According to the conclusions of a new investigation conducted in the United States, it would appear that people were less angry about the September 11, 2001 attacks than televisions and other media outlets first reported. The picture these channels painted was one of a nation eager to get revenge, and of a people that was all up in arms about what had happened. But the reality is that this was not the case, say investigators from the
Clemson University.
In a study they are about to publish in this week's issue of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) journal Psychological Science, the researchers say that the American people exhibited a relatively low level of anger following the terrorist attacks.
CU professor of psychology Cindy Pury and her collaborators browsed through about 500,000 text messages that people sent on September 11, 2001, after they learned about the disaster.
All the messages had been previously made public by WikiLeaks back in 2010. The Clemson expert wanted to test the results of past studies, which revealed that the people got angrier with the situation as the scale of the events unfolded, and the magnitude of the destruction became apparent.
“The original researchers used a tool called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, or LIWC, that measures the word usage and frequency in text messages. I downloaded the transcripts and started playing around with it in Excel,” Pury explains.
“LIWC can be quite sophisticated in looking for words, but without a way to read and analyze content for meaning, it can lead users astray,” she goes on to say.
The thing that most likely led other scientists in error, the expert says, is the fact that LIWC tends to interpret words such as “critical” as meaning anger, whereas they actually mean urgent or very important. Repeat this error enough time, and you get lousy statistics.
Furthermore, many of the messages containing the word “critical” were sent out by machines, in an attempt to warn their users that they had experienced damages, and that maintenance was needed.
Pury says that experts should pay more attention to how LIWC and other similar tools interpret a variety of words. There is a really high risk, she adds, that many will be taken out of context, therefore leading experts astray.
Interestingly, the new work found that Americans tended to speak more about comfort and support than about anger and payback. “The anger findings made sense to me when I first read them,” she says.
However, “thinking back to 2001, it was not how the situation seemed at the time […] People were sad and scared. But they were also incredibly considerate and warm and appreciative of each other,” the expert goes on to say.
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