It turns out your suspicions about people who constantly correct grammatical errors online are correct.
They’re officially jerks.
And science proves it.
Who’s smarter, cats or dogs? Science has the answer. Post continues after video.
Yes, that’s right – psychologists have found that people who constantly chime in when they see grammatical errors online (the “*you’re” types of the world, for example) have “less agreeable” personalities than those who aren’t bothered.
And people who are super-sensitive to typos? Tests reveal they’re generally less open, and are more likely to be judging you for your mistakes than everyone else.
Yikes.
The research paper, which was published in PLOS One in 2016, was the first time researchers were able to establish a connection between personality traits and how a person responds to typos and grammatical errors online.
The study involved 83 participants who were asked to read email responses to an ad for a housemate, which either contained no errors or had been tampered with to include typos and grammatical mix-ups.
The participants were then asked to judge the person in question on how good a housemate they’d be based on their perceived intelligence, friendliness, and other attributes.
“This is the first study to show that the personality traits of listeners/readers have an effect on the interpretation of language,” lead researcher Julie Boland from the University of Michigan said.