National character stereotypes, or beliefs about the personality characteristics of the members of a nation, present a paradox. Such stereotypes have been argued to not be grounded in the actual personality traits of members of nations, yet they are also prolific and reliable. Stereotypes of Canadians and Americans exemplify the paradox; people in both nations strongly believe that the personality profiles of typical Canadians and Americans diverge, yet aggregated self-reports of personality profiles of Canadians and Americans show no reliable differences. We present evidence that the linguistic behavior of nations mirrors national character stereotypes. Utilizing 40 million tweets from the microblogging platform Twitter, in Study 1A we quantify the words and emojis diagnostic of Canadians and Americans. In Study 1B we explore the positivity of national language use. In Studies 2A and 2B, we present the 120 most nationally diagnostic words and emojis of each nation to naive participants, and ask them to assess personality of a hypothetical person who uses either diagnostically Canadian or American words and emojis. Personality profiles derived from the diagnostic words of each nation bear close resemblance to national character stereotypes. We therefore propose that national character stereotypes may be partially grounded in the collective linguistic behaviour of nations.

Funding: Bryor Snefjella’s contribution was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship 767-2016-2299 http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/home-accueil-eng.aspx , an Ontario Graduate Scholarship. Daniel Schmidtke’s contribution was supported by the Ontario Trillium Award and a Graduate fellowship awarded by the Lewis & Ruth Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship (McMaster University) https://scds.ca/ . Victor Kuperman’s contribution was partially supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada http://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/index_eng.asp Discovery grant RGPIN/402395-2012 415 (Kuperman, PI), the Ontario Early Researcher Award https://www.ontario.ca/page/early-researcher-awards (Kuperman, PI), the Canada Research Chair http://www.chairs-chaires.gc.ca/program-programme/index-eng.aspx (Tier 2; Kuperman, PI), the Canada Foundation for Innovation Leaders Opportunity Fund https://www.innovation.ca/about/news/leaders-opportunity-fund (Kuperman, PI), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Training Grant 895-2016-1008 (Libben, PI). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Data Availability: All transformed data used in the study is available in the supplementary materials. Raw text (i.e. the untransformed data) data from Twitter is not shareable due to the Twitter API terms of use. Word counts derived from Tweets are sharable, and are included in the supplementary materials. The API terms of use are available here https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/agreement-and-policy.html and the API itself was available at https://developer.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/post/statuses/filter during the time of data collection. Twitter has since updated its API, which can now be found at https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/ .

Introduction

Stereotypes about national character, i.e., individually held beliefs regarding psychological traits of world nations and cultures, are ubiquitous, stable and influential (see [1]). The importance of these beliefs for the functioning of individuals, groups and societies is hard to overestimate. National character stereotypes have the capacity to fuel discrimination and intergroup conflict [2]; they are also a salient factor in diplomacy [3], governmental and corporate policies [4], marketing [5], and consumer decision-making [6]. The power of stereotypes regarding national character has put them in the center of prolific psychological and social research. A search for topics containing the term “national character” retrieved a total of 551 items in the Web of Science bibliographic database from 1976 till 2015, with an annual linear increase in the number of publications since 2000. Two ways of characterizing beliefs about a nation have reached particular prominence in the literature: an inquiry into personality traits perceived as typical of a nation [7] and an inquiry into perceived positivity of a national culture [8, 9]. The present paper addresses both lines of inquiry. Our interest lies in a question that has puzzled this research field since its inception [10–12]: what are national character stereotypes grounded in?

A simple mechanism for stereotypes to form would be “a statistical agreement between beliefs about a group and the aggregate characteristics of the group in question” [13, p. 831]. If stereotypes are accurate, each culture has a characteristic psychological profile, and individuals are capable—with a degree of precision—of discerning the traits that differentiate this culture from that of other groups. Two observations lend plausibility to this assumption. First, large-scale international surveys show national character stereotypes regarding personality traits to be stable both within individuals and at the aggregated level, as well as within and across cultures [13–18]. For example, when evaluating personality traits of their own cultures, Canadians and Americans demonstrate differences in perceived levels of neuroticism (less typical of Canadians), conscientiousness (more typical of Canadians) and agreeableness (more typical of Canadians) that are strong and consistent over multiple data collection sites in each country [14]. A second reason to expect a high level of accuracy in national character stereotypes is that stereotypes about many other group variables, including age and gender [19–22] show convergence with respective self-reports and observer ratings of psychological traits. It is therefore a tempting explanation that, for example, the reason Canadians are stereotypically more agreeable is that they really are more agreeable.

