Mobiles make Twitter users more egocentric than while tweeting from PCs: study

A new research suggests people use more egocentric language when tweeting from a mobile device rather than their desktop.

The researchers - Dhiraj Murthy (Goldsmiths, University of London), Sawyer Bowman (Bowdoin College), Alexander J Gross (University of Maine), and Marisa McGarry (University of Maine) - who published their findings in the Journal of Communication, studied tweets to determine whether presentations of self were likely to be more egocentric, gendered or communal based when users were on a mobile device or a web-based platform.

Over a period of six weeks, they collected 235 million tweets - 90 per cent of the top sources to access Twitter were coded to denote mobile, non-mobile and mixed sources.

Using social-psychological methods, they then studied language use in tweets by analysing the frequency and ratios of words traditionally associated with social and behavioural characteristics.

They found that tweets from mobile sources were not only more egocentric in language than any other group, but that the ratio of egocentric to non-egocentric tweets was consistently greater for mobile tweets than from non-mobile sources.

They further concluded that mobile tweets were particularly gendered and regardless of the platform, tweets tended to employ words traditionally associated as masculine.

The study also found that tweets sent from smartphones were 25 per cent more negative than when sent from computers.

The researchers also considered the time of the day when people tweeted and whether they were sending messages from a mobile phone or computer.

They found that tweets were most negative and egocentric during certain days of the week and certain times of the day.

Tweets were the most negative in the early morning and the late evening and while users' egos chilled out a bit during the workday, it rose right after, tweets revealed.

''We leave work, we leave school and we start becoming more egocentric,'' Murthy said.

However on the positive side we give our narcissism the weekends off.

According to the study Sunday morning, the ego's holy day of rest, was the time we tweets were least egocentric.