Massachusetts residents are the smartest people in America, at least they are according to Twitter.
California researchers studied thousands of messages tweeted in all 50 states and found that tweets from Massachusetts suggested the highest reading levels and IQ, the Daily Mail reported Wednesday. Reversely, the state with the lowest-scoring tweets was Mississippi. The California-based real estate company Movoto compiled the results into several interactive maps.
Using a computer algorithm, researchers were able to rate 500,000 tweets based on spelling, grammar and word choice, according to the Daily Mail. The results showed that for the most part, the tweets indicated a state reading level of no higher than sixth grade.
"The required brevity of tweets is likely the cause of this, and the comparison of states is the real measurement of interest," Chris Kolmar, chief economist for Movoto, wrote according to the newspaper.
The states with the lowest reading levels were Arizona with a level of 4.6, followed by Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama and Louisiana with 4.2. Four of those states were also on the 2011 list of states with the worst education.
According to the study, the states with the lowest IQ were New Mexico, Alabama, Louisiana, California and Mississippi with an IQ of 94.2.
That's approximately 10 points lower than the highest scoring state, Massachusetts, with an IQ of 104.3.
Most of the other high ranking states, including New Hampshire, Vermont and North Dakota, are in the nation's north. Several of the top states also had the highest eighth-grade reading proficiency, according to 2009 data from the State of the States in Education report, the Daily Mail reported.
"An interesting question which is not explored here would examine the reason behind this correlation," Kolmar wrote. "Are worse writing skill correlated with lower IQ scores, are IQ tests necessarily biased to the better educated?"
After noting the correlations, Kolmar added it would not hurt if some states, even smartest ones, added a "class on incorporating proper grammar, spelling and word choice into tweets."
