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Study Says People Who Continually Point Out Typos Are 'Jerks'
HughPickens.com writes: Sophie Kleeman, writes at Gizmodo that according to a study at the University of Michigan people who are more sensitive to written typos and grammatical errors are indeed the kinds of 'Type A assholes' everyone already suspects them to be. Researchers gathered 83 people and had them read emails that either contained typos ("mkae" or "abuot"), grammar errors (to/too, it's/its or your/you're), or no spelling mistakes at all. Participants were asked at the end of the experiment whether or not they'd spotted any grammatical errors or typos in the emails, and, if so, how much it had bothered them. The researchers then asked the participants to complete a Big Five personality assessment -- which rates where they are on a scale of openness, agreeableness, extraversion/introversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness -- as well as answer questions about their age, background, and attitude towards language. People who tested as being more conscientious but less open were more sensitive to typos, while those with less agreeable personalities got more upset by grammatical errors. "Less agreeable participants showed more sensitivity to 'grammos' than participants high in agreeability," the researchers said, "perhaps because less agreeable people are less tolerant of deviations from convention."
Is something stupid people do to hedge their bets
- Rick
What are the people who carry out those studies?
I know...people who need something, anything to study for Federal Grant money.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Nothing more annoying than someone who cannot handle a simple typo - as the old saying goes, consistant spelling is the hallmark of a weak mind.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For obvious reasons :)
but I guess this study proves that I am.
I "could of" been a nice guy all this time...
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
... summarise the story for me? It contained so many errors and poor sentence structure that I couldn't follow what the submitter was trying to say.
Survey of 83? WTF?
Is it April 1st already somewhere on the planet? Crap.
I don't respond to or upvote ACs
The only reasons I can think of that people get hung up on grammatical mistakes are:
1. They like to feel smarter/superior
2. They are OCD or have some kind of fixation
3. They are genuinely trying to help/improve someone's ability
But even if 2 or 3 are true, they still come off as number 1.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Misuse of to/too, there/their/they're, your/you're, etc is ignorance. There's a difference.
How's that for pointing out errors?
That's weird, I always thought of myself as "Type B". I point out typos to help educate. I'll be damned if I put ending punctuation inside parentheses though (example: suck it).
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
If these conclusions rest upon the Big Five personality test, then they rest upon unfounded, unscientific cultural assumptions. Big Five axiomatically assumes extraversion = healthy and introversion = pathological.
So, I call bullshit on this whole deal.
We're actually helping educate you to use the correct spelling and to double check your spelling, so you stop making your self look like a moron.
"your self" or "yourself"?
People can makes all the grammatical errors they wants. There not going to loose my respect
It does not help that the article in question has both spelling and grammatical errors.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
I don't need a university study to tell me I'm a jerk. I'm comfortable with that fact already.
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
"Less agreeable participants showed more sensitivity to 'grammos' than participants high in agreeability," the researchers said...
So people who are less likely to let small errors slide without comment in general turned out to be less likely to let small errors slide in one specific context?
Mind. Blown.
They may be perceived as "disagreeable assholes" by the illiterate, but they are still right.
And no, I don't think, a study mixing typos (like "mkae" instead of "make") with illiteracy ("your" instead of "you're") is actually valid.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
...each and every time a plane crosses the equator yet computes it's trajectory correctly, every time your car adjusts properly to changes in air temperature, and every time your pacemaker properly tells your heart to beep.
Jerks rule the tech universe. Others participate, but the Jerks keep them in line and the Jerks rule. Without Jerks all would be chaos.
Learn to spell. Pay attention to grammar. Get the errors out of your maths. Become a Jerk, not an uneducated slob! Then get a high-paying tech job and contribute something to the future of mankind.
The first comma was unnecessary. I wrote a sternly-worded letter to the president.
I suspect this has to do with personalities that tend to favor order, logic, and organization, something that's obviously beneficial to programming or engineering, but could be a hindrance when dealing with messy and unpredictable human interpersonal relationships. As a programmer myself, seeing typos and grammatical errors tends to trigger something in my brain that screams "that's not correct - it needs fixing!" in the same way a crookedly hung painting will irritate people who strive to create a sense of order in their environment.
Of course, general social awareness prevents me from reacting too negatively to things like simple typos, but there are some people who simply don't have those sort of brain-to-mouth social filters. If you've never worked with someone like that, you know how awkward or unpleasant it can be unless you've got an *extremely* tolerant personality - which I'd admit I probably don't have.
