Ritter,
Preston, and Hernadez analyzed data from nearly 2 million text messages
(tweets) across over [sic] 16,000 users on Twitter to examine differences between
Christians and atheists in natural language. Analyses reveal that Christians
use more positive emotion words and less negative emotion words than atheists.
Moreover, two independent paths predict differences in expressions of
happiness: frequency of words related to an intuitive (vs. analytic) thinking
style and frequency of words related to social relationships. These findings
provide the first evidence that the relationship between religion and happiness
is partially mediated by thinking style. This research also provides support
for previous laboratory studies and self-report data, suggesting that social
connection partially mediates the relationship between religiosity and
happiness. Implications for theory and the future of social science using computational
methods to analyze social media are discussed.
Actually,
this is not the first findings on the power of Christ-thinking. There was a
study back in the 1990s that determined Evangelicals who went to church
regularly (and at least once per week) were happier than those who went to
church only occasionally, and much more happy than people who did not go to
church at all. I do appreciate this research though because it is another proof
positive that Christians have a much better outlook in general than those
people who do not believe in an all powerful, divine, and supreme, holy God. Interestingly,
Ritter, Preston, and Hernandez point out Karl Marx’s idea that religious
benefits are illusions. We Christians know better.
First,
though, I find reading 25 tweets daunting and time consuming. How did these
people read more than 2 million? They categorized analytical thinking style as
words such as Think and Consider, whereas social process thinking were words
such as Mate and Friend. It is a quantitative content analysis and fairly
effective to denote people’s inadvertent thought processes by word usage.
Thank
you to George Duncan for highlighting this article for me on LinkedIN...
No comments:
Post a Comment