Online Buddies

There's a limit to what online communication can relay about personality. A person's gender can be detected, but not much more.

By W. Eric Martin, published on November 01, 2001 - last reviewed on April 07, 2006

If you think you have a firm "read" on someone's personality from an e-mail exchange, think again: Two studies found that little more than a person's gender can be accurately predicted.

Research has established that women are more likely than men to ask questions, make self-denigrating comments and reference emotions. In contrast, men issue more opinions, grammatical errors and insults.

A study by Rob Thomson and Tamar Murachver of the University of Otago in New Zealand, found that these traits are easily detected online: The 35 subjects correctly identified the sex of the author of non-gender specific e-mail messages more than 90 percent of the time. Language style, rather than subject matter, is the giveaway. "If a woman talks about a male-stereotypical topic, like rugby, without changing her style, readers will still think she's female," explains Thomson, whose findings were published in the British Journal of Social Psychology.

But identifying more nuanced personality traits is another matter entirely, according to Steven Rouse, assistant professor of psychology at Pepperdine University in California. Rouse asked 82 students to complete a personality test and then spend two hours online playing a word game and chatting with the other players. He gave transcripts of these chat-room discussions to a new group of students and asked them to rate specific individuals' behavioral traits such as extraversion, openness and neurosis.

"There was almost no agreement between a person's personality test scores and the [chat-room-based] ratings," explains Rouse. And an individual's personality test gave little clue as to what they actually did in the chat room.

Ironically, raters accurately "decoded" an individual's chat-room comments, but those comments were only marginally related to the individual's true personality. "People who read what a person wrote in a chat room formed very inaccurate perceptions of that person, because they were using behavioral cues—like complimenting and greeting—not relevant to the person's personality traits," says Rouse.