Word choice betrays your personality

Whatever online persona you may have chosen to adopt in your blog, your deepest personality traits may be given away by your choice of words, a new study has found.

The specific words bloggers use relate to which of the ‘big five’ personality factors dominates in that person. These factors are: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

For the highly neurotic, the most commonly used words were: ‘awful’, ‘though’, ‘lazy’, ‘worse’ and ‘depressing’; while with wild-child extroverts, ‘bar’, ‘other’, ‘drinks’, ‘restaurant’ and ‘dancing’ kept cropping up. Agreeable people happily repeated ‘wonderful’, ‘together’, ‘visiting’, ‘morning’ and ‘spring’, while the conscientious made sure to reiterate ‘completed’, ‘adventure’, ‘stupid’, ‘boring’ and ‘adventures’. For open types, ‘folk’, ‘humans’, ‘of’, ‘poet’ and ‘art’ appeared most often.

The research project – run by Tal Yarkoni, a psychology and neuroscience postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado at Boulder – is one of the largest conducted examining the connection between writing and personality.

Thanks to bloggers’ typically prodigious outpourings, Yarkoni had around 115,000 words from each of the 700 or so participants. This larger-than-usual sample meant that the research could go beyond broad topics focused on, and look at particular words that recur.

The results suggest we can’t completely separate our online and offline selves, however much you might want to maintain a particular facade of yourself. And this is hardly surprising, says Yarkoni: ‘Our personalities don’t dramatically change just because we’ve turned on our computers.’

Still, at the very least, it’s probably best to try to keep work and business blogging separate, no matter how lazy, awful and depressing you may find your boss.

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Author: Catie Holdridge

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Catie joined Emphasis with an English literature and creative writing degree and a keen interest in what makes language work. Having researched, written, commissioned and edited dozens of articles for the Emphasis blog, she now knows more about the intricacies of effective professional writing than she ever thought possible.

She produced and co-wrote our online training programme, The Complete Business Writer, and these days oversees all the Emphasis marketing efforts. And she keeps office repartee at a suitably literary level.