Automatic Personality Assessment Through Media Language

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

2015, Vol. 108, No. 6, 934 –952

© 2014 American Psychological Association

0022-3514/15/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000020

Automatic Personality Assessment Through Social Media Language

Gregory Park, H. Andrew Schwartz,

Johannes C. Eichstaedt, and Margaret L. Kern

Michal Kosinski and David J. Stillwell

University of Cambridge

University of Pennsylvania

Lyle H. Ungar and Martin E. P. Seligman

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University of Pennsylvania

Language use is a psychologically rich, stable individual difference with well-established correlations to

personality. We describe a method for assessing personality using an open-vocabulary analysis of

language from social media. We compiled the written language from 66,732 Facebook users and their

questionnaire-based self-reported Big Five personality traits, and then we built a predictive model of

personality based on their language. We used this model to predict the 5 personality factors in a separate

sample of 4,824 Facebook users, examining (a) convergence with self-reports of personality at the

domain- and facet-level; (b) discriminant validity between predictions of distinct traits; (c) agreement

with informant reports of personality; (d) patterns of correlations with external criteria (e.g., number of

friends, political attitudes, impulsiveness); and (e) test–retest reliability over 6-month intervals. Results

indicated that language-based assessments can constitute valid personality measures: they agreed with

self-reports and informant reports of personality, added incremental validity over informant reports,

adequately discriminated between traits, exhibited patterns of correlations with external criteria similar

to those found with...