While attractive as a causal mechanism, simple accuracy of national character stereotypes is questionable. An influential body of negative evidence comes from a series of large-scale studies that focuses on comparing (i) stereotypes about personality traits associated with one’s own and other cultures with (ii) the personality traits of actual individuals from those cultures [13, 14, 18, 23–26]. Based on samples from up to 49 cultures, these studies have addressed (ii) by using the Revised NEO Personality Inventory instrument based on the Five-Factor Model of personality, [27, 28] and have also assessed (i) with the help of the National Character Survey, a short questionnaire designed to quantify stereotypical personality traits of a nation on the same facets as NEO-PI-R (for motivation and reliability, see [14]). Two central claims summarize the findings of these studies: perceived personality profiles vary dramatically from one culture to another, while actual aggregated personality profiles of those cultures show no reliable variability. In other words, when measured using self-reports, national character stereotypes are as consistent and strong as they are inaccurate.

These findings have raised several methodological concerns which question the validity and reliability of intra- and inter-cultural comparison of personality traits using self-reports [29–33]. McCrae et al. [13] address these and other points of methodological concern both by recruiting existing evidence in support of the validity and reliability of their instruments, and by conducting a replication and extension study in 26 cultures. Their recent study reiterates the finding that “[c]onsensual stereotypes of national character are internally consistent, generalizable across raters, and stable over time—but they show only weak traces of accuracy” [13, p. 840]. The broader debate about stereotype accuracy is ongoing [34, 35]. While the debate about the validity of using self-report instruments to make inter-cultural comparisons is not settled, we agree with McCrae et al. [13] that, at present, the more parsimonious interpretation of the available evidence is that aggregated self-reports are a valid method for intercultural comparisons (also see General discussion).

A similar question has been raised about the origin of stereotypes regarding a culture’s positivity. Massive research efforts like the World Happiness Index [36] and the World Values Survey [37] have shown that indices of subjective happiness and life satisfaction aggregated over individuals in a nation correlate strongly with objective measures of national well-being such as the national gross domestic product, social support, life expectancy and others (see also a real-time online happiness index at hedonometer.org [38]). Yet an influential folklore theory of happiness argues that a stereotypical outlook of a culture can diverge from either subjective or objective well-being of individuals from that culture [39–41]. Under this theory, happiness is not “an individual evaluation of life, but […] the reflection of a body of widely held notions about life, that is part of the national character” [39]. The theory proposes that if a culture’s outlook on life is predominantly pessimistic (e.g., as argued for France, Italy and Russia) or optimistic (as argued for the USA), this stereotype would persist despite a change in living conditions and would only be loosely related to subjective happiness of individuals in that culture [9, 42, 43]. There is evidence to suggest that perceived happiness of a culture might indeed be different from subjective happiness of individuals in that culture as well as their objective well-being [39, 44]. If so, stereotypes regarding the optimism or pessimism of a culture’s outlook might be inaccurate, much like the stereotypes about personality traits of a national character.

The central question remains: if it is not the psychology of nations, what does give rise to consistent national character stereotypes? In line with prior research [30, 45–47] we speculate that stereotypes about a group (including a nation) may stem from systematic and distinct behaviors that this group shows in comparison to other groups. More specifically, beliefs about the psychological profile of a group may partly be rooted in distinct patterns of language use that this group produces. As a toy example, suppose that phrases like “hiking”, “camping”, “nature”, “tent”, and “bird watching”” occur with a higher relative frequency in language productions of group A relative to group B. Both members of group A, members of group B, and non-members who are exposed to these language productions might sensibly form a belief that group A prefers outdoors, and are relatively adventurous and sportive in their leisure choices. Importantly, these verbal behavioral markers do not need to stem from respective psychological traits (e.g., adventurousness, or openness to new experiences), or even from relevant non-verbal behavior (e.g., days spent outdoors). A greater verbal emphasis on physically demanding activities or closeness to nature may be a strategy for group A to construct its identity by distinguishing itself from either one specific out-group (as is often done during inter-group conflicts) or from a generic out-group [48–50]. In this case, either a subjective or an objective measure of how adventurous and nature-loving people in groups A and B are will not detect any appreciable group differences in these traits, yet dissimilarities in their verbal behavior may give rise to different beliefs regarding psychological profiles of these groups. In sum, a stereotype of group A as an outdoorsy, hardened collective would be an accurate reflection of its observable verbal behavior, and it may form regardless of the ground truth of that group’s personality traits. That is, a nation’s persona may differ from the nation’s personality.

