Personality influences how one reacts to email errors

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When reading emails, do you become the “grammar police”?

You no who you aer: the person who thinks its her job too catch every typo or gramatical errur?

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This behavior is partly the result of personality traits that influence how people react to written errors, according to University of Michigan linguistics experts.

Extroverted people are likely to overlook typos and grammatical errors that would cause introverted people to more negatively judge the person making such errors.

“This is the first study to show that the personality traits of listeners/readers have an effect on the interpretation of language,” said Julie Boland, professor of linguistics and psychology, and the study’s lead author. “In this experiment, we examined the social judgments that readers made about the writers.”

Eighty-three participants read email responses to an ad for a housemate that either contained no errors or had been altered to include either typos, such as mkae (make) or abuot (about), or grammar errors, such as to/too, it’s/its or your/you’re. They rated the email writers in terms of perceived intelligence, friendliness and other attributes, as well as provided information about themselves.

At the end of the experiment, participants were asked if they noticed any grammatical errors in the responses. If they answered “yes,” they indicated how much the errors bothered them.

As expected, participants who reported grammar being important at the beginning of the experiment were more likely to be bothered by grammatical errors at the end, said study co-author Robin Queen, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and professor and chair of the Department of Linguistics.

In addition, less agreeable people are more sensitive to grammatical errors, while more conscientious and less open people are sensitive to typos, the researchers said.

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Comments

  1. Therese Shaw
    on April 1, 2016 at 11:37 am

    Another answer to the mystery: Some of the grammar police are simply lawyers who have been trained to check, check and then check again for typos, misspellings, grammar errors, and syntax errors.
    Or, they studied Latin.

    • Mari Ford
      on April 4, 2016 at 10:05 am

      Hahahah LOL so true!

  2. William Ingram
    on April 1, 2016 at 12:48 pm

    Or, they’re English majors (or English teachers) who have — one hopes — been sensitized to such issues and thus can’t fail to notice them, regardless of what their personality type is.

  3. Lisa Papp
    on April 1, 2016 at 1:10 pm

    I’m curious to know if it’s the article writer, Jared Wadley, or Professor Boland who included this juicy, sexist tidbit in the opening intro to the article: “the person who thinks its ***her**** job too catch..”
    Can you enlighten your readers about THAT? (Thanks!)

    • Jessyca Riggleman
      on April 4, 2016 at 7:57 am

      Maybe they were just testing us to see if anyone noticed. 😉 I sure didn’t.

    • Alan Headbloom
      on April 9, 2016 at 7:42 pm

      As an extroverted male with an English degree, I was mentally correcting this line to say “the person who thinks it’s his/her job to catch.”

  4. Jennifer Sporer
    on April 12, 2016 at 3:20 pm

    When I was younger, I did judge people for spelling and grammar. I generally think that it is best to aim to write professionally; however, I have also learned from life that writing skill is independent of intelligence or personal character. With the information age, it is more and more common for people to communicate without strict adherence to what is taught in school.

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