Big Data and Personality

Andrew McAfee posted about a very intriguing study on personality, gender and age in their relation to language. In essence, what the study did was to look at the correlation of people’s Facebook statuses and their personality, gender, and age.

You’ll know why I say it’s intriguing when you take a look at some of the findings. Especially interesting are the word maps.

Here’s one showing the words used by people who were extraverted/introverted, and their emotional stability (i.e. personality). Neurotic people are sad, angry, and existential. Emotionally stable people are… hmm… outdoorsy/active? As McAfee mentioned in his post it’s an interesting correlation between the sorts of activity and emotional stability, but one which cause-and-effect is difficult to determine. Does physical activity lead to a more emotionally stable personality, or do emotionally stable people just tend towards physical activity?

I’m pretty much a 60/40 introvert (60% introvert, 40% extravert) so I’m always intrigued with studies on introversion, so I just couldn’t ignore the huge “anime” (and its related terms, like “Pokemon”) popping up in the introversion word map.  — I do wonder how much of an impact cultural influence (i.e. a person’s country of origin/residence) plays a part. And did you notice the number of emoticons in that map? Me too 🙂

And here’s the word map for males vs. females. I love this one. Seems like the biggest thing on female’s minds is shopping and relationships, while for males it’s all about sex and games. As McAfee mention’s on his blog, this doesn’t “does not reflect well at all on my gender”.

And here’s one for age. My guess why daughter’s are more talked for the 30s to 65s about is because women are the ones talking about them (men just talk about sex and sports). In the gender map, relationships dominate what women talk about (apart from chocolate and shopping), and through my experience in TV watching, women don’t really talk about sons because sons pretty much take care of themselves. Daughters, on the other hand, are always worth worrying about.

I could imagine fiction writers using these to build character dialogues; or academics building ever more insightful anthropological maps; or marketers with targeted campaigns. It’s a really imaginative use of big data, and one that I think is brilliant.

Who says Big Data’s failed?