In a recent paper, researchers compared the trends in Google searches that suggest people are looking up the answer to the formerly-ubiquitous word game Wordle with tweets from US players of the game.

An important note for the handful of people that don’t know how Wordle works is that if you lose the game then it tells you the answer, so I suppose the premise is that if you’re independently looking it up you must be up to no good.

The claim is that people who live in states that are more religious or ‘culturally tight’ - having stricter, stronger, more enforced social norms - are less likely to cheat at Wordle.

Behavioralscienist.org reproduces one of their charts.

Intuitively I feel like there’s plenty of other possible explanations for this pattern out there - the paper is paywalled so I haven’t read the full thing to know what else they considered and to what level of rigour.

But in the mean time, never trust an East Coast wordler I guess.