Hiding behind the words of others: Does redundant word choice reflect suppressed individuality when tweeting in the first person singular?

Abstract

We analyze naturally occurring social media data that derive from Twitter messages posted over a 24-h period in immediate reaction to the Paris terrorist attacks in November 2015. We separately examine patterns for tweets with first-person singular pronouns (I) and first-person plural pronouns (WE), the corresponding variations in valence, arousal, proportion of words in various LIWC categories, and diversity of word choices within those categories. Negatively valenced word choices revealed greater mean differences between I and WE than did positively valenced words. Novel was that tweets with I exhibited a more uniform distribution of word choices and greater linguistic alignment, for most of the LIWC categories and for both positively and negatively valenced word choices, relative to tweets in WE. Greater diversity differences associated with pronoun choice when valence is negative than when it is positive suggest less self-disclosure when tweeting with first-person singular than plural pronouns.