Study says those who call out grammatical errors are in fact scientifically 'jerks' [View all]
Study says those who call out grammatical errors are in fact scientifically 'jerks'
Everybody knows the world's worst people are the ones who never miss an opportunity to explain the difference between who and whom. Those "friends" who are pretending to be policing spelling and grammar for the sake of posterity are probably just flexing for attention, or so it seems to everyone they're interrupting.
As a study from the University of Michigan recently found, those people aren't just annoying, they're also apparently huge jerks.
The study looked at the way both introverted and extroverted people reacted to typos within emails, and deduced that those who were less socially-inclined tended to "judge the person who makes such errors more negatively."
For the experiment, 83 subjects were asked to peruse email responses for a roommate ad. Some contained no errors, but others had been altered to include simple common errors. For example, in some, "about" might have been written "abuot," and in other instances, "their" and "there," or "you're" and "your" might have been swapped incorrectly.
After subjects had looked over the emails, they were questioned first as to whether or not they noticed the emails, and if they had responded "Yes," they were asked to expand upon their answer.
As researchers found, those were surveyed to be "less agreeable" were most bothered by the errors, while those who surveyed as having a "more agreeable" personality tended to overlook typos.
"Agreeability was the only personality trait to have a main effect on the Housemate Scale," the study read. "Participants who tested as more agreeable on the BFI [Big Five Personality Index] tended to rate the paragraphs more positively overall than participants who tested as less agreeable."
http://m.sfgate.com/news/article/Study-says-those-who-call-out-grammatical-errors-7221146.php
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