4 ms·
If you're curious which absolutist words they picked: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/2167702617747074/suppl_file/Table_S2_Supplemental_Material.p
by roflc0ptic 9y ago
If you're curious which absolutist words they picked: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/2167702617747074/suppl_file/Table_S2_Supplemental_Material.pdf http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/21677026177470...
Methodology for determining words:
"To construct these dictionaries, we initially brainstormed
more than 300 absolutist words and 200 nonabsolutist
words (including extreme words). Testing on
pilot data (control and test groups) revealed that many
of the words on these original lists were too obscure
to register with sufficient frequency for analysis. Consequently,
the original dictionaries were reduced to the
most prevalent 22 absolutist words and 43 nonabsolutist
words (including 21 extreme words). Although this was
based on a mostly arbitrary cutoff, it was intended that
the lists be large enough to produce representative
dictionary percentages, but small enough to facilitate
independent validation by experts. The 22 absolutist
words and 43 nonabsolutist words were combined into
a single list of 65 words. Five independent expert
judges were asked to categorize them as absolute, nonabsolute,
and/or extreme. Two of the judges are clinical
psychologists from the University of Reading Charlie
Waller Institute and three are linguists from the University
of Reading School of Clinical Language Sciences.
Judges were permitted to place words into more than
one category (i.e., extreme and absolute). The agreement
between our original categorization of the words
(absolutist/nonabsolutist) and that of the judges ranged
between 83% and 94%, whereas the interjudge agreement
was 96%. Words were considered absolute,
extreme, or nonabsolute on the basis of a majority
decision by the judges. Three words, anything, need,
and needed, were moved from the absolutist dictionary
to the nonabsolutist dictionary as they were not categorized
as absolute by the majority of judges. All the
words on our nonabsolutist dictionary were judged
nonabsolute. Judges showed almost no agreement on
extreme words, this category was consequently
removed from the analysis (collapsed into the nonabsolutist
category)."
- slig 9y agoList of absolutist words: absolutely all always complete completely constant constantly definitely entire ever every everyone everything full must never nothing totally whole
- mozumder 9y agoLot of these words are spoken by politicians to demand authority recognition. Can we say politicians therefore exploit the anxiety of the population through absolutism?
- matt4077 9y agoI just did a quick grep in a set of Speeches by two different politicians (about 20,000 words each): #Pol #<absolutely|all|always|...>/#<words> Trump 0.013 Obama 0.004 Congress 0.011 HN 0.017 Yeah, I threw in a few Hacker News comment pages (not including this one). So, I'm questioning your assumptions...
- mozumder 9y agoYah that's about right. Thanks for this data. I would expect some positivity from politicians compared to HN nerds. BTW this really shows how awful Trump is.
- dboreham 9y agoJust these two work pretty well as a short list: "Always", "Never".
- anon_mouse 9y agoIs this the entire list of 'absolutist' words? A. It seems very small. B. I'm assuming a lot of research went into choosing that list, I guess I'll have to search for how that works haha.
- no_news_is 9y agoThank you for posting this, I would have ignored the Supplemental Materials link otherwise.