Olympia Sternson
8th Grade, The Rhoades School
Encinitas, CA
The Role of Language Specificity in Sparking Controversy on Social Media
Olympia studied how general or specific language affected how political messages were received. She compared language in 11,725 posts from X and measured the sentiment in how people responded to them. She showed that for political topics, general words produced more sentiment, while specific words were better for non-political topics.
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Project Background
Olympia has always been interested in how the language people use makes others feel. She also noticed that politicians didn’t speak like the people around her. “This difference was that politicians tended to use more general language, and non-political speakers tended to use more specific language,” she says. “I wondered if this was a strategy to increase positive reactions to their statements.” She decided to study how people used general and specific language to convey positive feelings without inciting controversy.
Tactics and Results
Olympia looked at the sentiments associated with words in 20 lexical hierarchies, which are relationships between words, ranging from general to specific. For example, “transportation” would be a very general topic, and more specific words in the transportation hierarchy would be “car” or “train.” She collected 10 hierarchies per topic. Olympia then took 11,725 posts from the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) and used an AI sentiment model to measure the feeling of each post, where high sentiment would mean strong feelings. She found that sentiment increased for political topics when the words were more general, but for non-political topics, the sentiment increased when words were more specific. The highest sentiment also had the biggest range—meaning people had strong negative and positive reactions. Olympia concluded that general political language is associated with positive feelings, even though it’s also more controversial, while specific language was best for non-political topics.
Beyond the Project
Olympia competes in Botball — which is not a sport for humans. Teams of students build robots that complete tasks to win. When their robot broke on the plane to a competition, “we rebuilt and re-programmed the robot to score points in an entirely different way.” The competition taught her how to start over and adapt on the fly. Olympia also likes horseback riding and competes in showjumping. She would like to become a psychologist and is fascinated by the way the mind takes in the world around it, and how interpretations of the world differ from person to person.
