The Psychology of Technology: Social Science Research in the Age of Big Data

Language - both spoken and written - allows us to effectively communicate our thoughts, feelings, hopes, concerns, or intentions to other members of our species. It fosters cooperation and collaboration in a social world, and ultimately allows us to create a shared reality with others about the world we inhabit. Although language has been an integral part of people's social life for millennia, the scientific inquiry into language as a window into people's psychology has only recently become popular among psychologists. This chapter discusses the potential of using text analyses in psychological research. It first surveys different analytical strategies for analyzing text, ranging all the way from counting words to capturing meaning through vectors in multidimensional space. The chapter subsequently provides an overview of how text analyses have been used in different psychological subdisciplines - personality, health and clinical, social, organizational, consumer, developmental, and cognitive psychology - to both generate and empirically investigate psychological theories.