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The Humintell Blog July 23, 2020

How Smartphone Data Can Predict Your Personality

For many people around the globe, smartphones are an integral and indispensable part of their daily lives. Rarely more than an arm’s length away, these sensor-rich devices are easily used to collect rich and extensive records of their users’ behaviors which some argue poses serious threats to individual privacy.

But what can smartphone data tell us about the user’s personality?

Computational social scientists and psychologists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet in Munich (LMU) utilize smartphone data in order to learn more about personality traits and social behavior.

According to Science Direct, in a study that appears in the journal PNAS, a team of researchers led by LMU psychologist Markus Bühner set out to determine whether conventional data passively collected by smartphones (such as times or frequencies of use) provide insights into users’ personalities. The answer was clear cut.

“Yes, automated analysis of these data does allow us to draw conclusions about the personalities of users, at least for most of the major dimensions of personality,” says Clemens Stachl, who used to work with Bühner

The LMU team recruited 624 volunteers for their PhoneStudy project. The participants agreed to fill out an extensive questionnaire describing their personality traits, and to install an app that had been developed specially for the study on their phones for 30 days. The app was designed to collect coded information relating to the behavior of the user.

According to their press release, “The researchers were primarily interested in data pertaining to communication patterns, social behavior and mobility, together with users’ choice and consumption of music, the selection of apps used, and the temporal distribution of their phone usage over the course of the day. All the data on personality and smartphone use were then analyzed with the aid of machine-learning algorithms, which were trained to recognize and extract patterns from the behavioral data, and relate these patterns to the information obtained from the personality surveys.

Focus was given to the five most significant personality dimensions (the Big Five) identified by psychologists, which enable them to characterize personality differences between individuals in a comprehensive way:

  • Openness: willingness to adopt new ideas, experiences and values
  • Conscientiousness: dependability, punctuality, ambitiousness and discipline
  • Extraversion: sociability, assertiveness, adventurousness, dynamism and friendliness
  • Agreeableness: willingness to trust others, good natured, outgoing, obliging, helpful
  • Neuroticism (Emotional stability): self-confidence, equanimity, positivity, self-control

The automated analysis revealed that the algorithm was indeed able to successfully derive most of these personality traits from combinations of the multifarious elements of their smartphone usage.

Moreover, the results provide hints as to which types of digital behavior are most informative for specific self-assessments of personality. For example, data pertaining to communication patterns and social behavior (as reflected by smartphone use) correlated strongly with levels of self-reported extraversion, while information relating to patterns of day and night-time activity was significantly predictive of self-reported degrees of conscientiousness.

The results of the study are of great value to researchers, as studies have so far been almost exclusively based on self-assessments. The conventional method has proven to be sufficiently reliable in predicting levels of professional success, for instance.

“Nevertheless, we still know very little about how people actually behave in their everyday lives — apart from what they choose to tell us on our questionnaires,” says Markus Bühner. “

Thanks to their broad distribution, their intensive use and their very high level of performance, smartphones are an ideal tool with which to probe the relationships between self-reported and real patterns of behavior.”

Want to learn more about this hugely complex but entirely fascinating topic?
Don’t miss a rare opportunity to learn from Dr. David Matsumoto in a first-time series, powered by Humintell science!
Learn more here!

Filed Under: Science

The Humintell Blog July 13, 2020

There’s More to Reading People than Just Body Language

People often think that the terms “reading people” and “body language” are synonymous but that’s simply not true. In reality, being able to read body language or nonverbal behavior is just one (important) part of reading people.

Of course reading people involves reading their body movements and facial expressions of emotion; we focus a lot on those skills here at Humintell. But reading people also includes aspects we may not necessarily think about such as the way someone dresses, the way someone speaks and even the way someone organizes their bedroom or office.

In fact, research has shown that a person’s home and office environment can reveal certain personality traits. According to University of Texas, Austin psychologist Samuel Gosling, Ph.D., and his colleagues, personal spaces such as bedrooms and offices are an incredibly rich source of information about people’s personalities.  One of their studies called “A Room With a Cue: Personality Judgments Based on Offices and Bedrooms” was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

A press release on EurekAlert describes the study.

”Gosling and Sei Jin Ko, of the University of Texas at Austin, Thomas Mannerelli, Ph.D., of the international business school INSEAD and Margaret Morris, Ph.D., of Sapient, a consulting firm in San Francisco found that people are remarkably accurate at guessing some aspects of others’ personalities–in particular whether they tend to be open and conscientious–based only on a look at either their offices or their bedrooms.

In two separate studies, Gosling asked people to rate others’ personalities–using the standard and quite broad “Big Five” traits of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and emotional stability–after looking through either their offices or their bedrooms. He then compared how well these personality-raters agreed with each other as well as how accurate their assessments seemed when compared to self- and peer-ratings of the office and bedroom inhabitants.

The 94 offices examined in the study belonged to employees of five businesses: a bank, a real estate firm, a business school, an architecture firm and an advertising agency. The 83 bedrooms belonged to college students or recent college graduates living on or near a college campus. The researchers used several methods to ensure that the occupants did not make changes to their offices or bedrooms prior to the inspections. For example, one of the incentives for participating in the study was to receive an evaluation of how others perceive them based on their personal space.

