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Typing can be tough for your hands—but can it also mess with your head? Researchers have discovered that words typed on the right side of a QWERTY keyboard, for example POOL, tend to be thought of as more positive than those typed on the left side, say DESERT. The work is in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. [Kyle Jasmin and Daniel Casasanto, "The QWERTY Effect: How typing shapes the meanings of words"]
The QWERTY layout on your keyboard was designed to prevent typewriter jams by keeping common letter pairs apart. But QWERTY also creates new problems. It’s harder on the left hand then on the right, because it places more letters, and more tricky-to-type letter pairs, on the left side of the keyboard.
And this may make the left-side words less likeable. English, Spanish and Dutch speakers rated the positivity of over a thousand words’ meanings. And words typed with more right-side letters earned more positive marks.
This so-called “QWERTY effect” was stronger in words the researchers made up and in real words created after QWERTY’s invention—perhaps because these newer words are typed more frequently than spoken aloud. Right-side words are easier to type, which makes them easier to like—even for lefties.
—Sophie Bushwick
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
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9 Comments
Add CommentI presume the stated conclusions only apply to righties, and that lefties experience the opposing association?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"It’s harder on the left hand then on the right, because it places more letters, and more tricky-to-type letter pairs, on the left side of the keyboard."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLefties might conceivably find the difficult combinations easier to type than righties but the fact remains that they are more difficult. Thus the concluding statement: "Right-side words are easier to type, which makes them easier to like—even for lefties."
Thanks - I had overlooked the cause of difficulty, explained in the text.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat about guitar players who are used to doing difficult stuff with their left hand? What about three finger typists such as myself ... hang on, I just pressed L with my right 3rd finger .... er, what about 4 finger typists such as myself? What about one handed people (or no handed people come to that)? And how about people who never type at all? Was there a control study? Does the list include negative right sided words like KILL, PUNK, JUNK and JUMPILY and positive left sided words like BREATH, ZEST, WED and GRACE? Or is the whole thing biassed by the fact that TAX, DEAD, FESTER, FRET, and FEAR are all left sided? What about words that are typed right across the keyboard (like POSITIVE and NEGATIVE!) which involve switching between hands for the 'proper' typist and would therefore seem to be the more tricky. Did anybody do a study of the errors made by typists to see if these were in fact weighted to either side of the keyboard? In short, did anybody give this study a chance of being significant cos I'm really not sure anybody's thought this through!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSTEWARDESSES - all left hand, and a very likable word.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat research of difficult interpretation! It really seems to be proper for linguists!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut about the mechanical difficulty of the QWERTY system see what is written in the text of the presentation of that research:
PDF (footnote of pag 3):
*Experiment 1: Does QWERTY predict valence ratings
for words across languages?
Results and discussion
1 The phrase QWERTY effect is sometimes used informally in economics
to describe a product that is highly successful despite being inferior to its
competitors. The semantic QWERTY effect we report here is unrelated.*
Here is a better system than QWERTY: DVORAK.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard
This text of this site is very interesting, especially in the item:
*Comparison of the QWERTY and Dvorak layouts*
See in there this comparative table:
*Key stroke distribution
Row QWERTY Dvorak
Top 52% 22%
Home 32% 70%
Bottom 16% 8%*
"It’s harder on the left hand then on the right", you meant THAN.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNothing here implies that all words with a positive connotation are typed only on the right side of the keyboard or that those with a negative connotation are typed on the left. This form of bias is even alluded to and subsequently discounted in the research paper. Your examples therefore contribute nothing. As for words which are typed "across the keyboard" this article tells us that "words typed with more right-side letters earned more positive marks."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou ask whether a controlled study was undertaken. Do you mean by, for example, making words up and then testing how positive people felt about them?
"This so-called “QWERTY effect” ... in words the researchers made up ..."
"(D)id anybody give this study a chance of being significant(? C)os I'm really not sure anybody's thought this through!" Did you read the 4000 word research paper by following the provided link or are your objections based entirely on your (apparently shallow) reading of the 200 word transcript of a podcast reporting its existence? The description of the study, the analysis of the results and the discussion of the conclusions reached indicates to me that somebody _did_ think it through. Perhaps you should "give this study a chance" by actually reading the research before criticising it.
Is this research definitive? Perhaps not. Does it raise some interesting questions regarding the perception of existing words and uptake of new words? I think so.
we are deressed wt ts ews.
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