Who Is Bragging More Online? A Large Scale Analysis of Bragging in Social Media

Mali Jin, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, A. Seza Doğruöz, Nikolaos Aletras


Abstract
Bragging is the act of uttering statements that are likely to be positively viewed by others and it is extensively employed in human communication with the aim to build a positive self-image of oneself. Social media is a natural platform for users to employ bragging in order to gain admiration, respect, attention and followers from their audiences. Yet, little is known about the scale of bragging online and its characteristics. This paper employs computational sociolinguistics methods to conduct the first large scale study of bragging behavior on Twitter (U.S.) by focusing on its overall prevalence, temporal dynamics and impact of demographic factors. Our study shows that the prevalence of bragging decreases over time within the same population of users. In addition, younger, more educated and popular users in the U.S. are more likely to brag. Finally, we conduct an extensive linguistics analysis to unveil specific bragging themes associated with different user traits.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1529
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
17575–17587
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1529
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mali Jin, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, A. Seza Doğruöz, and Nikolaos Aletras. 2024. Who Is Bragging More Online? A Large Scale Analysis of Bragging in Social Media. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 17575–17587, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Who Is Bragging More Online? A Large Scale Analysis of Bragging in Social Media (Jin et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1529.pdf