TY  - JOUR
TI  - Regional IQ Differences in Russia through the Prism of Social Media
T2  - Psychology. Journal of Higher School of Economics
IS  - Psychology. Journal of Higher School of Economics
KW  - intelligence
KW  - digital footprints
KW  - social media
KW  - VKontakte
KW  - cognitive complexity
KW  - text automatic analysis
KW  - text sentiment analysis
KW  - regions of Russia
AB  - The article examines the relationship between characteristics of text messages, composed by users of social network (VKontakte), and intelligence. The analysis is conducted on the regional level: we compared the regional IQ with the text parameters averaged over the users living in one region. The text parameters include formal, grammatical and emotional indexes. The regional IQ is computed as an average z-score of the Unified State Examination score (high school entrants, 2018) and IQ score of the attendees to the volunteer military service. Four text parameters that can be considered as markers of the text cognitive complexity (mean word length, mean sentence length, percent of the parenthetic words and phrases, percent of the simple propositions) predicted regional IQ independently and explained 60% of its variance. Emotional index correlates with regional IQ, but does not predict regional IQ independently of cognitive complexity markers. Moreover, we revealed correlations between regional IQ and literacy of VKontakte users. The significancy of these results is creating the new IQ measure, which allows evaluating regional IQ and its dynamics by means of text analysis. The method has an advantage over the traditional psychometric IQ measures in this field of research.
AU  - Ekaterina Valueva
AU  - Ekaterina Lapteva
AU  - Andrew Grigoriev
UR  - https://psy-journal.hse.ru/en/2021-18-1/456554115.html
PY  - 2021
SP  - 129-144
VL  - 18