Topics for dating conversation

From Data Science of the Facebook World by Stephen Wolfram.

More than a million people have now used our Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook. And as part of our latest update, in addition to collecting some anonymized statistics, we launched a Data Donor program that allows people to contribute detailed data to us for research purposes.

A few weeks ago we decided to start analyzing all this data. And I have to say that if nothing else it’s been a terrific example of the power of Mathematica and the Wolfram Language for doing data science. (It’ll also be good fodder for the Data Science course I’m starting to create.)

We’d always planned to use the data we collect to enhance our Personal Analytics system. But I couldn’t resist also trying to do some basic science with it.

I’ve always been interested in people and the trajectories of their lives. But I’ve never been able to combine that with my interest in science. Until now. And it’s been quite a thrill over the past few weeks to see the results we’ve been able to get. Sometimes confirming impressions I’ve had; sometimes showing things I never would have guessed. And all along reminding me of phenomena I’ve studied scientifically in A New Kind of Science.

Lots of good material and insights.

This grabbed my attention, using NLP to understand what people are talking about on Facebook and then looking at that by sex and age.

What do men and women talk about on Facebook?

Click to enlarge.

Women talk pretty consistently more than men about:

Family & Frineds
Fashion
Their health
Relations
Personal Mood
Pets and animals
Special occasions
Weather

I am somewhat surprised by weather but all the rest match common tropes.

Men talk pretty consistently more than women about:

Books
Fitness
Technology
Movies
Music
Politics
Sports
Television
Transport
Travel
Video Games

Books is interesting. As children and young adults, men tend to read a good deal less than women. Later in life, they end up equalling or, depending on the research, becoming more enthusiastic readers. In the Wolfram data, however, men are more interested in talking about books from the git-go.

I am a little surprised that men are more interested in talking about music than women. That may, however, reflect an asymmetry in type of interest within my social networks. I know many more women interested in talking about music they have heard or know than I know men interested in doing so. On the other hand, I know a good number of men who are involved in, and enjoy talking about, music production, whereas I can think of no such women on the spur of the moment.

Topics in which men and women are pretty nearly identically interested:

Career & money
Social media
Food & drink
Quotes & Life philosophy
School & university

Wolfram also shows hoe these interests by sex change as well by age.

Click to enlarge.

It’s almost shocking how much this tells us about the evolution of people’s typical interests. People talk less about video games as they get older, and more about politics and the weather. Men typically talk more about sports and technology than women—and, somewhat surprisingly to me, they also talk more about movies, television and music. Women talk more about pets+animals, family+friends, relationships—and, at least after they reach child-bearing years, health. The peak time for anyone to talk about school+university is (not surprisingly) around age 20. People get less interested in talking about “special occasions” (mostly birthdays) through their teens, but gradually gain interest later. And people get progressively more interested in talking about career+money in their 20s. And so on. And so on.

Some of this is rather depressingly stereotypical. And most of it isn’t terribly surprising to anyone who’s known a reasonable diversity of people of different ages. But what to me is remarkable is how we can see everything laid out in such quantitative detail in the pictures above—kind of a signature of people’s thinking as they go through life.

There is a standard framing that women are more interested in relationships and men are more interested in things. Friends versus F-150s for example. The above data is broadly consistent with that framing.

But the data suggests another way to look at the difference.

For those things women enjoy talking about more than men, they tend to be small domain networks. Small and specific, intimate and particular. Family, friends, relationships, pets, etc. All subject to the Dunbar number.

For men, however, their domain networks tend to be large domain networks. Large and abstract, impersonal, and general.

Is that true and is it significant? No idea, but possibly.