Predicting Personality Traits, Gender and Psychopath Behavior of Twitter Users

Abstract

Social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are quickly becoming one of the most popular tools for social interaction and information exchange. Users of social networks reveal a lot about themselves in their public profiles, photos and status updates. While, social networks request users to create a truthful representation of themselves, they actually do so with a varying degree of accuracy. Depending on their privacy attitudes, the users may choose not to share details they find sensitive or tend to provide fake information. Contrary to a number of previous studies to predict the personality traits of the users of social networks primarily based on the users' profiles and other publically available information, this study provides an insight into the personality traits and psychopath behavior of twitter users by analyzing the tweets. The authors predict personality traits along the dimensions of “Big Five” personality model, gender and psychopath behavior of Twitter users. The paper discusses our data collection, gender, personality traits and psychopathic behavior prediction tool. It presents the analysis results of 327672 tweets of 345 users. The results show that there are more male users than the female users (70% male and 30% female). The results also show that majority of Twitter users are open to new ideas, are more agreeable and conscientious in nature but are less extravert. Out of 345 users, nine were indicating psychopath behavior and show less neuroticism. The authors also present a comparison of our personality traits' results with the results of two other similar studies.