Renee DiResta was curious about what stereotypes Americans pinned on other states during last year’s presidential election. For each state, DiResta typed “Why is [state] so___?” into Google and let the search engine autocomplete the rest.
The results uncover common state biases, and reveal some interesting insights into how we search. For example, we are much more likely to search for negative things. Of the twelve terms that were related to culture/sentiment queries, ten were negative: backwards, bad, boring, crazy, dangerous, hated, racist, stupid, trashy, and weird. Luckily, there were a handful of positive results related to state sentiments; Colorado, Minnesota, Texas, and Vermont were “awesome,” and Montana, New Hampshire, and New York were “great.”
(via Renee DiResta)
