Computer Measurement of Personality

Software	None
Covers	Psychology, social impact of the internet, social impact of technology
Skills Required	Interest in social impact of computers, interest in psychology, ideally some understanding of statistics
Challenge	Conceptual ????? Technical ?? Programming

Brief Description

Attempting to measure personality didn't begin with computers. Questionnaires for assessing individual differences have been a feature of serious academic research and clinical practice in psychology, and of popular magazines, for most of the twentieth century. But computers and the internet have changed things radically in two ways.

The first is to make it much easier for people to find and take personality tests, and information about how to interpret them, and rather harder to know what their provenance is and how seriously to take them. We're all fascinated by what kinds of people we are and how we're different from others. And there are a lot of personality tests out there - many made available via the web - that you can take, ranging from jokes to well-tested scientific instruments. But it's difficult to know what to take seriously, and what provides useful guidance. Tests need a lot of work to get them right and validate and normalize them to satisfy academic psychologists, but these often aren't the tests you can get at: for instance the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a well-regarded test (even if its theoretical foundations have been severely challenged) but you can't easily do the real thing; however you can easily find less-well-validated tests that aim to give you an MBTI assessment. (And while many tests may provide useful information, unsophisticated categorizations can grossly overinterpret results, like dividing people taking MBTI-like tests into sixteen personality categories when many people will be very close to the middle on some or all of the dimensions.) So what can you learn about yourself and how useful is it?

The other change is to make trying to assess individual differences between other people including personality by measuring behaviour of different sorts much easier than it used to be - especially without the subject's knowledge or consent.

So what can computers do to measure personality? And what should they do?

Variants

A project on personality assessment by computer could have a number of different slants.

The computer ethics project: big data. What are the appropriate limits on the use of computers to measure personality by observing and comparing behaviour, such as how people type or how they walk around in public spaces observed by CCTV cameras? How can these be policed, if at all? What are the range of different attitudes and practices among people who might be observed and measured, and among people who might use surveillance information?
The computer ethics project: discrimination by personality. What is and is not right or appropriate to do to measure personality, and when? And what is it right or appropriate to do with the results? For instance psychometric tests are often used in employment decisions, and are potentially useful for getting a good fit between jobs and candidates, but can be abused, for instance by one American company that systematically and deliberately discriminated against introverts regardless of job role.
The internet sociology project. The assessement of personality has always been fraught with superstition and pseudoscience: for example the belief is widespread in Japan that personality is strongly influenced by blood type; even though it's regarded as nutty by non-Japanese, blood type is openly used to discriminate in employment and partner-selection. But now a lot of people have access to well-grounded research if they choose to look for it. How does the use of the web and social media like Facebook influence people's understanding of their own personalities and their use of personality assessments? What do people take how seriously? Does propagation of ideas via social media have any influence on what people think?
The business intelligence project. What is involved in integrating data from a variety of sources with different degrees of reliability and validity, to obtain useful understanding of individual differences that matter in particular situations?

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