Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Analyze Twitter To Find Happiest Parts of the United States
Nerval's Lobster writes "If you live in Hawaii, congratulations: according to a new study (PDF) by researchers at the University of Vermont, you live in the happiest state in the union — at least as far as Twitter sentiment is concerned. (Hat tip to The Atlantic for posting about the research.) The researchers — affiliated with the University's Department of Mathematics & Statistics, Complex Systems Center, Computational Story Lab, and Advanced Computing Core — collected 10 million geo-tagged Tweets from 373 urban areas across the United States in 2011 and ran them through a system designed to tag each on a scale from 1 (sad) to 9 (happy). According to the study, the five happiest states include Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Utah and Vermont; the five saddest are Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, Delaware and Georgia. In general, the West and Northeast seemed much happier than the Mid-Atlantic and South—with the exception of Florida, which shaded 'happier' than many of the surrounding states. While the researchers admitted their study's limitations, there are certainly a lot of opportunities for refining the model: for example, if Hawaii's status as a vacation state affects its rate of 'happy' Tweets, or if incorporating languages other than English into the dataset would affect the ultimate results."
Frankly, I'm not surprised. I amazed many more Americans don't live in Hawaii. I realize there are many reasons people live where they do - Family and friend connections, employment, intertia... But man, if it was easy for me to move to Hawaii I'd be there in a shot. It's just such an agreeable place - Particulary places like Kauai.
So, lemme get this straight... If you live in a tropical paradise, you're happier than if you live in a state with a depressed economy and terrible weather.
In other news, grass is green.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
"While the researchers admitted their study's limitations,"
-Ya no shit it has limitations. Here's a great exercise for middle school kids: point out the obvious flaws with this study with regards to the scientific method. Social Sciences already were pseudo science/witchcraft. It's like they are trying to parody themselves now.
We used to get warnings when a link was a PDF. Thar could be danger thar maties!
That the Univerity of Vermont researchers' methodology indicates that Vermont is among the happiest states.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'm curious how they overcame issues with local dialect. Meaning, how do you differentiate actual unhappiness from typical East Coast urban "this sucks" type banter.
Louisiana has the largest prison population and is also the saddest place according to this study, coincidence?
:)
... that happy people do not use Twitter.
Anyone else find it interesting that, in general, red states (Republican) are mostly blue (unhappy) on the map, while blue states (Democrat) are mostly red (happy) on the map?
Hawaii has a lot of tourism and generally people are happy on vacation. Did they account for that?
I think this just means that Utah is the most sarcastic state.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You can control for the tourists in Hawaii by looking at their tweet timeline and only using tweets that are broadcast from Hawaii for a long period of time and not elsewhere before and after.
It seems to me that the more happy or optimistic a person is in their social network presence, the more troubled they seem to be IRL. Personally, when I'm happy, the last thing I think of doing is proving it to other people. Just my two cents.
Other than a brief mention in The Atlantic article, it looks like tourism wasn't really taken into account. I'd be interested in seeing if Hawaii still is the happiest state when you eliminate all the tweets that are from tourists and not natives or long term residents. At least eliminate all of the "Just got off the plane in Hawaii so happy to be on vacation woo lol" or whatever.
On the flip side, I can easily see Beaumont as a sad city if people driving through stop there for gas before entering Louisiana (a wise move) and while the pump is running they tweet that Beaumont is an ugly shithole and then move on. That's not really fair to Beaumont though as its residents are the ones who have truly earned the right to berate it.
TLDR, find a way to present this mostly from natives or long term residents and it'll actually be interesting.
So we still don't know if Walt Disney World really is the Happiest Place On Earth.
The only people who use Twitter are bored, uneducated malcontents. I wouldn't shake hands with anyone who's got a Twitter account.
To the stupidest article to ever be posted on Slashdot, ever.
Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Utah
Hot, cold, vice, and virtue.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
if some of those southern states were 'blue' at election time, they'd be 'blue' in this study?
captcha: grinning
(not happy here -- have a moron named walker in the state house screwing everything up)
In Delaware, we're all just looking for the exit to the parking lot.
The study just did a search for specific words, tabulated the results, and said that because happy words mean happy posters and unhappy words (and swear words) mean unhappy people, that their study was a study on happiness.
Complete bullshit. I have yet to even see a study that determines what percentage of happy words correlate with an actually happy post (Classic example: "Steak overdone. Not happy"), and extrapolate from there to overall numbers. Instead, it's just some people making shit up so that they can sell their tools to executives who are looking for some numbers.
This is nothing but a complete waste of time, and of money.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
... as the inside of my pants is my happy place.
There's a black president. Depression and anger must be at an all time high in the south. Hawaii is so far from all the bullshit that it's no wonder they're the happiest.
No if you're posting from a vacation destination you're probably happy.
Exactly. If the researchers didn't account for traveling behavior (i.e., check to see if the person was posting from their typical geographical region) then the results would be heavily skewed by vacations. Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Utah and Vermont are all popular vacation locations.
The happy-go-lucky crowd doesn't tend to worry. Others are looking toward the future with concern. Optimists vote Democrat, while pessimists vote Republican.
I can't tell if your sense of american geopolitics is really that messed up, or if you just don't care.
Seems like an easier data set to parse and a bit more truthful. You can tweet how happy you are, but at the end of the day your taking pills for depression your are not(of course excluding certain medical conditions). L.A. and other areas might be exposed for people seeming to be happy, but ultimately not.
