Personality and Places
**Our paper examining the link between individual personality and the places people visit has just been published in Computers in Human Behavior. It’s open access, so you can go read it for free, now! **
In an experiment we ran previously, we asked users of Foursquare to take a personality test and give us access to their checkin history. The personality test gives us a measure of how each person scores for five different factors: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. The checkin history lists all the places they’ve ever checked in to using Foursquare. Because a couple of hundred people took part in the experiment, we ended up with a large number of individual personalities that we could link to over a hundred thousand venues. In total, this represents a pretty staggering half a million Foursquare checkins that we have personality data associated with.
Our first step with this data has been to see if there are any links between personality factors and the places people choose to visit, and we found some interesting connections.
One of our main finding shows that the use of Foursquare for recording checkins seems to correlate well with Conscientiousness. The more conscientious a user is, the more likely they are to have checked in at more places and to have visited more venues. This could be because people with a high Conscientiousness score tend to be quite organised and disciplined, and so are more likely to remember to check in at every place they visit.
The opposite is true for Neuroticism: the more neurotic an individual is, the fewer places they have visited. Neuroticism is associated with negative feelings, and a tendency to be less social, which could then translate into people going to fewer places, and so checking in less. This is expressed again when we look at only those venues classed as ‘social’ (i.e. - somewhere you would go to hang out with friends). The more neurotic someone is, the fewer ‘social’ venues they have been to.
Surprisingly, we have found no link between Extraversion and the number of social venues visited. It may be expected that extraverts (who are very social in their nature) may go to more social venues. However, the data does not support this. In fact, we find no link between Extraversion and any aspect of Foursquare checkins that we have examined so far.
The personality factor of Openness is related to feelings of creativity and artistic expression, and a willingness to experience new things. It is interesting to find that there is a link between Openness and the average distance travelled between checkins -** the more Open an individual is, the further they tend to have travelled**. This could be an expression of an Open individual’s desire to experience new things exposing itself through wider travel, and a larger geographic spread of checkins. However, we do not find any link between Openness and the number of different categories visited by a user. We do not see a desire for new experiences express itself in the range and diversity of places visited.
Ultimately, this data could be incredibly useful in improving venue recommendation systems. Current systems use many different information ‘cues’ to recommend to a user a place they might like to visit. These cues include things such as where they have been in the past, where their friends have been, or where is popular nearby. Perhaps by including aspects of an individual’s personality (so including aspects of why they might visit somewhere) we can increase the usefulness of these recommendations.
There is still a lot of analysis to be done on this data, and both myself and Nyala Noe are busy churning through it to discover other links between personality and the places people visit. As we find more interesting connections, I’ll post more here.