A recent study by PLOS One suggests that people who are obsessed with grammar aren't as nice as everybody else and those who constantly get bothered by grammatical errors online have "less agreeable" personalities than those who just let them slide.
According to the study, more agreeable participants tended to rate grammar errors less harshly than less agreeable participants. Those who are super-sensitive to typos reveals they're generally less open and are also more likely to be judging you for your mistakes than everyone else.
For the study, scientists Julie Boland and Robin Queen from the University of Michigan asked 83 participants to review email responses to an ad for a roommate and then evaluate the writer on both social and academic criteria.
"This is the first study to show that the personality traits of listeners/readers have an effect on the interpretation of language," said Boland. "In this experiment, we examined the social judgments that readers made about the writers."
Three types of emails were used in the the research: emails without errors, emails with grammatical mix-ups only (e.g. too instead of to, or it's instead of its) and emails with typos only (e.g. tihs instead of this). In addition, participants were also asked to complete a personality assessment.
The 83 participants were then asked to judge the person who'd written the email based on their perceived intelligence, friendliness and how good they'd be as housemates. They were also asked whether or not they'd spotted any grammatical errors or typos in the emails and how much it bothered them.
Overall, the participants rated the fictional roommate with typos and grammatical slips in their emails as worse than those with perfect spelling and grammar.
Certain personality types appear to be judging the typo-challenged applicants more harshly. Extroverts were much more likely to ignore both the grammar errors and typos, while introverts were more likely to judge the applicants negatively.
The study also reveals that more conscientious but less open people were more sensitive to typos, whereas those with less agreeable personalities get more upset. "Perhaps because less agreeable people are less tolerant of deviations from convention," the researchers explain.
Interestingly, how neurotic someone could be shows to have no effect on how they interpreted mistakes.
The sample size is quite small so more research are needed to confirm the results.
Meenwhile lets see if yuo get upst by tihs.
Photo: Writing Forward
Sources: Mashable Asia Science Alert
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