Stereotyping happens. A new study helps identify how it happens and what it gets wrong by asking participants to make predictions about people based on their Tweets. 

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and other institutions had subjects read sets of 20 Tweets and predict the writer's gender, age, political orientation, and education level based on the words they used. Subjects' guesses were fairly accurate — they guessed right 76% of the time on gender, 69% on whether the person was older or younger than 24, and 82% on liberal versus conservative. They were only right in 46% of cases, however, when predicting whether the Tweet-writers had no bachelor’s degree, a bachelor’s degree, or an advanced degree.

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