With these words you come out as a "low performer" on Facebook, Instagram & Co.

Russian scientists have succeeded in using social media posts to find out who is particularly capable - and who is not.

• Russian researchers used a computer program to analyze around 7 million social media posts * from PISA participants.

• Her goal was

  to be able to differentiate high performers from less powerful authors

  based on their

  social media posts

  .

• In fact, the contributions of

  high performers

  and

  low performers

  differ

  in the choice of words, use of punctuation marks or emojis.

People who are particularly productive and successful are often referred to as “high performers” in their professional lives.

In contrast, “low performers” perform less on average.

Russian researchers have now discovered that these skills are not only revealed in the job, but can be predicted long in advance.

Scientist analyzes social media posts from schoolchildren and students

Ivan Smirnov is a senior research fellow in the Computational Social Sciences Laboratory at the Pedagogical Institute of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

As the science magazine EurekAlert reports, he

developed

a

program

for his study

.

This analyzed the texts of the social media posts of around 4,400 schoolchildren and students who took part in the PISA study in 2012.

From the results he tried to predict how capable the writers are.

Also read:

High and low performers use different words and punctuation marks

And indeed: According to his findings, the posts of the later high performers and low performers differ - both in the choice of words and in the use of punctuation marks and emojis.

As follows:

Signs of a high performer:

• Use of Latin characters

• longer than average posts

• words that are longer than average

• large vocabulary

• high information content

• Topics:

  books, reading (e.g. author names, words from the publishing industry), physics

• Words related to thought processes and cognitive performance

• English words (above, say, yours, must)

Also Read:

Evidence for a low performer:

• Use of capital letters

• Use of emojis

• lots of exclamation marks

• misspelled words

• Topics:

  computer games, military, car, car accidents, horoscope

With the help of text analysis, around 7 million posts were examined on the Russian social media platform VK.

The results should also be transferable to other social media platforms.

More on the topic: 

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