Determining Personality Traits and Privacy Concerns from Twitter Activity

The OPF Big 5 Twitter Experiment looked at how well anti-social personality traits can be discovered using a linguistic analysis of Tweets.

The results show that while we may be careful about the content we post on Twitter, the words we use may reveal more about our personalities than we might wish.

Blog Post Commentary:

Are you what you Tweet?   The results show that there are a number of statistically significant relationships between personal Twitter activity and certain personality traits, such as narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. But these relationships are relatively weak, especially when applied to individuals.   Read more

Papers:

Sumner, C.,  Byers, A., Boochever, R., and Park, G, J. (2012). Predicting Dark Triad Personality Traits from Twitter usage and a linguistic analysis of Tweets, 11th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications, 2012, pp. 386-393.  Paper | Slides | Google Scholar | Read More 

Wald, R.,  Khoshgoftaar, T, M.,  Napolitano, A., and Sumner, C. (2012). Using Twitter Content to Predict Psychopathy, 11th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications, 2012, pp. 394-401. Paper via IEEE | Google Scholar

Presentation Slides:

‘Predicting Dark Triad Personality Traits from Twitter usage and a linguistic analysis of Tweets’, Dec 2012.  Presentation Slides