Dr. Alicia Cork says 'when you concentrate on the style of communication used by group members,' you can better understand group dynamics

Research from the universities of Exeter, Bath, and Lancaster has found that the way social groups communicate online could reveal how the group views itself, and could make it easier to track how a group’s values change over time.

A study, published in the journal Behavior Research Methods in 2021, analyzed Reddit data from distinct communities, providing a new approach to understand collective self-understanding and potential societal implications.

Dr. Alicia Cork of the University of Bath wrote that "the study of group dynamics often involves asking people to tell us about their group - for example, what does being an England football supporter mean to you? The drawbacks of this, in simple terms, is that these questions can be quite ambiguous to answer, and it is tricky to articulate what particular group memberships may mean to a person. However, when you concentrate on the style of communication used by group members, you can access the overarching principles that guide the behavior of those members."

The research was conducted in three stages. In the first, the team tested whether similar groups exhibited similar communication styles, using three communities for each of the five existing group types: vocational, political, religious/ethnic, relational, or stigmatized. Researchers gathered a year's worth of Reddit comments from 15 online communities and analyzed the writing style of each group, including factors such as formality and emotiveness.

Dr. Miriam Koschate-Reis, Associate Professor of Computational Social Psychology at the Institute for Data Science and AI (IDSAI) at Exeter, said the findings showed the differences in the types of communities through their communication styles. 

"The results indicated that our vocational identities, such as entrepreneurs and white-collar salespeople, expressed high levels of achievement but fairly little benevolence," she wrote. "Groups that expressed benevolence were consistent with the relational types - mothers, fathers, and those focused on relationships. Interestingly, we also found that while the political and religious/ethnic groups tended to espouse conformity, the latter tended to express greater benevolence in their language." 

In the second phase, the researchers linked the group's communication style to their values, which allowed them to build a greater understanding of how the groups described themselves and compared this information to their relative clustering positions.

In the final stage, the project focused on charting the evolution of a group's collective self-understanding over time. Researchers studied Reddit data from the transgender community, beginning in 2011. Over time, the group migrated away from other stigmatized groups and toward groups exhibiting collective action, such as political and religious/ethnic groups. The data was show to have correlated with the gradual politicization and de-stigmatization of the transgender community, which mirrored the development of LGBTQ+ rights in recent years. 

Researchers say the application of the technique could lead to better identification of emerging political movements to understanding groups that aim to disguise their true nature, such as criminal organizations on online forums. The study also provides evidence that linguistic style can be a powerful tool for understanding the collective self-understanding of social groups, the report stated.