Language and social dynamics

What do words suggest about people and their experiences? We use language as a lens into psychological events and social interactions. Our approach uses computational tools to gather and examine language data, from online reviews to science papers. We specialize in collecting and analyzing data from natural repositories at scale.

Our recent papers investigate a variety of phenomena including the language features that predict funding success in peer-to-peer financial networks (Larrimore et al., 2011), the traces of deception in fraudulent science papers (Markowitz & Hancock, 2014, 2016), and the language patterns of emotional contagion in social networks (Kramer, Guillory, & Hancock, 2014).

Publications

Academy Awards Speeches Reflect Social Status, Cinematic Roles, and Winning Expectations

Markowitz, D.M. (2018) Academy Awards Speeches Reflect Social Status, Cinematic Roles, and Winning Expectations, Journal of Language and Social Psychology

Linguistic obfuscation in fraudulent science

Markowitz, D.M. & Hancock, J.T. (2015). Linguistic obfuscation in fraudulent science. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 35, 435-445.

Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks

Kramer, A., Guillory, J., & Hancock, J.T. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 111:8788-8790

Peer to peer lending: The relationship between language features, trustworthiness, and persuasion success

Larrimore, L., Jiang, L., Larrimore, J., Markowitz, D., & Gorski, S. (2011). Peer to peer lending: The relationship between language features, trustworthiness, and persuasion success. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 39, 19-37.