People who constantly point out grammar mistakes are pretty much jerks, scientists find

sciencealert.com ^ | March 31, 2016 | FIONA MACDONALD

[Morgana]

Scientists have found that people who constantly get bothered by grammatical errors online have "less agreeable" personalities than those who just let them slide.

And those friends who are super-sensitive to typos on your Facebook page? Psychological testing reveals they're generally less open, and are also more likely to be judging you for your mistakes than everyone else. In other words, they're exactly who you thought they were. That sounds pretty obvious, but this is actually the first time researchers have been able to show that a person's personality traits can actually determine how they respond to typos and grammatical errors, and it could teach us a lot about how people communicate (or miscommunicate) online.

"This is the first study to show that the personality traits of listeners/readers have an effect on the interpretation of language," said lead researcher Julie Boland from the University of Michigan. "In this experiment, we examined the social judgments that readers made about the writers."

The researchers took 83 participants and asked them all to read email responses to an ad for a housemate, which either contained no errors or had been altered to include typos (e.g. "teh" instead of "the") or grammatical mix-ups, such as too/to or it's/its.

[ifinnegan]

Do you object to on the other hand?

[DungeonMaster]

Do you object to on the other hand?

That seems to have a different application.

Obama is a muslim, however he will never claim to be a muslim.

Obama is a muslim on the other hand.....

It doesn't seem to work.

[ladyjane]

My pet peeves:

Imply versus infer. Some people use the word infer when they mean imply. I guess they think it sounds fancier.

Less versus fewer. Fewer is used when you have countable objects, e.g., fewer people, fewer commas.

“With all due respect...” That phrase shows zero respect.

[SunkenCiv]

and for your convenience:

<blockquote>
<a href="http://tinypic.com" target="o"><img src="http://i16.tinypic.com/2zqu9hl.jpg" border="0" alt="Image and video hosting by TinyPic"></a>
</blockquote>

[ifinnegan]

Good points.

[GOPJ]

People who block turn lanes are jerks too...

[Grimmy]

Heh.

I prove, on a nearly daily basis, that it’s possible to be a complete jerk and not mention grammar at all, ever.

[SunkenCiv]

;’)