Understanding individuals' personal values from social media word use

Abstract

The theory of values posits that each person has a set of values, or desirable and trans-situational goals, that motivate their actions. The Basic Human Values, a motivational construct that captures people's values, have been shown to influence a wide range of human behaviors. In this work, we analyze people's values and their word use on Reddit, an online social news sharing community. Through conducting surveys and analyzing text contributions of 799 Reddit users, we identify and interpret categories of words that are indicative of user's value orientations. Using the same data, we further report a preliminary exploration on word-based prediction of Basic Human Values.