Wow… what an amazing response to a simple Tweet, so here’s a big thank you.

Here’s the story

Late last week we launched a follow-on experiment to our 2011 Facebook Big Five Experiment,  focusing instead on what Twitter activity might reveal about someone’s personality. We’d had a steady trickle of people take the personality test and after 6 days we had 24 participants (You guys may get a special prize).  That doesn’t sound a lot, but it’s about the rate we were expecting.  You see, we were ready to hand out flyers like the following as we’d had a good return on using flyers in our 2011 Facebook study.

 

Yesterday, we wrote an email to Stephen Fry’s people (yes that Stephen Fry) asking (nicely) for a Tweet.  We were not expecting anything as a lot of people ask Stephen Fry for a lot of Tweets.

At 11.54PM (here in the UK) Stephen Fry (yes that Stephen Fry) Tweeted this…

 

 

 

 

 

 

…then things went crazy. We went from 24 participants to 2,072 in less than 12 hours. In no uncertain terms is this simply incredible.  Thank you all very much for taking part, retweeting etc. Your participation is truly appreciated. You have all contributed to the largest, independent study of personality and Twitter activity to date.

You can stay tuned to our progress by following @The_OPF on Twitter or liking our Facebook page or simply checking back on this site periodically.

Of course, now this leaves us with a somewhat (arguably at least) biased study as the vast majority of participants are Stephen Fry fans (we’re not complaining).  We probably need to even the demography out a little and seek participation from Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber fans (hint hint).

What happens next?

We will be comparing participants Twitter activity (Tweets per day, type of language used, Friend/Follower ratio etc) with users self reported personality traits.  We aim to see just what can be revealed through Tweeting. Our Facebook study presented some interesting results, which you can read about here so we’re hopeful that this will be at least equally interesting

While current statistical analysis means that we should be careful what we attempt to deduce about someone based on their Facebook activity, we’ve been chatting to researchers at a US university about different approaches to applying predictive models to the data.  Early results suggest that it may be possible to rank people based on certain personality traits with a reasonably high degree of accuracy (much better than current statistical analysis provides).

What does this mean? We’ll that’s a good question. At the very least, our  Facebook study points to critical questions around the possible need for regulatory controls and/or raising awareness amongst users in order to prevent the misuse of information derived from Facebook and other online social network activity.

…and finally

Our intent isn’t to scare people away from Social Media. In fact, as individuals, we rather enjoy its benefits, but we do want to examine its potential abuse and make people aware so that they can make informed choices about how much information to make public and in the case of employers, critically evaluate their hiring practices.

Thank you again,

 

Chris

P.S. If you found this personality study interesting, I’d highly recommend the  following books.

 

	“Snoop” Professor Sam Gosling’s highly readable book that reveals what your stuff reveals about your personality.	“The Secret Life of Pronouns” Professor James Pennebaker looks at the words we use in everyday life and what they might reveal about us.	“The Psychopath Test” From the author of ‘The Men Who Stare At Goats”, Jon Ronson looks at Psychopathy.	“Virtually You” Elias Aboujaoude, MD examines how people differ on and offline. This is a fascinating book and really calls into question the validity of Cyber Vetting as a predictor of job performance.

 

In the spirit of transparency, the links above are to Amazon .co.uk and .com.   Through Amazon’s affiliate scheme, we’d make a tiny fraction of the purchace price on each sale. We are not in this to make money at all (as crazy as that seems), so we’d donate any money received to Great Ormond Street Childrens Hospital in London.