If the data from MyPersonality is going to mean anything, the distribution of trait scores needs to be somewhere close to a normal distribution. That is, a curve with most of the people in the middle and a few people on each side. The graphs below plot the number of people who have each trait score (from 0 – 100%). The good news is, they’re nice and smooth curves! You can click on the thumbnails to see the full graph, which also includes the mean and standard deviation scores.
Some features to point out:
- Unfortunately there are slight ceiling effects on the openness and extroversion distributions, since quite a lot of people have 100%, so it’s reasonable to assume that if it was possible some people would have 105% or even 110%.
- The extroversion trait score has the highest variability. The standard deviation is the highest at just over 19% – which means that it has the greatest average deviation from the mean. If you look at the frequency you’ll also notice that the highest peak in the extroversion trait does not reach 10,000 people – whereas the others are all higher than this. This is because less people are ‘average’.
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In MyPersonality, people run the Big Five personality test and then have the option of running the star sign personality section, which compares their personality to the one that their star sign predicts. Even deciding to check your star sign personality though might say something about you, so MyPersonality had a look by comparing the personalities of people that have added the star sign feature with the personalities of people that haven’t.
You can see in the table below that people who have added the star sign feature have a very slightly higher openness trait score (+2.4%), which seems consistent with the idea that people who are interested in unconventional ideas like star signs are more likely to be open to new experiences. However, the other differences are less explainable, particularly why people on average who run the star sign feature have a lower extroversion score than those who do not (-2.6%).
|
# ppl |
Ope % |
Con % |
Ext % |
Agr % |
Neu % |
| Star Sign Disabled |
316459 |
72.6 |
63.1 |
64.1 |
65.3 |
43.4 |
| Star Sign Enabled |
47538 |
75.0 |
61.6 |
61.5 |
64.8 |
44.2 |
Although all of the differences are statistically significant to a high degree of probability (see below the cut for the statistical stuff), is the fact that people who are interested in their star sign personality have a 2.4% higher openness trait score very interesting? Possibly not, but it does demonstrate that scientists can’t assume that people who opt-in to an experiment are the same as the people who don’t.
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