Personality Reputation Formation and Network Structure on Computer Technologies

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The last decade has seen explosive growth of online social networks, which are now a pervasive part of everyday life for many people. More and more, people encounter one another for the first time through social media and make important social decisions based on those encounters. Individuals make decisions about who to hire and who to trust based on the impressions others convey on-line. People may decide with whom they will exchange information, and can even decide with whom to pursue close personal relationships based solely on online encounters. Given the multitude of outcomes, people's online social behavior likely reflects their different goals about how they wish to be seen by others, in addition to their personality. Despite the importance of understanding how these issues operate in communication technologies, most research on self-presentational goals, personality traits, and impressions is based on traditional laboratory and survey methodologies. The goal of this project is to study how users' personalities and self-presentation goals are reflected in their social media presence, how people form accurate or biased impressions of one another online, and how people make consequential social decisions based on those impressions. The project will also produce important tools for other scientists. By combining the expertise of a personality psychologist with that of a computer scientist, the project will create new methods and techniques for doing large-scale, automated studies in social psychological science and personality psychology. The outcomes of this research will also inform policy discussions on online privacy and on the use of social media in hiring, in spreading news and information online, and other important social and economic transactions. In their project, the investigators propose to merge "big data" methods from computer science with rigorous laboratory methods from psychology to study personality and reputation on Twitter, a popular online social network with a large and diverse user base in the United States. Five studies focus on a series of related questions about how people convey who they are through Twitter, and how others form impressions by observing such behavior. (1) Data-driven analyses will be used to identify patterns in Twitter users' publicly available information (including profile information, network size and structure, and tweet content) to determine what important stable attributes distinguish users. (2) A sample of Twitter users will complete validated psychometric assessments of personality and self-presentation goals to see how these are reflected in the users' public Twitter data. (3) Research will examine how others form personality impressions based on such Twitter profiles, and the ways those impressions are accurate or biased. (4) Studies will examine how others make important social decisions based on their accurate or inaccurate impressions of Twitter profiles. (5) Finally, research will examine how personality and impressions affect how people decide to affiliate and form online communities. This research will produce new scientific insights about how people express themselves and interact online. It will also generate new tools for assessing personality and reputation in online settings, enabling future "big data" studies in psychology.