Wisdom in Adversity: A Twitter Study of the Japanese Tsunami

Sophisticated data science techniques have recently been applied to social networks data to study social phenomena and people. Recognizing that social psychology research has witnessed a renewed interest in the notion of wisdom, with an emphasis to its contextual dimensions, this study looks at the expression of wisdom in twitter messages. Specifically, it examines the relation between wisdom in adversity and cultural influences using Twitter data from the tragic Japanese tsunami of 2011. The study employs natural language processing and data science to detect the expression of wisdom. Two categories for wisdom in adversity are used: recognition of uncertainty and change, and cognitive empathy. Data processing is applied to 1,000 annotated tweets and extended to 43,436 tweets. The results show that it is viable to study wisdom in context using social networking sites data. This short paper discusses some of the findings.