personality and email addresses

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Personality @revealed.oops

Your e-mail address could be more revealing than you realise. When psychologists in Germany asked 100 students to rate the personalities of the owners of hundreds of e-mail addresses, it turned out that five out of six personality traits, their judgements were better than would be expected by chance. The students’ ratings compared with the e-mail address owners’ self-ratings if their own personalities. Accuracy was highest for Openness, intermediate for Conscientiousness and Narcissism and low for Agreeableness and Neuroticism, while ratings for Extraversion were completely off the mark. Given their accuracy, the students must have been basing their judgements on cues inherent in the e-mail addresses. Indeed, to take two examples, it transpired that Conscientiousness was determined from the quantity of dots and characters in an address, and the lack of digits, while Narcissism was detected from the salaciousness or vanity revealed in the address. The Psychologist (2208). 21,6, p.468.