Room to Grow: Understanding Personal Characteristics Behind Self Improvement Using Social Media
This work addresses the challenge of understanding personal motivation for change using computational methods, offering incremental insights into social psychology.
The paper tackled the problem of predicting who persists in self-improvement efforts by analyzing social media writings, finding that persistent individuals reference more long-term topics and use complex language, and built a classifier to identify them reliably.
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.