Twitter Culture: Atheist Tweets More Analytical, Christian Tweets Less Negative [View all]

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By News Staff | June 26th 2013 01:01 PM

A computer analysis of nearly 2 million Tweets on the Twitter online social network revealed another divide in the religious culture war - while atheists engage in more analytical thinking, Christians use more positive words and fewer negative words.

To identify Christian and atheist Twitter users, the researchers studied the tweets of more than 16,000 followers of a few prominent Christian and atheist personalities on Twitter. They analyzed the tweets for their emotional content (the use of more positive or negative words), the frequency of words (such as "friend" and "brother&quot that are related to social processes, and the frequency of their use of words (such as "because" and "think&quot that are associated with an analytical thinking style.

Overall, tweets by Christians had more positive and less negative content than tweets by atheists, the researchers report. A less analytical thinking style among Christians and more frequent use of social words were correlated with the use of words indicating positive emotions, the researchers said. Christians also were more likely than atheists to tweet about their social relationships, the results found.

"Whether religious people experience more or less happiness is an important question in itself," the authors of the new analysis wrote. "But to truly understand how religion and happiness are related we must also understand why the two may be related."

http://www.science20.com/news_articles/twitter_culture_atheist_tweets_more_analytical_christian_tweets_less_negative-115544

The findings are reported in the journal Social Psychological & Personality Science. Reference: Ryan S. Ritter, Jesse Lee Preston, and Ivan Hernandez, 'Happy Tweets: Christians Are Happier, More Socially Connected, and Less Analytical Than Atheists on Twitter', doi: 10.1177/1948550613492345, June 18th, 2013