MyPersonality Research

MyPersonality added the Satisfaction with Life Scale earlier this summer in collaboration with a project that Dr Richard Tunney was running for the UK National Lottery examining the connection between the number and quality of friendships that people have and their satisfaction with life. In MyPersonality, the Scale allows you to quantify how happy they are with your life, to compare this to other people including your friends and the general population, and then suggests areas that research has suggested to concentrate on in order to improve your score.

The results of the research project (from other sources as well as MyPersonality) have been released today, which show that having 10 or more old friends is more likely to give you a higher satisfaction with life score, but that increasing this number is not so likely to help. This suggests that people should spend time cultivating their oldest and closest friendships.

There is coverage of this in various news outlets including: The Daily Mail, The Sun, PhysOrg.com

Just in case you wondered whether MyPersonality’s research was stalled, I can assure you it is not! We’ve been looking at some more substantial questions than the ones already answered here. These take some time to analyse, and then we’re looking towards academic publication which usually requires that findings haven’t already been published elsewhere (including here). However, the plan is to put research findings on this blog as soon as we can, and we’re pretty excited about what we’ve been able to look at already.

Users who add the star sign personality feature are asked:

With the caveat that people who opt-in to the MyPersonality star sign feature are not necessarily the same as people who do not, we can have a look at the frequency graph for star sign belief.

1 = strongly disagree, 2 = slightly disagree, 3 = no opinion, 4 = slightly agree, 5 = strongly agree.

As is shown, just 4.6% of respondents believed strongly in the ability of horoscopes to provide information that would be useful to guide a decision, compared to 23.3% of respondents who believed strongly in the opposite. Perhaps surprisingly though, the number of people who leaned towards a negative opinion of the usefulness of horoscope information was almost equal to the number of people who leaned towards a positive opinion (17,359 negatively, 14,791 positively). The biggest difference is that people who leaned negatively tended to have a strong opinion that horoscopes provide no useful information, whereas those who learned postively weren’t so sure, electing for “slightly agree” rather than “strongly agree”.

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If the data from MyPersonality is going to mean anything, the distribution of trait scores needs to be somewhere close to a normal distribution. That is, a curve with most of the people in the middle and a few people on each side. The graphs below plot the number of people who have each trait score (from 0 - 100%). The good news is, they’re nice and smooth curves! You can click on the thumbnails to see the full graph, which also includes the mean and standard deviation scores.

Some features to point out:

• Unfortunately there are slight ceiling effects on the openness and extroversion distributions, since quite a lot of people have 100%, so it’s reasonable to assume that if it was possible some people would have 105% or even 110%.
• The extroversion trait score has the highest variability. The standard deviation is the highest at just over 19% - which means that it has the greatest average deviation from the mean. If you look at the frequency you’ll also notice that the highest peak in the extroversion trait does not reach 10,000 people - whereas the others are all higher than this. This is because less people are ‘average’.

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In MyPersonality, people run the Big Five personality test and then have the option of running the star sign personality section, which compares their personality to the one that their star sign predicts. Even deciding to check your star sign personality though might say something about you, so MyPersonality had a look by comparing the personalities of people that have added the star sign feature with the personalities of people that haven’t.

You can see in the table below that people who have added the star sign feature have a very slightly higher openness trait score (+2.4%), which seems consistent with the idea that people who are interested in unconventional ideas like star signs are more likely to be open to new experiences. However, the other differences are less explainable, particularly why people on average who run the star sign feature have a lower extroversion score than those who do not (-2.6%).

Although all of the differences are statistically significant to a high degree of probability (see below the cut for the statistical stuff), is the fact that people who are interested in their star sign personality have a 2.4% higher openness trait score very interesting? Possibly not, but it does demonstrate that scientists can’t assume that people who opt-in to an experiment are the same as the people who don’t.

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