Modern psychology recognises five dimensions of personality: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience. Previous research has shown that people’s scores on these traits can, indeed, predict what they purchase. Extroverts are more likely to respond to an advert for a mobile phone that promises excitement than one that promises convenience or security. They also prefer Coca-Cola to Pepsi and Maybelline cosmetics to Max Factor. Agreeable people, though, tend to prefer Pepsi, and those open to experience prefer Max Factor.
People are, of course, unlikely to want to take personality tests so that marketing departments around the world can intrude even more on their lives than happens already. But Dr Haber thinks he can get around that—at least for users of Twitter. He and his team have developed software that takes streams of “tweets” from this social medium and searches them for words that indicate a tweeter’s personality, values and needs.
For a study published in 2010 by Tal Yarkoni of the University of Colorado, Boulder, Dr Yarkoni recruited a group of bloggers and correlated the frequencies of certain words and categories of word that they used in their blogs with their personality traits, as established by questionnaire.
Some of the relations he found were commonsensical. Extroversion correlated with “bar”, “restaurant” and “crowd”. Neuroticism correlated with “awful”, “lazy” and “depressing”. But there were also unforeseen patterns. Trust (an important component of agreeableness), for example, correlated with “summer”, and co-operativeness (another element of agreeableness) with “unusual”.
Inspired by Dr Yarkoni’s findings, Dr Eben Haber and his team are conducting research of their own, matching word use with two sets of traits not directly related to personality. These are people’s values (things they deem to be good, beneficial and important, such as loyalty, accuracy and self-enhancement) and their needs (things they feel they cannot live without, such as excitement, control or acceptance).
In a test of the new system, Dr Haber analysed three months’ worth of data from 90m users of Twitter. His software was able to parse someone’s presumptive personality reasonably well from just 50 tweets, and very well indeed from 200.
Read more at The Economist
