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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."'
So the article summary starts with:
How extraverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de? Inferring personality from e-mail addresses
And ends with:
Moreover, these impressions contained some degree of validity....but not for extraversion
So the only example in the summary is wrong. And you can tell by reading the summary. Bravo.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
I mean, consider an address like "leatherdude@hotmale.com", "bottom4lrgck@gmail.com", or "cowboyneal@slashdot.org" It's fairly safe to assume they're into the gay scene.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
mmmm, chunky peanut butter....
"I only speak the truth"
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Personality tests are (reasonably) based around extroversion in normal social interactions. I think its fairly well accepted that one's introversion/extroversion on the Internet is not necessarily the same as in "meat space". Perhaps "honey bunny" is shy in real life but using the freedom and anonymity of the web to act as she would like to be able to act in real life without consequences. The reserved accountant in real life could be the brash bon vivant at their computer.
Granted, a similar variation would be likely for other attributes, but I would be surprised if extroversion was the trait most likely to have a radical change (increase).
You clearly have far too much spare time & not enough to do.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
that if you have multiple email addresses you have multiple personalities?
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
Creationists.
I'm disabling ads until because I choose not to reward redesigns that are less usable than "view source".
Bollocks. The correlations are weak, at best, and are barely distinguishable from chance. E.g., Consider Table 2. There are 196 entries in the top section of the table. The excess of postive correlations over negative corrlations is a grand total of 8. Assuming 50/50 odds, that excess will happen about 11% of the time just by chance alone. When you factor in the conditional probablity of publishing results (i.e., the argument that if they were any weaker, the data would never have been published), this has to be an extraordinarily weak finding.
The average correlation (without regard to sign) in the same section of Table 2 is a whoppping 0.067, suggesting an average explanatory power on the order of 0.5%. I suppose such power might have some benefit to someone that sends a lot of e-mails to random addresses like spammers, but for the odinary Joe or Jo, this is not a lot to go on.