People Who Point Out Typos are the Worst Kind of Human Beings

Grammar nazis, pedants, trolls. Whatever you call them, people who feel it's their duty to point out spelling mistakes and typos are a tad annoying, right?

Because a) it was a keyboard slip, b) we were in a rush and c) we were gonna correct it anyway.

Well, a new study has just revealed what we basically already knew, that people who point out typos are jerks.

Linguists at the University of Michigan looked into how personality traits influence people's reactions to errors.

They asked eight-three participants to read email responses to an advert for a housemate. The responses either contained no mistakes or had been altered to include typos (typso) or actual grammatical errors (it's instead of its).

Participants were then asked to write an evaluation of each email, rating the writer on perceived intelligence, friendliness and other attributes. The final stage was a personality assessment on the participant.

​They found extroverts are more likely to ignore mistakes than introverts, which is surprising considering they tend to be more confident and direct.

It was introverts who were more likely to notice the errors and then pass a judgement on the writer.

Researchers concluded that "less agreeable people are more sensitive to grammatical errors" while "more conscientious and less open people are sensitive to typos."

So there you have it, less agreeable people ARE more likely to point out your mistakes. But now, at least you have a great comeback for those jerks.