People obsessed with grammar are less nice

People obsessed with grammar aren't as nice as everybody else, study suggests

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Image: FLICKR, NIC MCPHEE

Well thsi is akwrd...

A study published in March suggests what we've all long suspected: People who are obsessed with grammar aren't as nice as the rest of us.

For the study, scientists Julie Boland and Robin Queen from the University of Michigan asked 83 participants to read email responses to an ad for a roommate, and then evaluate the writer on both social and academic criteria.

There were three types of emails shown in the study: emails without errors, emails with grammatical errors only and emails with typos only.

In addition to reading emails, participants were asked to complete a personality assessment.

And the results are in.

According to Boland and Queen's research, more agreeable participants (as determined by the results of the Big Five Personality index) tended to rate grammar errors less harshly than less agreeable participants, who showed more sensitivity to "grammos" — homophonous grammar errors like to/too, it’s/its.

The study, published in the journal PLOS One, then speculates that the difference between the two groups may be "perhaps because less agreeable people are less tolerant of deviations from convention."

Introversion/extroversion and conscientiousness also had some correlation with how grammar errors were perceived.

"More extraverted people were likely to overlook written errors that would cause introverted people to judge the person who makes such errors more negatively," the study says. "Less agreeable people were more sensitive to grammos, while more conscientious and less open people were sensitive to typos."

According to New York University Professor of Linguistics Gregory Guy, these findings aren't incredibly surprising.

Less agreeable people are less tolerant of deviations from convention

"This ideology of standardness and correctness — seeing everything that is not standard as deviant — is constantly confronting [the] linguistic reality which is of a lot of [language] diversity, so I would imagine that personality traits would correlate with language attitudes," Guy told Mashable.

"Impressionistically, I could imagine that a more fastidious personality type would be inclined to have a more judgmental view of deviance from perceived linguistic norms."

That said, Guy also clarified that research correlating personality type to language attitudes is a relatively new field of study.

"There’s been a trend recently in the field to look at psychological characteristics of this sort as indexes or predictors of things like language attitudes," he added.

"There’s also interest in looking at [psychological characteristics] as predicators of whether somebody adopts or advances an ongoing change in the language or resists accepting change. This is a relatively new field, to talk about psychological characteristics and their influence on your attitude toward language and your linguistic behavior."

Ultimately though, no matter what your grammatical disposition is, we understand — evrbody makes a tpyo onse in a wile.

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Topics: books, Entertainment, grammar, psychology

Image: FLICKR, NIC MCPHEE

http://mashable.com/2016/04/15/grammar-obsessed-personality-study/#K.2O4xOFiPqR

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0149885