Garrick Sherman

Sharath Chandra Guntuku, Thomas Talhelm, Garrick Sherman et al.

We used natural language processing to analyze a billion words to study cultural differences on Weibo, one of China's largest social media platforms. We compared predictions from two common explanations about cultural differences in China (economic development and urban-rural differences) against the less-obvious legacy of rice versus wheat farming. Rice farmers had to coordinate shared irrigation networks and exchange labor to cope with higher labor requirements. In contrast, wheat relied on rainfall and required half as much labor. We test whether this legacy made southern China more interdependent. Across all word categories, rice explained twice as much variance as economic development and urbanization. Rice areas used more words reflecting tight social ties, holistic thought, and a cautious, prevention orientation. We then used Twitter data comparing prefectures in Japan, which largely replicated the results from China. This provides crucial evidence of the rice theory in a different nation, language, and platform.

Young-Min Cho, Dandan Pang, Stuti Thapa et al.

While affective expressions on social media have been extensively studied, most research has focused on the Western context. This paper explores cultural differences in affective expressions by comparing valence and arousal on Twitter/X (geolocated to the US) and Sina Weibo (in Mainland China). Using the NRC-VAD lexicon to measure valence and arousal, we identify distinct patterns of emotional expression across both platforms. Our analysis reveals a functional representation between valence and arousal, showing a negative offset in contrast to traditional lab-based findings which suggest a positive offset. Furthermore, we uncover significant cross-cultural differences in arousal, with US users displaying higher emotional intensity than Chinese users, regardless of the valence of the content. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive language analysis correlating n-grams and LDA topics with affective dimensions to deepen our understanding of how language and culture shape emotional expression. These findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of affective communication across cultural and linguistic contexts on social media.

Salvatore Giorgi, Tingting Liu, Ankit Aich et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in human-centered social scientific tasks, such as data annotation, synthetic data creation, and engaging in dialog. However, these tasks are highly subjective and dependent on human factors, such as one's environment, attitudes, beliefs, and lived experiences. Thus, it may be the case that employing LLMs (which do not have such human factors) in these tasks results in a lack of variation in data, failing to reflect the diversity of human experiences. In this paper, we examine the role of prompting LLMs with human-like personas and asking the models to answer as if they were a specific human. This is done explicitly, with exact demographics, political beliefs, and lived experiences, or implicitly via names prevalent in specific populations. The LLM personas are then evaluated via (1) subjective annotation task (e.g., detecting toxicity) and (2) a belief generation task, where both tasks are known to vary across human factors. We examine the impact of explicit vs. implicit personas and investigate which human factors LLMs recognize and respond to. Results show that explicit LLM personas show mixed results when reproducing known human biases, but generally fail to demonstrate implicit biases. We conclude that LLMs may capture the statistical patterns of how people speak, but are generally unable to model the complex interactions and subtleties of human perceptions, potentially limiting their effectiveness in social science applications.

Jesse Cui, Tingdan Zhang, Kokil Jaidka et al.

Modeling differential stress expressions in urban and rural regions in China can provide a better understanding of the effects of urbanization on psychological well-being in a country that has rapidly grown economically in the last two decades. This paper studies linguistic differences in the experiences and expressions of stress in urban-rural China from Weibo posts from over 65,000 users across 329 counties using hierarchical mixed-effects models. We analyzed phrases, topical themes, and psycho-linguistic word choices in Weibo posts mentioning stress to better understand appraisal differences surrounding psychological stress in urban and rural communities in China; we then compared them with large-scale polls from Gallup. After controlling for socioeconomic and gender differences, we found that rural communities tend to express stress in emotional and personal themes such as relationships, health, and opportunity while users in urban areas express stress using relative, temporal, and external themes such as work, politics, and economics. These differences exist beyond controlling for GDP and urbanization, indicating a fundamentally different lifestyle between rural and urban residents in very specific environments, arguably having different sources of stress. We found corroborative trends in physical, financial, and social wellness with urbanization in Gallup polls.