Submitted by Administrator on Thu, 17/10/2013 - 16:36
New research, which uses the myPersonality dataset, collected by David Stillwell of The Psychometrics Centre, has found that the words used by individuals on Facebook reveal rather a lot about their age, personality and, in particular, their sex.
In a paper published this month, 700 million words, phrases and topic instances from 75,000 volunteers were analyzed by David Stillwell and Michal Kosinski of the Psychometrics Centre and their colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania. They used an open-vocabulary technique to investigate the relationship between word choice and the sex, age and personality of the individual using the word. Somewhat surprisingly, the largest difference identified was in the words used by females and males.
The myPersonality dataset, used in the study, is a resource of over 6,000,000 personality profiles with associated anonimized Facebook data.
For further information about the study, read the article: Schwartz HA, Eichstaedt JC, Kern ML, Dziurzynski L, Ramones SM, Agrawal M, Shah A, Stillwell D, Kosinski M and Seligman M (2013) Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach. PLoS ONE 8(9): e73791. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.007
Adapted from: The Psychometrics Centre news.