Behind Our Words: Psychological Paths Underlying the Un/Supportive Stance Toward Immigrants in Social Media

The present work is aimed at exploring the psychological paths underlying supportive and unsupportive social media stances toward immigrants. This investigation is based on a particular case of supportive communication on immigration promoted on line by a public figure (Morandi, a famous Italian singer). The used methodology integrated methods from data science and psychology, and it was based on a machine learning approach combined with a psycho-lexical analysis of online discussions. Results showed that from the words used by social media commenters can be extracted peculiar psychological processes behind supportive and unsupportive stance toward immigrant hosting. In particular, words were qualitatively grouped by defining the underlying value dimension, cognitive, emotional and also attributional processes for both supportive and unsupportive commenters. Thus this study allowed to find fine grained socio-psychological shades by overcoming the simple polarized online stances detection.