Tweets sent out by Christians are more positive and less analytical than tweets send out by atheists, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found.
Christians are known for their happy-go-lucky characteristics and researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that these characteristics are displayed in the way they use social networking sites as well. In a recent study, approximately 2 million tweets sent out on the social networking site Twitter were analyzed using a computer. Researchers found that tweets sent out by Christians were more positive and less analytical than the ones sent out by atheists. They also found that Christians were more likely to post tweets about their social status and relationships than atheists.
"Whether religious people experience more or less happiness is an important question in itself," the authors of the new analysis wrote in a press release. "But to truly understand how religion and happiness are related we must also understand why the two may be related."
To determine whether the tweets were sent out by a Christian or atheist user, researchers looked at 16,000 users that were followers of a few prominent Christian and atheist personalities on Twitter. The tweets were analyzed for their emotional content that displayed more positive words, for words that displayed social status and relationships like "friend" or "sister" and for words that displayed analytical thinking like "think and "because".
"If religious people are indeed happier than nonreligious people, differences in social support and thinking style may help to explain why," said University of Illinois graduate student Ryan Ritter, who conducted the research with U. of I. psychology professor Jesse Preston and graduate student Ivan Hernandez.
Previous studies have linked greater levels of social connectedness to higher well-being and this study yet again proves this link. Authors of the study say that religion plays an important role in social connections. Belonging to a certain religious group automatically links a person to other people in the group, which makes them a part of a larger social connection. And studies have found that being a part of larger social connections makes a person happier.
Similar studies in the past have reported that Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and Muslims have a greater positive association between religion and well-being. However, since most of these studies were based on people self-reporting how satisfied they were in life, their results are questionable.
The study was partially funded by The John Templeton Foundation and its findings were published in the journal Social Psychological & Personality Science.
