Study: Bloggers’ Words Expose Personality Traits
You can blog, but you can’t hide. That’s the message sent by new research from the University of Colorado at Boulder that examines the links between bloggers’ word choices and personalities.
A study by Tal Yarkoni, a psychology and neuroscience postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado, refutes the widely held belief that people can maintain distinctly different online and off-line personalities. His research was published in the Journal of Research in Personality and was financed by the National Institutes of Health.
“The results converge with other recent findings suggesting that, contrary to popular wisdom, people do not present themselves in an idealized and overly positive way online, and maintain online identities that reflect the way they genuinely see themselves and are seen by others," Yarkoni said.
Yarkoni’s research shows that if you’re an extroverted blogger, for instance, you’re likely to use words such as “bar” and “dancing.” But if you’re a neurotic blogger, you lean toward words like “lazy” and “depressing.”
Aside from “bar” and “dancing,” words that popped up most often in blogs posted by extroverts were “other,” “drinks” and “restaurant.”
Other than “lazy” and “depressing,” the most popular words among neurotic bloggers were “awful,” “though” and “worse.”
People who are extroverted or neurotic make up two of the five major personality types. Among the three other personality types, Yarkoni discovered:
• The most common words for bloggers displaying “openness” were “folk,” “humans,” “of,” “poet” and “art.”
• Bloggers who were deemed “agreeable” most often cited these words: “wonderful,” “together, “visiting,” “morning” and “spring.”
• Words mentioned most frequently by bloggers classified as “conscientious” were “completed,” “adventure, “stupid,” “boring” and “adventures.”
In his research, Yarkoni studied the posts of nearly 700 bloggers. On average, each of the bloggers had typed more than 115,000 words of text—representing more than a novel’s worth of material.
“People have been interested in personality and language for a long time, but it's really hard to get somebody to sit down and write 100,000 words,” Yarkoni said. “The nice thing about bloggers is they write a lot, often over very long periods of time.”
Yarkoni said the overlap between the online and off-line personalities of bloggers shouldn’t come as a surprise.
“If you're sociable and like to seek out people off-line, you’re probably going to do the same thing online,” he said. “If you complain a lot when you’re around your off-line friends, you may very well complain about similar things in your online blog.
“Our personalities don’t dramatically change just because we’ve turned on our computers.”
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