How you act is who you are? Predicting personality with social behavior
How you act is who you are? Predicting personality with social behavior
One’s personality impacts many aspects of her interactions with the outside world. The impact of personality on job performance is well studied. It also has an impact on personal relationships. There is a growing body of work in trying to predict one’s personalty based on their activity in social media sites likes Twitter and Facebook [1,2,3]. This work predominantly analyses the textual content and in some cases the ties between individuals.
We ask a different question: can we predict personality based on one’s social behavior? Can we use how people act towards as indicators of personality? While personality impacts our behavior, personality aspects do not show up in all situations. An aggressive person will not act aggressively in all situations. In fact, there are many situations where act like others. Studies have looked at when distinctive characteristics of our personality are more visible. Research indicates that in environments that satisfy one’s basic psychological needs like relatedness to others, show of competence, and autonomy, “people tend to act like themselves”. We then ask the question whether Twitter satisfies these needs?
Can we predict personality based on how people behave on Twitter? The answer is yes, we can predict personality as well as you would with analysis of textual content of Tweets and relationships of an individual. In our recent paper (asonam_cameraReady.pdf) that will appear in the Asonam 2012 Conference proceedings, we consider a set of indicators that look at how much one’s behavior varies towards different friends and what type of friends she has by looking at friends’ behavior. For behavior, we measure a large range of actions like the bandwidth of total and reciprocal communication, the amount of message forwarding, the amount of priority given to friends and delays incurred, etc. We also compute a set of detailed textual features used in the previous work. We then predict personality using our features vs. the textual features against the results of a big five personality survey. We find that we can predict personality as good as any textual analysis tool.
Here are some behaviors that are best predictors of different personality traits:
• Neuroticism: anxious, insecure, sensitive. Neurotics are moody, tense, and easily tipped into experiencing negative emotions. Behavior that best predicts neuroticism is a lot of variation of behavior such as high variance of message text and response time, sending messages that are not propagated and having friends who do not propagate messages through retweets.
• Extroversion: outgoing, amicable, assertive. Friendly and energetic, extroverts draw inspiration from social situations. Extraverted individuals write long messages, but they typically tend not to be propagated by others.
• Agreeableness: cooperative, helpful, nurturing. People who score high in agreeableness are peace-keepers who are generally optimistic and trusting of others. Agreeable individuals tend to follow the norms of Twitter like mentioning topics, they tend to respond uniformly to friends and have friends who are responsive.
• Openness to Experience: curious, intelligent, imaginative. High scorers tend to be artistic and sophisticated in taste and appreciate diverse views, ideas, and experiences. This trait is best predicted by low variance of timing between tweets and almost uniform propagation behavior from friends.
• Conscientiousness: responsible, organized, persevering. Conscientious individuals are extremely reliable and tend to be high achievers, hard workers, and planners. Conscientiousness is highly correlated with a lot of behaviors that indicate that people with this trait tend to act like others.
Overall, the timing between messages, text length and propagations appear to be the most informative features for understanding personality.
The journal version of this paper appears in SNAM Journal, “Predicting personality with social behavior: A Comparative Study”. (Link)
Friday, July 20, 2012