NTU Singapore Study Suggests Link Between Word Choices And Extraverts

A study by a team of NTU Singapore psychologists has found a link between extraverts and their word choices. The finding highlights the need for stronger linguistic indicators to be developed for use in online personality prediction tools, which are being rapidly adopted by companies to improve digital marketing strategies. Today, marketing companies use predictive algorithms to help them forecast what consumers want based on their online behaviours. Companies are also keen to leverage data and machine learning to understand the psychological aspects of consumer behaviour, which cannot be observed directly, but can provide valuable insights about how to improve targeted advertising. However, personality prediction tools available today that are used by marketing firms are not entirely accurate due to a lack of theoretically sound designs.

Principal investigator of the study, Assoc Prof Lin Qiu from the Psychology programme at the NTU SSS said, “Current machine learning algorithms for personality prediction can seem like a black box – there are many linguistic indicators that can be included in their design, but many of them are dependent on the type of computer application used. This may lead to biases and overfitting, an error affecting the performance of the machine learning algorithms. This begs the question – how should we create robust and accurate personality predictions?” The study found a corelation between extraverts and their tendency to use certain categories of words. The results showed a small strength of relationship between extraversion and the use of “positive emotion words” and “social process words”.

Read the article here.

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