Individuals who tend to think further into the future are more likely to invest money and to avoid risks, finds a new paper by psychologists at Emory University. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published the research, which tapped big data tools to conduct text analyses of nearly 40,000 Twitter users, and to run online experiments of behavior of people who provided their Twitter handles.
The researchers also found an association between longer future-sightedness and less risky decision-making at a U.S. state population level.
“Twitter is like a microscope for psychologists,” says co-author Phillip Wolff, an Emory associate professor of psychology. “Naturalistic data mined from tweets appears to give insights not just into tweeters’ thoughts at a particular time, but into a relatively stable cognitive process. Using social media and big-data analytical tools opens up a new paradigm in the way we study human behavior.”
Co-author Robert Thorstad, an Emory PhD candidate in the Wolff lab, came up with the idea for the research, worked on the design and analyses, and conducted the experiments.
“I'm fascinated by how peoples’ everyday behavior can give away a lot of information about their psychology,” Thorstad says. “Much of our work was automated, so we were able to analyze millions of Tweets from thousands of individuals’ day-to-day lives.”