Room to Grow: Understanding Personal Characteristics Behind Self Improvement Using Social Media

TL;DR

This study analyzes social media writings to identify linguistic patterns associated with persistence in personal self-improvement efforts, revealing key behavioral indicators and developing a predictive classifier.

Contribution

It introduces a novel dataset and linguistic analysis approach to distinguish persistent individuals from non-persistent ones in self-improvement contexts.

Findings

Persistent individuals reference more self-improvement topics

They use more complex writing styles

A classifier reliably predicts persistence based on language

Abstract

Many people aim for change, but not everyone succeeds. While there are a number of social psychology theories that propose motivation-related characteristics of those who persist with change, few computational studies have explored the motivational stage of personal change. In this paper, we investigate a new dataset consisting of the writings of people who manifest intention to change, some of whom persist while others do not. Using a variety of linguistic analysis techniques, we first examine the writing patterns that distinguish the two groups of people. Persistent people tend to reference more topics related to long-term self-improvement and use a more complicated writing style. Drawing on these consistent differences, we build a classifier that can reliably identify the people more likely to persist, based on their language. Our experiments provide new insights into the motivation-related behavior of people who persist with their intention to change.