I'd imagine our brains have evolved to recognize patterns and draw our attention to things that break those patterns, because in nature such a thing has a high probability of being either be interesting or dangerous. I think this could theoretically explain why bugs on streaming videos (logos overlaid in the corner of the video screen) tend to bother me more than most people - my brain recognizes it as something "different" and so it constantly draws my attention away from the content of the video.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
So I'm an asshole because it irritates me to no end that some people can't even be bothered to learn the difference between there, their, and they're? Typos ar one thign, even I makes thme, but when a 'typo' is really pure, unadulterated ignorance, is it really the readers fault that they're bothered by it? The English language is complex and full of silly rules, but there are some things so basic and so often called out that there really is no excuse to continually make those errors past grade school.
Agreeable to whom, by whom ? You have to wonder how they can measure a subjective in absolute terms. Typos don't really bother me, the bad grammar leads to misunderstandings and communication failures, which already plague internet communications to a high degree. We can do without the additional impediments.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The article implies that this is a bad thing. There is nothing wrong with getting shit done and doing it right the first time.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Let me get this straight -- people who care about correctness and doing things right are assholes?
I completely disagree. Yes, people who constantly correct others in a rude way can come across as arrogant condescending assholes. They also can come across as Insufferable Know-it-alls.
But you know what? I consider people who don't care about being correct to be assholes, and if they bitch when corrected, I consider them to be coddled unique snowflake assholes. I guess that makes me an asshole.
So to the author of this study and all the lemmings who will parrot its findings for the next thousand years, I have to say "My god, it's full of assholes!"
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
You should have put the word "or" in quotes.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Dear people who type in all lowercase,
We are the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse and helping your uncle jack off a horse.
Sincerely,
Capital Letters.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Why? It's a term familiar to any western chef. According to dictionary.com, "Aspic is a savory jelly usually made with meat or fish stock and gelatin, chilled and used as a garnish and coating for meats, seafoods, eggs, etc."
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
The study found that while conscientious people noticed, less agreeable people (assholes) were bothered by typos. Quoting the fine summary:
Participants were asked at the end of the experiment whether or not they'd spotted any grammatical errors or typos in the emails, and, if so, how much it had bothered them. ...
People who tested as being more conscientious but less open were more sensitive to typos, while those with less agreeable personalities got more upset by grammatical errors.
This study has far too many typoes for me to take it seriously.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
Complaining about typos in non-published stuff? What do they think, we all have a professional editor who vets our stuff before hitting submit? Not to mention not everyone in places like /. are typing in their native language.
Obviously a certain line can be crossed where our opinion of the commenter becomes so low as to dilute whatever point they are making, but anyone who comes onto a tech board to complain about someone's typing mistakes has some pretty serious priory issues.
To me this comes under the same category about all arts majors complaining that tech people don't take enough arts courses and thus aren't "Well rounded"
I'm not likely to point out grammatical flaws in other people's writing, usually chalking it up to human error. Maybe they already know better and just made a mistake. Maybe they don't know better but it doesn't fucking matter to me unless I'm specifically proofreading it with an eye for correctness; so long as I understood, it's fine.
But if an argument has started over whether or not something is in fact an error (not whether or not the error matters in the moment), I cannot fucking stand so-called "descriptivists" who are in fact prescriptive relativists (which, like all relativism, is tantamount to nihilism): people who say that because something is done some way, it's OK to do it that way. Mind you, ACTUAL descriptive linguistics, documenting what is or isn't done, is great, and is a completely separate activity from saying anything at all about what is or isn't OK. But a nihilistic form of prescriptivism that just says "anything is OK", or pretends "not just anything is OK, but so long as people actually do that, it's OK" (which is still tantamount to just "anything is OK") is not just descriptivism, that's a pants-on-head retarded kind of prescriptivism itself, trying to bad-mouth prescription as an activity even while engaging in it.
And the alternatives to that are NOT limited to from-on-high authoritarian prescription, any more than the only alternative to moral relativism is authoritarian religious moralism. It is possible to reason about these, things, fallibly and critically but objectively, pragmatically. It is possible to have a rational argument about these things, and in such an argument, it is possible for someone to be right or wrong.
I don't fucking care if you write "I could care less" when you mean "I couldn't care less", I know what you mean. But if for some reason a discussion is happening about whether "I could care less" is in fact in error, and it ought to be "I couldn't care less", the people saying that are fucking right and shut your relativist fucking pie-hole if you think otherwise, unless you have a goddamn reasonable argument why otherwise, not just "people say that, you know what they mean".
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Making spelling mistakes online: First, an indicator your correspondent may be poorly educated. Second, proof they have failed to properly use a spelling checker. Third, a virtual guarantee that at least some of their audience will not read for content. Fourth, sufficient provocation that some of those individuals may disrupt the conversation in turn.
Language is a key means for communicating ideas. How well we use it directly affects how well our communications are received. It is, in fact, an art, like painting. However, also like painting, one can paint ideas like a master or finger-paint them like an addled child. Which do you think will be better received?
Learn to write coherently and correctly. It is well worth it. Knowledge is power. Communications skills are tools to exercise that power.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.