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What makes people take risks? No stuntmen or Formula 1 drivers. Just ordinary people like you and me. Research published this week in PLOS ONE suggests that unexpected improvements in daily life (sun after several days of rain or victory of a local sports team) are correlated to a mood change of a city and to an increased likelihood that its citizens do risky things like betting.
Social media and mood of the city
Cities seem to have moods that fluctuate from one day to the next. Now, thanks to social media, these moods of the city are also measurable.
The McGill-led research team used automated techniques to evaluate the "feeling" of more than 5 million Twitter posts between 2012 and 2013, geolocated in six major US cities (New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Francisco Bay Area). and Los Angeles). This allowed them to deduce the mood of the city on a given day.
"We found that Twitter users served as" canaries "to their communities," said Johannes Eichstaedt, a computer science specialist at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of the paper. "What they say on Twitter is representative of the shared mood on the streets and in the local communities.So, using artificial intelligence, we were able to extract information about what happened on Twitter. the mood of the community as a whole from what people say on Twitter. "
Researchers analyzed the language expressed in social media data to see how the mood of tweets, and therefore cities, could be understood from day to day. They then sought to determine whether, by looking at unexpected positive outcomes (such as unexpected sporting victories or a sunny day after rainy days), they could predict when a city would be in a good mood. The next step was to examine how these positive moods of the city were related to increased risk taking.
How lucky is Chicago to feel today?
It all depends on whether the White Sox won last night or if the sun shines after days of gray skies.
Experiments in laboratory psychology have already shown that people tend to feel better and take more risks when something goes better than expected. The researchers wanted to know if the same thing was true at the city level. They therefore asked whether the increase in daily lottery ticket purchases in Chicago and New York, where there was no particular incentive to buy one day over another, since probabilities and profits remained constant, were related to a positive urban atmosphere, on social media. And they discovered that this was indeed the case – even though the authors note that this effect is subtle – for example, a "cheerful" day in Chicago and New York predicts an increase in gambling spending closely 2.5% per person. per day in particularly reactive neighborhoods.
The lead author of the paper, Ross Otto, of the McGill Department of Psychology: "Through social media data, we were able to examine the impact of collective events on subjective well-being at the University of Ottawa. Scale of the big cities. " He adds: "This information on how the mood of cities in transition is linked to risk-taking could potentially help those who want to discourage others from playing, to decide when their efforts to promote responsible gaming will be more necessary ".
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Material provided by McGill University. Note: Content can be changed for style and length.
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