Are you one of those people who likes to point out people’s spelling and grammar mistakes (without being asked to)?
Turns out there’s a connection between people who correct other people’s typos and how agreeable they are.
According to Gizmodo, linguists from the University of Michigan have found that if a person is a stickler for grammar, they are more likely to be introverted, whereas extroverted individuals don’t mind typos so much.
The study was conducted by asking 80 people to read a batch of emails that contained spelling or grammar mistakes, and then the readers had to answer questions about the “perceived intelligence, friendliness, and other attributes” of the sender.
They also asked the 80 subjects a few questions about their own level of agreeableness.
They then found out that those who identified as more outgoing tended not to care as much about the mistakes in the emails, and were able to separate the errors from the sender themselves.
Basically, they found that the least agreeable people surveyed were the ones who were the most tetchy about ‘there’ and ‘their’.
So, if your opinion of a person is based on one mistake they made in an email two years ago, you could be judging them a bit too harshly.
Find your chill, grammar police.
