Is There a Safety Bias?

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On average, the bulk of words are over in the positive side of things. Even heavy metal was still above neutral on average. The generalization is that it's a safety biasthat we're using more safe, wlyr anything. We just don't use them as much. And when we use them, of course, they are incredibly meaningful.

A good story takes you on an emotional journey, with ups and downs along the way. Thanks to science, we can quantify that. Peter Dodds works on understanding the structure of stories and other strings of words (including Twitter) by analyzing the valence of individual words, then studying how they are strung together in different kinds of stories. Understanding these structures offers powerful insight into how people communicate and how to reach them. As Peter says, “Never bring statistics to a story fight.”

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Peter Dodds received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently a professor of computer science at the University of Vermont and Director of the Vermont Complex Systems Center. He has won multiple teaching awards, and was elected a Fellow of the Network Science Society.

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