Gallup does a "well-being" poll (the factors they use to determine "well-being" correlate pretty well with happiness). While the Gallup poll agrees that Hawaii is the "happiest", the rest of their poll comes out significantly different. For example, the Twit survey from this article has Florida as above the median for happiness, the Gallup poll has them third from the bottom. Another example, this Twit poll puts Maryland near the bottom, while Gallup puts it near the top. The real problem with the Twit survey is that states that are vacation destinations will have a disproportionate representation of people who are not involved in their daily grind. I suspect That not only are people who are on vacation more likely to be happy, those that are Twits probably tweet more while on vacation.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
sad thing is someone modded that trash up
Uhh? Utah is the second most religious state and the fourth most happy.
As the summary points out many of the happy areas are vacation spots. Hawaii, Nevada and Maine are all popular vacation destinations, the same applies to Floria, which would explain why it is ranked higher than the surrounding states.
Hawaiians consume more Spam than any other state in the Union
Hawaiians are the happiest state
If you want to be happy, EAT MORE SPAM
the five saddest are Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, Delaware and Georgia
Nope. Since the above states have happiness values above the "indifferent" value of 4.5 (scale is from 1-9), they are not the saddest - they are merely less happy. Probably because they aren't Texas.
so, am I on an undefined happiness state? I don't use facebook neither... so, am I a terrorist? ... according to many recent "studies".
As a resident of Hawaii, I know that this cannot be right. Hawaii is so expensive that too many people have to work overtime and/or two or three jobs just to make ends meet. Also, unless you love the ocean and/or nature, there is little to do here.
Financial hardship, cost of living, boredom, incompetent politicians, oppression of the native people, and exploitation of the blue collar workers make this anything but the happiest state.
I believe that the results are skewed. "LOL" is too superficial to be counted as an indicator of happiness. And, "Rainbow" in Hawaii refers to the athletic program and all of the sports teams of the Univ of Hawaii system. The word "rainbow" would be used an inordinate number of times in Hawaii.
I wonder if the amount of lithium in the drinking water correlates with this data? Just curious if the states that are happy in general have higher trace amounts of lithium in the drinking water supply. I know in the past studies have shown suicide rates have been correlated to the amount of lithium in drinking water so I think it does make a valid question if it correlates to happiness in general. http://www.ij-healthgeographics.com/content/11/1/19
Don't bother. They looked at 10 million whole tweets (out of a population of 300million) and counted 'happy words' like rainbow, love, beauty, hope, wonderful, wine vs. "sad words" like damn, boo, ugly, smoke, hate, lied. The 'happy' or 'sad' status of words was determined by asking mechanical turk workers.
I would love to see a more detailed breakdown than just which state these tweets take place in, down to county lines maybe. At that point the heat map would be real interesting to juxtapose with data from other sources. Ex: Which areas voted for who in November's election.
Other than the tourist states (CA, FL, HI) it seems to really correlate with the census population density map... could it be that other people make people sad?
This "happy map" correlates with "twitter user-base map"?
even though it is a 1-9 scale the range of this report is really 5.85 to about 6.15 (about .3). So really happy vs sad is really not a huge difference.
Disagreeing with you does not make me a troll.
1) only measures twitter users. are twitter users a fair measure of a population? i would assert NO. twitter users are likely to be more technically literate than average, and _may_ have an aggregate political tilt to the right or left. This should be measured before assuming twitter could represent a state.
2) study looked at and assigned emotional value to works. one would expect this to have some degree of validity in the assessors home culture, but as culture and language usage shift (a known phenomenon), these value assignments will drift - people may in some place use the word "hate" when they are happy, just the way language works there ("bad" when i was a kid was good in some subcultures, for example).
3) as mentioned by numerous other posters, need to account for local vs vacationing
So the happiest places are the Rocky Mountains, the northern New England states, and Hawaii? Glad I live in the Rockies...
The happiest place in the United States doesn't have Twitter.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
Methodology aside, the state happiness levels are actually the most dull aspect of this. Far more interesting are the correlations to certain words, obesity, and especially the supplemental data on other traits. Not necessarily anything surprising but definitely more interesting.
Highest correlation with being happy? Being white.
Highest correlation for being sad? Being black.
The word "cafe" is correlated with percentage of the population having a Bachelor's degree.
"Cafe," "sushi," and "brewery" are the top food-related words correlating negatively with obesity.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
Glad to see that Researchers found useful things to do with their time!
Seriously.. who comes up with this crap?
And how's Obama doing with all that stuff? Seems to me he's continued all of Bush's most hated policies.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I prefer to believe ( :-) ) that most of us in Massachusetts and NH and VT are so happy we don't even bother with something as pitiful as Twitter in the first place.
Maybe Hawaii has the happiest twits (or do I have to call them tweeters?). That doesn't mean the GenPop is happiest.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
All the happiest cities are in locations where marijuana is legal. Coincidence?
Yeah, probably :)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Blue states happy, Red state unhappy. Kind of mirrors their politics. I plan to retire in Maine and I always found it laid back. Hard to be unhappy when you have a beer in hand and a lobster boiling for dinner. A northern version of Jimmie Buffet.
I don't think it's blue vs red (as other users have posted), but there are some definite trends. For example, compare to the map of the Post-Election Racist Tweets to see some interesting data: http://geocommons.com/maps/210024
Good thing they didn't get as geo-specific as just my company or they'd find the angriest hole of bitterness and hatred on the internet twitternet lol.
I am very skeptical about simply using words to gauge happiness.
I suspect that there are cultural factors that influence how people express their feelings in words.
In various subcultures, people might be either encouraged or discouraged from expressing their happy/sad feelings in words. Those cultural differences could strongly color the results of this Twitter analysis.
It's common to see strong cultural differences in the way people express themselves. Rich versus poor. Educated versus uneducated. Rural versus urban. Regional dialects, and so forth.
How do we know that geography isn't just being used here as a proxy for the true underlying cultural factors that cause these differences?
After weeks in Hawaii, I get island fever.