‘Grammar Nazis’ more likely to be introverts

Do you often become the “grammar police,” while reading emails You could be an introvert, according to a new study that suggests personality traits may influence how people react to written errors.

Extroverted people are likely to overlook typos and grammatical errors that would cause introverted people to judge the person who makes such errors more negatively. “This is the first study to show that the personality traits of listeners/readers have an effect on the interpretation of language,” said Julie Boland, University of Michigan (U-M) professor of linguistics and psychology, and the study’s lead author.

“In this experiment, we examined the social judgements that readers made about the writers,” said Boland. Eighty-three participants read email responses to an ad for a housemate that eith-er contained no errors or had been altered to include either typos, such as mkae (make) or abuot (about), or grammar errors, such as to/too, it’s/its or your/you’re. They rated the email writers in terms of perceived intelligence, friendliness and other attributes, as well as provided information about themselves. At the end of the experiment, participants were asked if they noticed any grammatical errors in the responses. If they answered “yes,” they indicated how much the errors bothered them.