Inferring Personality From Email Addresses

paleshadows writes "Three researchers from the University of Leipzig published an interesting paper titled 'How extroverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de? Inferring personality from e-mail addresses' (PDF). From the abstract: 'Email addresses represent the thinnest slice of information that people receive from one another. Using 599 e-mail addresses of young adults, their self-reported personality scores and the personality judgments of 100 independent observers, it was shown that personality impressions based solely on e-mail addresses were consensually shared by observers. Moreover, these impressions contained some degree of validity. This was true for neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and narcissism but not for extroversion."'

Comments

Re:German humour

[k2r]

I still feel insulted a little when I read things like these. While I agree on German humour being kind of special I think that it has some very funny ways. For example we have a sense for the humor of very elaborate and absurd situations - for absolutely no reason.
Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicco_von_Buelow or some of his work at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70Dd5dosUhk or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rypULAp99ao or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVCk8Inkav4

The English have a humour that quite sometimes is similar to aspects of our humour, neither nation would admit it, of course.
Proof: Watch http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9105942950207814319

  for example.