David M. Markowitz

Peer to Peer Lending: The Relationship Between Language Features, Trustworthiness, and Persuasion Success

This study examined the relationship between language use and persuasion success in the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending environment where unaffiliated individuals borrow money directly from each other using a textual description to justify the loan. Over 200,000 loan requests were analyzed with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software. The use of extended narratives, concrete descriptions and quantitative words that are likely related to ones financial situation had positive associations with funding success which was considered to be an indicator of trust. Humanizing personal details or justifications for ones current financial situation were negatively associated with funding success. These results offer insights into how individuals can optimize their persuasiveness by monitoring their language use in online environments.

Linguistic Obfuscation in Fraudulent Science

The rise of scientific fraud has drawn significant attention to research misconduct across disciplines. Documented cases of fraud provide an opportunity to examine whether scientists write differently when reporting on fraudulent research. In an analysis of over two million words, we evaluated 253 publications retracted for fraudulent data and compared the linguistic style of each paper to a corpus of 253 unretracted publications and 62 publications retracted for reasons other than fraud (e.g., ethics violations). Fraudulent papers were written with significantly higher levels of linguistic obfuscation, including lower readability and higher rates of jargon than unretracted and nonfraudulent papers. We also observed a positive association between obfuscation and the number of references per paper, suggesting that fraudulent authors obfuscate their reports to mask their deception by making them more costly to analyze and evaluate. This is the first large-scale analysis of fraudulent papers across authors and disciplines to reveal how changes in writing style are related to fraudulent data reporting.

Linguistic Traces of a Scientific Fraud: The Case of Diederik Stapel

When scientists report false data, does their writing style reflect their deception? In this study, we investigated the linguistic patterns of fraudulent (N  =  24; 170,008 words) and genuine publications (N  =  25; 189,705 words) first-authored by social psychologist Diederik Stapel. The analysis revealed that Stapels fraudulent papers contained linguistic changes in science-related discourse dimensions, including more terms pertaining to methods, investigation, and certainty than his genuine papers. His writing style also matched patterns in other deceptive language, including fewer adjectives in fraudulent publications relative to genuine publications. Using differences in language dimensions we were able to classify Stapels publications with above chance accuracy. Beyond these discourse dimensions, Stapel included fewer co-authors when reporting fake data than genuine data, although other evidentiary claims (e.g., number of references and experiments) did not differ across the two article types. This research supports recent findings that language cues vary systematically with deception, and that deception can be revealed in fraudulent scientific discourse.

The 27 Club: Music Lyrics Reflect Psychological Distress

People in psychological distress communicate differently than those who are free from psychological pain. We examine whether this phenomenon extends to musicians in popular media by investigating the lyrics of artists in the 27 Club, a notorious group of musicians who either committed suicide or who died of nonsuicidal causes at the age of 27. As predicted, the lyrics of suicidal musicians contained more self-references, more emotion terms, and were written with more verbal immediacy and in a more dynamic style compared to the lyrics of nonsuicidal musicians. These findings replicate and extend prior work on suicidal poets, suggesting that communication patterns in popular media can provide insights into the private psychological states of the artists who write them.

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

An analysis of Academy Awards acceptance speeches revealed that social status is indicated through pronouns. Speeches from high status movie directors contained fewer self-references than relatively low status actors. Directors also communicated analytically compared with actors, who told stories and communicated narratively. A post hoc analysis revealed that unexpected award winners communicated more positively than those who were expected to win. The analyses emphasize the importance of replications in the social sciences and extending social and psychological phenomena to new settings.

A Multitheoretical Approach to Big Text Data: Comparing Expressive and Rhetorical Logics in Yelp Reviews:

This article uses a multitheoretical approach to investigate the relationship between language use and opinion expression on Yelp. Using review metadata (e.g., star rating) to observe variation in reviewer feelings and motivations, we test for the strength of different message design logics: expressive logics, where language reflects a reviewer’s underlying opinion, and rhetorical logics, where language reflects a reviewer’s desire to make his or her opinion credible and acceptable to their audience. Results suggest that emotional language is motivated by expression as higher rated businesses are reviewed with more positive and fewer negative emotion terms. Rhetorical logics are associated with the use of abstract and self-focused language, with analysis suggesting this may result from the reviewer’s decision to write either narratively or formally.

The Media Marshmallow Test: Psychological and Physiological Effects of Applying Self-Control to the Mobile Phone

This research draws on a classic delay of gratification framework from psychology, the Marshmallow Test, to examine the effects of exercising self-control with the mobile phone. A total of 125 subjects were randomly assigned to sit in an unadorned room for six minutes and either (a) use their mobile phone, (b) sit with their device but resist using it, or (c) sit alone with no phone. Participants self-reported more concentration difficulty and more mind wandering with no device present compared to using the phone, while resisting the phone led to greater perceived concentration abilities than sitting without the device. Skin conductance data were consistent across conditions for the first three-minutes of the experiment, after which participants who resisted the phone were less aroused than those who were without the phone. Together, the findings suggest that self-control with mobile media is a complex psychological phenomenon that affects psychological and physiological behavior.

Social and psychological questions about humans and technology The Stanford Social Media Lab

M ed ia X at S ta nf or d U ni ve rs it y LABZ theories about Facebook and Twitter. In general, people have consistent folk theories about these sites and conceptualize them as a rational assistant, an unwanted obser ver, a transparent platform, or a corporate black box. Finally, a third area of research in the Social Media Lab investigates the efficacy and ethics of using conversational agents (e.g., chatbots) to communicate about mental health issues. Our evidence suggests automated assistants are not yet equipped to handle mental health dilemmas effectively, and collaborations bet ween technolog y scholars and practitioners are needed to address this new frontier. I am a researcher in the Social Media Lab primarily focusing on how language reveals what people are thinking, feeling, and experiencing psychologically. I combine computational social science (e.g., gathering and analyzing language data through automated means) with media studies to understand how language reT he Social Media Lab at Stanford Universit y evaluates communication and psychological questions about humans and technology. Our lab has several notable areas of research. One major area investigates the linguistic traces of digital media to reveal social and psychological dynamics, including deception, persuasion, and well-being. For example, a Social and Psychological Questions about Humans and Technology The Stanford Social Media Lab