As I perused research about grammar police, I found one study with a conclusion that I had already deduced myself. No matter how much of a thought provoking story or essay that I create, the people who notice every misspelling and usage error in my writing may still assume that I am ignorant based on these errors. However, when a person does this, they have given me a clue to their personality. A larger percent of these grammar judges are disagreeable–certifiably disagreeable as diagnosed using the Five Factor Personality Analysis (often called the Big Five).
One of the traits measured in this assessment is level of Agreeableness. Subsets of agreeableness include trusting, high moral standards, altruism, cooperative, modest and sympathetic. People that score low in two of or more of these characteristics are considered to be closer to the disagreeable end of this trait spectrum
Now, for the research. Subjects were sent emails to read, both with and without spelling and grammar errors. Those that downgraded their estimation of the person who had written the email based on the number of errors that they found also scored low on Agreeableness in the Five Factor Personality Analysis. Of course, that is no big deal. Like me, you probably expected that result.
One of the other factors measured in this analysis is degree of Extroversion. Overall introverts were not as generous with their estimation of the unknown people writing these emails as the extroverts. Introverts who indicated that good grammar was important to them were more sensitive to these errors and could detect more of them. So, they downgraded the likability of the email’s author more severely than introverts who didn’t care about grammar. A definite correlation existed for the introverts between how much (or how little) they cared about grammar and how much they expected to like these unknown email correspondents.
Results for extroverts were a little perplexing because some extroverts said grammar mattered, but behaved as if it did not. “Surprisingly, extroverts who reported grammar as more important were less sensitive to typos than extroverts who felt good grammar was less important.”[1]
Some extroverts said grammar mattered, but behaved as if it did not.
Why were they not noticing the typos? Did they overestimate their ability at spelling and grammar? Or was this lack of self-awareness intentional? This research may have provided a serendipitous insight into self-awareness and why it is rising on the list of desired traits of leaders. Past researchers have found that executives are predominantly extroverts.
Self-aware people are introspective and tend to be introverted. These are common characteristics of writers. They think about their own values and motives compared to their actions. But as hard as they try, they soon realize they are incapable of behaving consistently according to their own values. There are different ways to respond to this realization: change values to match actions, intently focus on every error and spiral into depression or give up being self-aware because nobody is perfect. Evidently extroverts use this last option. Simply avoiding reflecting on the effects of their actions is their preferred way of dealing with internal conflict.
This lower self-awareness has some negative side effects when leaders fail to accurately estimate their own skill or understand their own motivation. High self awareness among writers can cause excruciating self-doubt. We have yet to see whether self-awareness can be adjusted one way or the other by external instruction. This may be as difficult as teaching extroverts and introverts to behave like someone at the opposite end of that spectrum.
Write about what? 