Being betrayed by a partner or friend is often completely unexpected.
However, researchers have found that in fact, your betrayer may be giving themselves away with their language.
They say betrayers become more positive and less polite just before a betrayal.
Researchers
at Cornell, the University of Maryland and the University of Colorado,
found there are actually a series of subtle linguistic clues that
predict when a betrayal is coming.
Humans are poor at noticing them, but computer analysis can detect them, they found.
‘Language
does tell us a lot about human relations,’ said Cristian
Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Cornell assistant professor of information
science.
‘Not with certainty, but signaling intentions.
‘Language is a social signal we are trying to decode.’
They also found that the language patterns of betrayer and victim become less balanced as a betrayal approaches.
Victims used more planning words than their betrayers, further proof that victims were unaware of the coming treachery.
Cornell
graduate student Vlad Niculae unveiled the results at the 53rd Annual
Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, held in
conjunction with the seventh International Joint Conference on Natural
Language Processing, in Beijing.
Collaborators
on the paper along with Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil are Jordan Boyd-Graber,
assistant professor of computer science at the University of Colorado,
and Srijan Kumar, a graduate student in computer science at the
University of Maryland.
The result is not a recipe for avoiding betrayal in romance and friendship, the researchers said.
If it worked, they pointed out, betrayals could not happen.
But it
might offer ways to help groups work more effectively together, they
said, for example in software development teams or online crowdsourcing
projects like Wikipedia.
The game
they studied was the online version of Diplomacy (also played as a board
game), in which players assume the roles of European nations before
World War I and try to conquer the entire map.
In wars launched in the game, two or more countries will defeat a lone opponent, so players must form alliances to advance.
Each round of play begins with a ‘diplomacy’ discussion period for such negotiations.
But since
the ultimate goal is to rule alone, players inevitably will turn
against their allies, an act gamers call ‘backstabbing’ or just
‘stabbing.’ Parallels with the TV show ‘Survivor’ come to mind.
The researchers analysed a dataset of 145,000 messages between pairs of players in 249 online Diplomacy games.
They
matched pairs of players whose relationship ended in betrayal with
similar pairs where it did not, and compared the language of the
messages exchanged.
Drawing
sometimes on algorithms developed by previous researchers they looked
for positive or negative sentiment, politeness and for keywords
suggesting such concepts as planning (‘next,’ ‘then’), claims (‘I
believe,’ ‘I think’), time (‘still,’ ‘while’) or comparison (‘as much
as,’ ‘after’).
To carry
their work forward, the researchers have created a new online game
calledStreetCrowd, where teams must work together to solve a problem.
They hope to study the play to learn how to make group efforts more successful.
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