myPersonality Research

You may have seen in the media recently that an ApTiquant study apparently found that Internet Explorer (IE) users have a low IQ. Mainstream media around the world reported on it for a couple of days, until someone pointed out that ApTiquant is a completely new company and it copied much of its website from another website. The story was bogus.

If you look at ApTiquant’s original graph, it’s not surprising that it was fake. Apparently IE 6 users are 19 IQ points below the average. That would put anyone who uses IE6 into around the 11th percentile of the population. Differences that big just don’t happen.

But why was the article accepted so uncritically by the media? Because it seems to make sense. Internet Explorer is the default browser, so perhaps people who stick with it are the type who don’t like to try new things because they are happiest with what they’re used to. Part of the definition of a high IQ is someone who has no trouble adapting to new situations.

Since we run the MyIQ Facebook application, we’re ideally placed to have a look. Unfortunately we don’t store users’ browsers, however our LikeAudience website already lists the average IQs of the people who like various things on Facebook. So here’s the page for people who like Internet Explorer and for people who like FireFox.

IE’s average IQ is way below average, but Firefox’s is way above average. So actually ApTiquant’s fake results aren’t completely off the mark! However, the average IQ of people who like IE is around 93, and for Firefox it’s about 104, so the differences are a long way from the massive ones that ApTiquant fabricated.

It’s not all bad for people who like IE though. You can see from the profiles above that their life satisfaction is above average (Firefox’s is below average). IE likers also have more Facebook friends than Firefox ones.

Update: By the way, here’s the LikeAudience page for Chrome. Average IQ is ever so slightly lower than Firefox, around 103.

Two years ago around Valentines Day, myPersonality showed that married people are the most happy, followed by those who are engaged, followed by those in a relationship, followed by single people. In other words, people who take their relationship to the next level are happier.

But apart from their inner contentment, what distinguishes married people from single ones? Perhaps we can get some insights from their respective personalities. What kind of people get married and stay married?

We constructed a statistical model to see what predicts being married (vs. being single), using age, sex, and the 5 personality factors of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. We had 173,252 single people and 113,046 married people in our sample, and the results are summarised in the table below.

So there are reasonable (and all statistically significant with just a 0.1% probability of error) effects for the big 5 personality variables even after we control for age and gender. The biggest effects were that traditional and conscientious people are more likely to be married.

Of course, it’s possible that marriage might somehow cause people to change their personality to be more traditional and conscientious, rather than traditional and conscientious people getting and staying married. But on the other hand, just in case, and with Valentines Day coming up again, to show that you’re marriage material then we suggest that men should organise in advance to ask their Valentine out with 40 traditional red roses, and arrive on time to take her to a nice conventional romantic dinner.

There you go. Dating advice from your personality test!

Continuing our enthusiasm with sharing the results with our research, which would not be possible without the help of the kind myPersonality users who allow us to access their Facebook profile data, below we include a summary of some research into movie preferences by Olivia Chausson. Her full paper is available on our wiki.

Are you more likely to enjoy comedies if you’re an extrovert? Do boys like watching horror films more than girls do? Are male and female fans of fantasy sagas similar in terms of personality?

We investigated these intriguing questions by looking at the impact of gender and Big Five personality factors (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism) on nearly 30,000 British residents’ (aged 16-25) preferences for 5 types of films: Action, Comedy, Fantasy, Horror, and Romance. Our results are summarised in the table below where a + means that someone high in that personality trait enjoys that genre of film and a – means that someone high in that trait does not enjoy that genre of film:

Some highlights include:

• Open individuals were more likely to enjoy comic and fantastic films like Monty Python and Lord of the Rings.
• Neurotic and conscientious individuals really liked romances: e.g. Titanic and Dirty Dancing.
• Conscientious people also enjoyed 300, James Bond and other action movies, but not comedies.
• We also spotted a subtle relation between gender and Openness in people’s preferences for action, comedy and romance genres. Female fans of action and comedy were a lot more open that male fans, and the reverse was true for romantic films where male fans were more open. Intuitively this makes sense, as someone who goes against their gender stereotype is more likely to be unconventional and open to new ideas.

There was also a big difference in terms of gender: the popular notion that girls prefer romance and boys favour action was supported by our data.

Overall, the combination of gender and Big Five personality characteristics is valuable in understanding and explaining people’s film preferences. What you watch can say a lot about who you are…

Olivia Chausson is 3rd year undergraduate at the PPSIS Department at the University of Cambridge.

Back in October 2009 myPersonality advertised a study by Dr Gareth Hagger-Johnson and Professor Vincent Egan on “personality and attitudes”, which many of you were kind enough to help out with. Gareth has written us a summary of their research and what they were looking for as a way of saying thank-you for helping and also to let you know what it was all about!

Forensic psychologists have learned that personality traits are a key predictor of antisocial and violent behaviour. Evaluating personality underlies the accurate prediction of risk behaviour in offenders. Traditional demographic variables (age, sex, ethnicity, socio-economic status) are too broad for use with individual offenders since they are such a small section of the population. Environmental factors (e.g. where one lives) are mediated through the individual, so it is important to focus on the specific personality and individual differences that offenders have.

Extremism is a form of antisocial behaviour that is less well understood. It is not ’caused’ by poverty or ignorance, and we know little about how personality might influence the development of extremist attitudes. In our pilot study, a set of extremist attitudes were used to develop an Ideological Opinions Scale, derived from an analysis of 933 Hezbollah Militia interviews that looked for common themes. The attitudes appeared to cluster around four dimensions: fanatical zealousness, alienated alternativism, dogmatic individualism, and destructive terrorism. Additional research is required before using this scale in practice, because some of the attitudes appeared to show strong gender differences.

Gareth Hagger-Johnson is a lecturer in public health at the Leeds Institute of Health Sciences at Leeds University.
Vincent Egan is a professor of forensic psychology in the School of Psychology at Leicester University.

Gareth has also cheekily asked us to link to his JustGiving page. He’s running a half marathon in aid of UNICEF – any donations would be much appreciated!

If all 16,551 people who have taken myPersonality’s Satisfaction With Life Scale were lined up from those most satisfied with their lives to those least satisfied, then the average person from the US’s most satisfied State, Vermont, would be in the 36th percentile, but the average person from the least satisfied State, Rhode Island, would be down in the 68th percentile. That’s a big difference considering that they are only about 80 miles apart.

Our data are shown in the graph below, displaying the aggregate Satisfaction With Life scores for all of the 50 US States and the District of Columbia. Also shown are error bars. Broadly, large error bars mean that we can be less certain of where the true score lies. For example, Wyoming has a large error bar because since it is the least populated state it is the one that we have the least amount of data for.

We compared the myPersonality rankings to those from the recent Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which also ranks US States, and found a favourable correlation between the two sets of rankings, suggesting that myPersonality’s analyses have validity when compared to this much more comprehensive poll.

Method & Results
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