# Room to Grow: Understanding Personal Characteristics Behind Self Improvement Using Social Media

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.08031 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08031/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Crowdsourcing a Word-Emotion Association Lexicon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.6297/) (2013)
- [Conversations Gone Awry: Detecting Early Signs of Conversational Failure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05345/) (2018)
- [Loyalty in Online Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03386/) (2017)
- [#greysanatomy vs. #yankees: Demographics and Hashtag Use on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.01973/) (2016)
- [Does Journaling Encourage Healthier Choices? Analyzing Healthy Eating Behaviors of Food Journalers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01129/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Author as Character and Narrator: Deconstructing Personal Narratives from the r/AmITheAsshole Reddit Community](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08104/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Many people aim for change, but not everyone succeeds. While there are a number of social psychology theories that propose motivation-related characteristics of those who persist with change, few computational studies have explored the motivational stage of personal change. In this paper, we investigate a new dataset consisting of the writings of people who manifest intention to change, some of whom persist while others do not. Using a variety of linguistic analysis techniques, we first examine the writing patterns that distinguish the two groups of people. Persistent people tend to reference more topics related to long-term self-improvement and use a more complicated writing style. Drawing on these consistent differences, we build a classifier that can reliably identify the people more likely to persist, based on their language. Our experiments provide new insights into the motivation-related behavior of people who persist with their intention to change.