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Facebook collected data on what Americans were grateful for during holiday season

“Over the past few months, many people have been challenging one another to share on Facebook the things for which they are most grateful. So, for example, one friend might challenge another to “write 3 things you are thankful for over the next 5 days.” In the spirit of Thanksgiving, we thought we would see what people are most thankful for. The following analysis was conducted on anonymized, aggregate data by English speakers in the United States.  We started by collecting a set of anonymized English status updates that contained “grateful” or “thankful,” as well as the word “day” preceded or followed by a number. These status updates were then aggregated and processed by a text-clustering algorithm so we could identify what people were grateful for.  One of the first things we discovered is that the people who participated in this challenge were overwhelmingly women: 90% of people who participated identified as female on their profile. There are a number of explanations for why this might be: women may be more likely to participate in challenges such as this; women may be more likely to nominate other women than men; women may be more willing to share what they are grateful for on Facebook; etc. To be clear, we think it is unlikely that women are actually more grateful than men…”[via Facebook, by Winter Mason, Funda Kivran-Swaine, Moira Burke, and Lada Adamic].

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