Determining whether this process of verbal behaviour influencing stereotypes has indeed occurred in the formation of national character stereotypes is challenging. It is possible that both differences in national language use and national character stereotypes are caused by some other factor (such as they are both a result, but not a cause, of each nation’s ethos). It seems unlikely that language use would be the sole cause of national character stereotypes, given the possibility of non-verbal behaviours and other mediums of transmission (such as visual media) contributing to national character stereotypes. We conduct an observational study of national language use, but do not determine if language use is a causal factor behind national character stereotypes. What we can establish is three things. First, whether the language use of each nation has systematic differences. Second, whether those differences in language use a sufficient basis to perform differing personality judgments. Third, whether the personality judgments derived from national language use are similar to other measurements of national character stereotypes or aggregated self-reports of personality traits.

We establish differences in national language use by examining linguistic productions by individuals from the United States and Canada in the micro-blog platform Twitter (see below for the motivation of our choice). Our goal is to establish diagnostic patterns of language use associated with the two cultures under comparison, quantify what personality traits and outlook these patterns convey, and ultimately test whether the national personality profiles that emerge from Canadian and American preferences in language use correspond to independent assessments of their respective national character stereotypes. We predict that linguistic biases of a nation are consistent with its national character stereotype but do not correlate with the results from self-report psychological tests.

This paper adopts an open-vocabulary approach [51–53], which predicts psychological characteristics of interest (in our case, selected aspects of national character) from distributional patterns in lexical choices that individuals and groups make in their natural language productions. The open vocabulary approach is a bottom-up, data-driven technique which provides inferential estimates as to how diagnostic each linguistic unit is of those characteristics. It generates specialized lexica where each word is assigned a weight showing how strongly and with what polarity a word reflects that characteristic: for instance, the words bored, annoying, lonely are associated with high neuroticism, whereas success, workout and praise are associated with lower neuroticism [51]. Available open-vocabulary analyses of social media (typically, Twitter or Facebook) have revealed reliable and face-valid differences in language use as a function of gender, age, type of personality, temporal orientation, occupation, region of origin or residence, political orientation and multiple other characteristics [51–61] Moreover, these patterns of preference show a higher-than-human-rater accuracy when predicting respective characteristics of “unseen” users, i.e. users not included in the dataset from which linguistic patterns were derived [51, 57, 59]. One study has used the open vocabulary approach to study age, gender, education, and political stereotype accuracy. [62] The accuracy of a stereotype was gauged through comparison of the linguistic features which are correlated with ground truth of Twitter users’ traits to features perceived to indicate these traits. Our study is similar, in that we are comparing the ground-truth of Canadian and American language use to other research which has established the perceived national character stereotypes of Canadians and Americans.

The novelty of the present paper is in the psychological phenomenon that it approaches: national character stereotypes and verbal behavior of nations. The logic of the study is as follows. We use tools of the open-vocabulary approach to identify linguistic units (words, phrases, emoticons and emojis) that are most specific to American and to Canadian users of Twitter, as well as to subsets of users living in two smaller regions straddling the border of these two countries (the Great Lakes regions and the West Coast region). We further quantify the level of positivity and the personality profile associated with the “most American” and “most Canadian” linguistic units. First, we resort to specialized lexica of positivity to assess characteristics of the verbal output of each nation. Second, we administer a modified version of the National Character Survey [14], which asks participants to evaluate a personality of an individual whose linguistic preferences contain units preferred by Americans and, separately, by Canadians. This enables us to obtain language-based psychological profiles of the two nations, i.e., personas of a typical American and Canadian based solely on their differential language use. Finally, we pit the results of those comparisons against available independent assessments of stereotypes to evaluate the alignment between language-based patterns and findings from the National Character Survey of Americans and Canadians [14].

