Have a big salary? It probably shows in your tweets – high earners sound angrier and more pessimistic on social media
Does the stress of a well-paid job lead you to vent your frustrations on social media? According to a new study in the journal Plos One, high earners tend to express more negative emotions in their tweets than low earners.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania looked at the relationship between the self-described occupations and tweets posted by a sample of more than 5,000 Twitter users. They did this by creating a statistical natural language processing algorithm that pulled in words that people used in their tweets.
They found that overall, people with big salaries more frequently sounded angry, scared and pessimistic, although they also tended to use fewer swear words than low earners.
In terms of discussion topic, high earners were much more likely to write about politics, corporations or the non-profit world than low earners, who tended to focus more on their own lives.
Previous studies have already identified the influence of age and gender on Twitter use, but this is the first time the affect of job and income has been looked at in a large-scale study.
Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, lead researcher of the study, said:
Lower-income users or those of a lower socio-economic status use Twitter more as a communication means among themselves.High-income people use it more to disseminate news, and they use it more professionally than personally.