Principal Investigator Alex 'Sandy' Pentland
Project Website http://www.demontjoye.com/projects.html#predictingpersonality
How much can others learn about your personality just by looking at the way you use your phone? We provide the first evidence that personality types (for example, neurotism, extraversion, openness) can be predicted from standard mobile phone metadata. We have developed a set of novel psychology-informed indicators that can be computed from any set of mobile phone metadata. These fall into five categories, and range from the time it took you to answer a text, the entropy of your contacts, your daily distance traveled, or the percentage of text conversations you started. Using these 36 indicators, we were able to predict people's personalities correctely up to 63%, 1.7 times better than random using only metadata.