Today's Post reports on a study tracking how Twitter tweets reflect our happiness levels across the course of the day and week. According to the Cornell researchers, we humans love weekends, coffee and naps. But Monday mornings and traffic, not so much.
I love these studies of human behavior and had the opportunity to conduct my own little research project while standing on the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Military Road in Chevy Chase, DC this week. In the 15 minutes I waited for my ride at the tale end of Washington rush hour (6:45-7:00 pm), I counted the number of seconds that passed between each horn honk.
Result- we may like Tweeting about coffee and naps, but we truly love honking our horns! Never did more than 13 seconds pass between a honk, with the average being about 9 seconds. (To be honest, I didn't have a clipboard and stopwatch, but my number is pretty accurate.) This reinforces the Cornell Twitter study finding that we hate traffic.
What's my take away? We humans often struggle sometimes with interpersonal communications. But when we can sound off from the relative anonymity in our cars we've got no problem. SImilarly, a tweet or Facebook post gripe seems a "safe" place to express our emotions. Seems like we could use some help translating our comfort level with communicating by fingers and hands to our lips.
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