Scientists have found that people who get themselves into a tizzy about mundane grammatical errors online have “less agreeable” personalities than their more relaxed (much cooler?) counterparts.
In a new University of Michigan study titled “If You’re House Is Still Available, researchers found grammar police tend to be disagreeable, close-minded, and conscientious introverts – jerks, basically.
The study’s authors asked 83 participants to read emails – some with typos, some not – and evaluate the sender’s level of intelligence. They were then asked to evaluate themselves on the 5 Big Personality Traits: extraversion, agreeability, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness.
Overall everyone rated the fictional applicants with typos worse than those with perfect spelling but those with less agreeable personalities got more upset by grammatical errors.
Researchers noted that this could be because “less agreeable people are less tolerant of deviations from convention.”
So before you point out any typos in this article, think about what that really says about yuo.
