The politics of synonyms

Previous studies have shown people can identify the gender and race of a speaker based on the words chosen, but could a person identify something like political membership? A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found people are more successful at identifying language associated with Republican speech than Democratic speech patterns. The results are available in the February issue of the journal PLOS.

"While other studies have shown that people can detect social categories like the race and gender of a speaker based word choice, there hasn't been work on whether that's true for ideology ," said study contributor END