Typealyzer 101
What´s this?
This is a project dedicated to the research about how the language reflects our psychological type, and thus our motivations and interests. The fundamental idea is that everyone of us use different personas or social roles at different moments. Most of us tend to use a certain persona more often than the others which gives us a certain psychological type. The major research aim of this project is to find and describe patterns in what interests different personas in terms of opinions, brands, media content etc.
What is psychographics?
From Wikipedia:
In the field of marketing, demographics, opinion research, and social research in general, psychographic variables are any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles. They are also called IAO variables (for Interests, Attitudes, and Opinions)…
How did we do this?
We have been collecting sample texts from blog text over the course of 2 years based on research about personality type and writing style. A classifier then runs a statistical analysis of the example texts and created an algorithm based on word frequency for the different types.
Further reading:
Personality and the Teaching of Compostion (Jensen & DiTiberio, 1989)
Identities Across Texts, ( George H. Jensen (Author), Michael William (Editor), David Jolliffe (Editor) , 2001)
What can it be used to?
Except from driving awareness about self and personality it can be used for several professional purposes.
From Wikipedia:
When a relatively complete assessment of a person or group’s psychographic make-up is constructed, this is called a psychographic profile. Psychographic profiles are used in market segmentation as well as in advertising.
Some categories of psychographic factors used in market segmentation include:
Psychographics can also be seen as an equivalent of the concept of “culture” as used most commonly in national segmentation. “Psychographics is the study of personality, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles” “Who Is Your Next Customer?“. Booz Allen Hamilton Inc, Strategy+Business. 28 September 2007. http://www.strategy-business.com/press/enewsarticle/enews092807.
Is this ethical?
We do not collect data about peoples identities, but their pseudo-identities. A pseudo-identity is for instance the nick-name used persistent over time when a person is using social media such as a blog. If a blogger chooses to be anonymous on their blog we respect that.
Why do I get different results on different blogs?
That means that you are not ABSOLUTELY stuck in a box (blink-blink)! How we write are affected by how we are feeling at the moment and how we see ourselves. We might think it is important to sound “serious” or “personal” – we might be under a lot of stress or feeling relaxed. This text analysis gives a snapshot by looking at the communication style of the text. Looking on the results over a period of time will give more confident results about how a blogger “normally” prefer to communicate.
What type is best to be?
No specific. Psychological type is about talent. And all people have a mix of different talents. Some of them are more apparent than others, though. Scientists such as Martin Seligman and Katherine Benziger say that the most important thing is to live according to your strongest talents – whether it’s at school, at work, in their relationship, etc.
In real life you need to adapt to the situation and we all do – more or less successfully. But the fact remains that we still have a disposition to be in a certain way – with talents and weaknesses that make us unique.
What development is going on?
We are not finished, but we have decided to let people try us. This will ensure us that we are doing the right things.
– We are improving the texts that describe the types.
– We are building new sites and features for fun and for professional use. (Want to contribute?
– We are improving the training data.
Do you want to contribute, send feedback or have commercial interests? Send an e-mail!