Individual Differences In Personality Perception From Text Messages

Research has suggested that personality traits are detectable purely from the linguistic features of social media posts (Park et al., 2014) and text messages (Hood, Silio, & Webb, 2015; Udry, Rhoades & Webb, 2016). However, there may be individual differences in the ability to detect and utilize these linguistic cues. One trait that has been associated with accurate personality perception in previous research is intelligence (Christiansen, Wolcott-Burnam, Janovics, Burns, & Quirk, 2005; Lippa & Dietz, 2000; Murphy & Hall, 2009; Realo et al., 2003; Taft, 1955). The current study recruited 15 targets and 406 raters to investigate whether the relationship between rater intelligence and accuracy would hold true within the context of personality perception from text messages. Targets provided self-reported personality information and text messages, while raters were asked to complete an other-reported personality measure based on the text message of a particular target and an intelligence measure. Raters’ accuracy was assessed in terms of agreement with their assigned targets’ self-reported personality. Results indicated that while raters were able to achieve some level of accuracy in terms of agreement with targets’ traits, intelligence did not appear to be related to accurate personality perception in the context of text messages.