{"pk":28168,"title":"Using Big Data Methods to Identify Conceptual Frameworks","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Conceptual frameworks such as religion or politics may play\na pervasive role in people’s interpretation of experience, but\nthe empirical evidence for such effects is limited. To the\nextent that conceptual frameworks are real, they should have\na pervasive impact on how people talk about the world. Such\nan influence may be detected in people’s everyday language.\nIn a series of studies, text from the social media platform\nReddit was used to train machine learning classifiers to\nidentify people’s association with a particular religion or\nmental disorder. Impressively, classifiers trained on text\nfocusing on religion and mental disorders could be used to\nidentify people’s association with a particular religion or\nmental disorder even when the text was not explicitly about\nthese topics, such as when it was about buying a car or\nplaying tennis. Not only could the classifiers predict people’s\nreligion or mental illness in the present, they could also do so\nprospectively, indicating that people’s everyday language\ngives away information about the kinds of conceptual\nframeworks they may hold in the future. An analysis of the\nfeatures learned by the classifier suggested that they learned\nfeatures with high face validity for the underlying conceptual\nframework. Together, the results provide evidence for the\nexistence of conceptual frameworks by virtue of the imprint\nthey leave across a wide range of language contexts.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"conceptual framework; big data; machine learning;\nsocial media."}],"section":"Publication-based-Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/87m9t51v","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Robert","middle_name":"","last_name":"Thorstad","name_suffix":"","institution":"Emory University","department":""},{"first_name":"Philip","middle_name":"","last_name":"Wolff","name_suffix":"","institution":"Emory University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28168/galley/17827/download/"}]}