POPULARITY AND PERSONALITY IN THE SPEAKEASY
I did an informal study comparing popularity within our community with the different personality traits that IBM's service measures.
The objective.
The broad question I'm asking is "What makes someone in a community popular?" It can't be fully answered here, but let's keep our eyes on that. Beyond that, though, I've asked more particular questions: What kind of personality does our community have overall? Which traits relate with popularity/unpopularity? How is popularity and personality distributed within our community? Does the distribution of these variables have anything to do with how they relate with one another? Hopefully some of these questions interest some of you. (Cuz, like, I did a lot of work.)
Where the data came from.
The recent Speakeasy User Popularity Poll (SUPP) gave me data on different users' popularity here. 146 people were evaluated by 92 people on a scale from 0-10 (0 is "I absolutely LOATHE this user!"; 10 is "I absolutely ADORE this user!") and participants were later ranked by their average score. The standard deviations of these means were reported, too, along with the number of 0s and 10s each user was given. To measure personality traits, I obtained the 6000 most recent words that each evaluated person has made on the site and put them through the service. This partially explains why I made this decision, but please understand that my main reason is that it was really convenient. Anyway, the service returned for each SUPPicipant over 50 different measurements based on these writing samples.
A composite profile.
Let's start with the big picture. I took everyone's personality profiles and averaged their percentile scores. The result is a measure of which traits are prominent in our community relative to the general population. Since these are percentiles, the line at .50 refers to the average 'trait score' in the general population. So according to IBM the generated profiles were high in Depression and Anger and low in Self-discipline and Artistic interests relative to the typical profile. A one-sample t-test (mu=.5) comparing the Speakeasy and general profiles found p-values below .05 for every trait measured except for Excitement, Emotionality and Hedonism. I'll leave discussion of these and other results to the thread. Find the full figure
here.
This figure is like the other figure except it's about the standard deviation of traits rather than their actual scores. Spread matters, too, right? Get some help interpreting the "meaning" of each trait
here.
Correlations with popularity.
Now, the easiest question we can ask with our personality and popularity data is how each trait relates with popularity here in our community. I computed the correlation of every trait with the SUPP's
rankings,
average scores,
counts of 0s and
counts of 10s. Furthermore, each correlation was t-tested for significance. In my produced figures a horizontal green line indicates significance: traits outside of the rectangle outlined by the dotted lines (ie either above or below) correlated significantly with the popularity measure, p<.05. So for example Conscientiousness and Depression correlates significantly with average scores but not Practicality or Curiosity. If I were you I'd focus on the
average scores chart because the rankings one is shamefully misleading. Get some help interpreting the "meaning" of each trait
here.
Distinctiveness versus representativeness.
Let's get a little abstract. If one wants, one can pose two competing hypotheses about how popularity happens. The
representativeness hypothesis
is that popular people are representative of their communities. Some of their traits might stand out, but overall they fit in and work as exemplars of their communities. The
distinctiveness hypothesis
is that popular people are distinctive within their communities. They might have some typical characteristics, but overall they stand out and aren't typical. It's also possible, of course, that there's no strong relationship in either direction between popularity and representativeness/distinctiveness.
If you've been paying attention to these charts as much as I have, then you might have noticed something peculiar. The very same traits that are overrepresented in our community, such as Depression and Anger, are also the ones that correlate most negatively with popularity. The opposite is true, too - artsiness for example is (apparently) rare in SUPPicipants but also a great predictor of popularity. I did the analysis, and at least in the Speakeasy, the distinctiveness hypothesis seems to
strongly
win out. As
this figure illustrates, trait prevalence has a -.7782 correlation with trait popularity (p = 1.122e-11). For reference, the strongest correlation I found between a single trait and popularity was a little over .3.
Unless I did something wrong, what this means is that the popular people in our community are also the most distinctive people in our community; they have traits that happen to be rare in our neck of the woods. This is probably the most important as well as the strongest finding of my study. But maybe I did something wrong.
And that's that for now.
You can't step in the same river twice.