Foursquare Personality Experiment

Today we are finally starting to promote our latest experiment. It’s been online for about a month, but we haven’t told anyone about it while we’ve been finishing up the Year 2 deliverables for Recognition (the review is in a couple of weeks - fingers crossed!) Now however I can start publicly talking about it and encouraging people to take part and get involved!

We’re calling it the Foursquare Personality Experiment, and it’s available on the School of Computer Science & Informatics’ website here:

http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/recognition/foursqexp

It’s basically looking at comparing people’s five-factor OCEAN personality profiles to the places that they check in to on Foursquare. So, you go along to the site, sign in with your Foursquare account and take a really short 44-question personality test. While you’re doing that, we retrieve the list of places you’ve been to from Foursquare. When it’s all done, we show you your personality, and how it compares to the average personality of people in your area (average personality comes from the mypersonality.org data, thanks guys!). All the venues you’ve checked into on Foursquare are simultaneously displayed on a map, and selecting one of them will show you the average personality profile for that venue. This allows you to compare yourself to all the other people who go to the same places as you.

Meanwhile, we get a bunch of (anonymised) personality profiles that are linked to venues, so we can see if there are any correlations between places/categories of places and personality profiles. For instance, one of the things we may find is that the average personality profiles of “non-places” (those places frequented by everybody: the supermarket, the train station etc.) are different from the average personality profiles of “places” (the places visited by a subset of people: independent coffee shops, your local pub etc). We may also expect people with different visiting patterns to have different personalities. For instance, maybe I mainly check-in to pubs and bars on Foursquare, while someone else mainly checks in to shops. Is there a difference between the personality profiles of people who check into more pubs and people who mainly check in to shops?

Obviously we’ve only just started collecting data, but hopefully we’ll start to see some answers to some of these questions soon.