Before presenting our study, we discuss implications of two methodological choices that we made: the use of a social media outlet like Twitter as a source of verbal behavior that may mirror beliefs about nations, and the focus of Canada and the US as our specific test case.

0.1 Verbal behavior in social media Recent proliferation of electronic communication enables us to tap into billions of natural language productions, of which a substantial percentage can be enriched with information about the origin of the speaker and the geographic location of the production. Our study contributes to the rapidly growing body of social science research that demonstrates a link between language behavior and geographic, demographic, social or psychological characteristics of individuals or groups [38, 51, 63, 64]. The empirical base for our study is a dataset of approximately 50 million posts gathered over the year 2015 from Twitter, a microblog and an electronic communication platform, which enables individuals to publish messages restricted to 140 characters in length. For a short introduction to conducting psychological research on Twitter, including data collection and recent findings see [65]. Twitter is one of the 10 most visited sites on the internet (see http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/twitter.com), with 310 million active monthly users (see https://about.twitter.com/company) reported by the company. An independent estimate is that approximately 21% of all adults in the US used Twitter in 2016 [66]. Advantages of analyzing outputs of electronic means of communication like Twitter are well known: one gains access to millions of observations from thousands of language speakers varying in gender, age, language knowledge, socioeconomic status, psychological traits, indices of well-being and happiness, and place of residence. Although Twitter is not a representative sample of the population [67] it provides a larger, more natural and diverse sample than many psychological studies employ. Approximately 1% of tweets are tagged with GPS coordinates, enabling one to identify the location of a tweet production with a precision within a few meters. We only considered these geo-tagged tweets to enable attribution of a language production to a region and a country. Tweets are samples of natural language use and thus are free of potential biases that experimental methods of stereotype elicitation gives rise to [29–31]. We make no pre-selection of the topic that a tweet discusses: much more often than not, tweets in our pool did not specifically discuss the sender’s attitudes and beliefs about her own and other nations. Thus, statistical patterns of word occurrence extracted from tweets are indicative of broadly construed verbal behavior of a nation rather of specific linguistic patterns associated with a topic of national stereotypes. Furthermore, we only considered public Twitter messages here. These can be directed to a specific person or group, or—more often—have no addressee, but importantly, they can be read by anyone with internet access. Tweets produced by representatives of one culture, e.g., Americans, are equally visible to fellow Americans, Canadians, Chileans, or Ghanaians, and vice versa. This transparency may partially answer why stereotypes about Americans (or any other nation) are relatively stable around the world [14], even though immediate exposure to and knowledge of psychological traits of Americans would clearly vary from one country to another [15]. Linguistic outputs of nations are arguably more accessible around the world (through in the past TV, radio, newspapers, and contemporarily on Internet sources and social media) than their non-verbal behavior or psychology, raising the level of mutual familiarity even between nations that are geographically remote. This is certainly true of widely accessible sources like Twitter. We do not argue, of course, that only users of Twitter have access to the linguistic foundation of stereotypical beliefs, or even that such users can always differentiate between tweets sent by Americans, Canadians or say Brits. In practice, identifying a tweet with a culture of a person who sent it is only feasible if the sender revealed her affiliation with a country through either the content of the tweet message, linguistic cues like a regional dialect, an explicit mention of the location in the user profile or a profile picture. This limits the pool of messages relevant for national character stereotypes considerably. Yet prior work shows that even small subsets of tweets and users are representative of their communities, because they tend to share the same culture (including beliefs and attitudes), as well as environmental and social resources and affordances [51]. Thus, it is possible that readers of tweets and similar media might form their beliefs regarding nations based on a fraction of users and messages whose national affiliation is clearly marked. Also, the constructed national character channeled through tweets is likely to be similar to the character conveyed through other media, and so we use Twitter data to approximate linguistic choices that a nation would reveal in other accessible outlets too.