The “I”s have it: Sex and Social Status Differences on Twitter

Abstract

We examined the use of “I” in Tweets posted by 50 famous people during a one-month window. The linguistic inquiry and word count (LIWC) was implemented to determine the percentage of 140-character Tweets that used the personal pronoun “I”. Our findings showed patterns typically seen in natural speech. Specifically, women used the self-referent focus “I” significantly more often than men did, and lower status (operationalized as the number of Twitter followers) people used “I” significantly more often than those with higher status. Men of low social status used significantly more “I” language than did women with lower social status, but women and men of higher social status used “I” equally. Our findings suggest that social status may alter sex-linked communication, with the use of an informal and friendly style that includes self-referencing by men of lower social status, perhaps in an effort to engage more people and enhance their own status through more self-referencing.