Other researchers have done similar studies using photographs of people, video clips, evaluations of people’s reputations and the like. But Gosling is the first to try it without providing any direct visual or biographical information about the person whose personality is being assessed. Instead, they had to rely on cues such as personal items (though all photos and references to the occupants’ names were covered up), decorating style, neatness and level of organization.

Not only did Gosling find that personality raters–eight in the study looking at offices and seven in the study looking at bedrooms–agreed among themselves, but he also found that they were relatively accurate in their assessments. At least for certain traits. While earlier studies found that people could accurately assess extroversion and agreeableness by viewing photos and video clips but had a harder time assessing conscientiousness and openness, Gosling found the opposite is true for viewing people’s personal environments.

“Should you decide to date someone by looking at their bedroom?” says Gosling. “If openness is important to you, sure. But if extroversion is important, you might want to meet them first. It seems to depend on what information you want.”

By evaluating the cues in the offices and bedrooms that people use to assess personality traits, the authors found many cues that people could use to judge openness and conscientiousness–such as distinctive decorating for openness and neatness for conscientiousness–but few for judging the other traits. Gosling and his colleagues then determined which of these cues were “valid.” In other words, if a bedroom was neat, they looked to see whether the room’s occupant tended to be conscientious. If so, neatness was considered a valid cue for that room.

Based on their list of valid cues, the researchers found that people seemed to use valid cues to assess openness and conscientiousness but were less likely to do so to assess the other traits. The researchers also found that people relied on gender and racial stereotypes–based on their guesses of occupants’ gender and race–when few cues were available. So, for example, they tended to use stereotypes to assess emotional stability but not to assess conscientiousness.

“Even though the observers in both studies used stereotypes to form impressions,” said the researchers, “they did not base their judgments solely on stereotypes but may have drawn more heavily on the physical cues in the rooms.”

The researchers’ next step will be to better understand the process by which people make their personality evaluations. For example, in one study they’re manipulating people’s assessment of a person’s race to see if that affects their personality judgments.”

Want to learn more about this hugely complex but entirely fascinating topic?
Don’t miss a rare opportunity to learn from Dr. David Matsumoto in this first-time series, powered by Humintell science!
Learn more here!

 

Filed Under: Emotion, Nonverbal Behavior

The Humintell Blog July 7, 2020

The Devil is in the Details. A Guide to Lie Catching.

Guest blog by Craig James Baxter of Understanding Body Language. Liars, Cheats and Happy Feet

During a trip to my local garden centre, I noticed this sign for sale. We didn’t buy it, but I did mention to my wife that this statement is often correct and promised that I would write an article about why that is. So here it is! The theory that the longer the explanation the bigger the lie does indeed have research attached to it, with many eminent psychologists suggesting there are often more verbal than visual clues to deceit when the stakes (consequences) are high.

When you’re assessing credibility (or a lack of it) listen for someone struggling to recall very basic information and keep an ear out for someone giving you an abundance of irrelevant information rather than focusing on what actually happened, as this form of ‘attempted behavioral control’ helps to keep you distracted away from wherein their story the deceit occurs (as in the longer the story, the more creative they’ve been in hiding the truth from you).

Furthermore, as the irrelevant details mount up, this can make them appear ‘chatty’ and can give the impression that they seem ‘credible’, especially if their delivery is flamboyant and well spoken. It’s worth remembering that many liars simply do get away with their deceit because their target is more focused on LOOKING for deceit (such as observing for eye movements/aversion) and may simply forget to actively LISTEN to the actual spoken content.

With this in mind, when you are assessing the credibility of a story, be sure to remember that skilled and habitual (practiced) liars will often conceal information rather than present false information as if it were true. This method is frequently preferred by liars, as this allows them to tell the truth up to the certain point, skip over their indiscretion (the lie) and resume telling the truth. This is known as a ‘text bridge’ and these are key words that can indicate that there might be a gap in their story, I.e. the information they don’t want you to know. Key words such as ‘and then’, ‘shortly after’, ‘later on’, ‘the next thing I remember’ all help span time and skip over and keep something hidden without sounding suspicious. The next time you have your suspicions, shrewdly listen for these words, they could help you pin point an area which they have intentionally left out.

A special mention needs to be given to eye movements. Focusing on eye movements will seriously impair your ability to detect deceit. Modern day research (Vrij, Porter, DePaulo) have all concluded that the eyes themselves do not provide reliable information regarding deception. Examining the wrong cues to deception could have serious ramifications, such as labelling a truth teller as a liar because they habitually looked ‘up and right’ when in fact their statement was honest. Many lie catching guides enthusiastically claim that eye movements can reveal the difference between a fictitious event and a truthful memory; however these claims have again been widely disputed by eminent professors of psychology.

Remember, truthful people simply convey facts. Liars have to remember the facts, distort or conceal them & appear credible in their delivery.

Never forget, the devil is in the details!

Filed Under: Deception

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