can be thought of, collectively, as having decision-making preferences. For example, we aggregated a number of public policy variables to determine the relative level of risk taking in the state, and the relative level of investment in the future in the state. We also mapped the average future temporal horizon of each state based on an analysis of several million geo-located tweets. As with individuals, we found that states with a longer future temporal horizon were more conscious of future risks, although we did not find a relationship with investment behavior in states.
Third, we capitalized on the fact that social media posts extend over time to ask about the stability of future thinking in people’s tweets. We found that the distance people tweet into the future is partly a stable trait, as evidenced by increased consistency in temporal horizon of two tweets from the same person, compared to two tweets from different individuals. Nevertheless, we also found that the distance people tweet into the future is partly a malleable state, as evidenced by the fact that as two tweets from the same person became further separated in time, they were less similar in their temporal horizon. In other words, temporal horizon is both a state and a trait.
Together, we think these results show that your tweets can reveal deep facts about your psychology, even when you do not explicitly reveal these facts. Specifically, we found that your tweets were predictive of your decisions, for both individuals and US states. One direction we are currently exploring is whether your writing on social media can be predictive of mental illness. Another direction we are exploring is whether your writing on blogs can reveal the basic mechanisms people use to think about the past and future. The hope is to build a psychological science based on everyday online behavior, in effect “data mining the mind”.
Robert Thorstad
Emory University, Department of Psychology, Atlanta, USA
Publication
A big data analysis of the relationship between future thinking and decision-making.Thorstad R, Wolff P
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018 Feb 20
Related Articles:
![]() | What do patients and healthcare professionals… Many patients post on Twitter about their healthcare experiences. Patients with cancer are especially active on Twitter, and studies have found that sharing experiences online can reduce feelings of isolation.… |
![]() | Do patients return to sport activities after total… Total hip replacement (THR) is a successful procedure to treat end-stage hip osteoarthritis. The procedure is increasingly performed in adults of working age, who often wish to return to highly… |
![]() | Cannabinoid receptors and incidental associations: a… Animals and humans adapt to changes in the environment through previous experiences. In our daily life, while we are engaged in a particular activity or social event, we are continuously… |
![]() | Talking about childhood music: A twin study To what extent do childhood experiences of music practice influence thinking about music later in life? We could get an idea about this if we talk about childhood music memories while physiological recordings are made concomitantly.… |
![]() | Most common behavioral problems in people with dementia With people all over the world living longer, more and more of them develop problems with brain functions. Some of these problems are mild, e.g. slight forgetfulness, but some may… |
![]() | Do people want to participate in decisions… Health and medication literacy are important factors linked to the outcomes of medical treatment (Table 1). Health literacy has been assessed in several countries all over the world and has… |
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.