The vast volume of data created by social media such as Facebook and Twitter can be used to help scientists to get a better understanding of human behaviour and social dynamics.
The President of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), James Pennebaker, launching the annual conference in Texas said, "By analysing different types of social media, search terms, or even blogs, we are able to capture people's thinking, communication patterns, health, beliefs, prejudices, group behaviours - essentially everything that has ever been studied in social and personality psychology. We can examine thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people at once or track them over time."
Pennebaker of the University of Texas-Austin, whose work has explored the power of language in revealing our personality and behaviour, chaired a session on the opportunities enabled by big data and new technology. No longer do research psychologists need to rely on traditional experimental designs, "running one upper middle class college student at a time," he says. "We now have access to the world of social behaviour in ways never imagined before."
For example, a recent study by research scientists at Facebook analysed 400,000 Facebook posts to determine differences in how parents talk to their children versus other friends and how they address their adult versus teen children. The posts, stripped of identifiable user information, showed that children's communication with their parents decreases in frequency from age 13 on, but then rises when they move out. Counter to previous research on familial communication, they also found that being farther away from each other does not diminish how much parents and children talk on Facebook.
The study also found differences between how mothers and fathers use Facebook. Automatic language coding showed that mothers' posts showed more emotion, using phrases like "poor baby" or "so proud of," while fathers' posts were more abstract, with phrases such as "keep it up" or "got your back." Also, mothers were more likely to ask children to call them, while fathers talked more about shared interests, such as politics or sports.
"The Internet offers a tremendous opportunity to understand important social phenomena like family structure and also to help us explore how sharing information influences people's emotional states and decision-making," says Adam Kramer, a data scientist at Facebook. Kramer will be presenting such varying examples at the SPSP conference in Austin.
Eric Horvitz, distinguished scientist and director of Microsoft Research lab in Redmond, Wash., has been analysing data from Twitter and other online media to better understand and predict people's health and well-being. "Large-scale data analyses generate insights about people - their mood, goals, intentions, health, and well-being - over both short and long periods of time," he says.