Tweets in which US Senators accuse others of greed are more successful than other tweets

Eric J. Mercadante, Jessica L. Tracy, and Friedrich M. GĂśtz, Greed communication predicts the approval and reach of US senators’ tweets, PNAS, March 6, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2218680120

Abstract: Social media are at the forefront of modern political campaigning. They allow politicians to communicate directly with constituents and constituents to endorse politicians’ messages and share them with their networks. Analyzing every tweet of all US senators holding office from 2013 to 2021 (861,104 tweets from 140 senators), we identify a psycholinguistic factor, greed communication, that robustly predicts increased approval (favorites) and reach (retweets). These effects persist ...