What's a Goofy Webmail Address Reveal About You? More Than You Might Think

Ah, what better week to announce such a study than the weekend of the American Psychological Association (APA) national convention?

Ever wonder if choosing a webmail address such as honey.bunny77@hotmail.com says anything about your personality? Well, researchers at the University of Leipzig did, and they recently published a paper in the Journal of Research in Personality (.PDF), titled "How extraverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de? Inferring personality from e-mail addresses."

The paper was co-authored by Mitja D. Back, Stefan C. Schmukle, and Boris Egloff of the
Department of Psychology, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany.

According to the paper,

Using 599 e-mail addresses of young adults, their self-reported personality scores and the personality judgments of 100 independent observers, it was shown that personality impressions based solely on e-mail addresses were consensually shared by observers. Moreover, these impressions contained some degree of validity. This was true for neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and narcissism but not for extraversion.

I decided at this point that I was in need of a little translation, I went to my psychologist wife (who presented this weekend at the APA convention, plug, plug).

Note for one thing that the paper refers to extraverts, which is just another name for the more commonly termed extroverts.

Partipants were asked to make a determination as to whether a user was:

• neurotic
• open
• agreeable
• conscientious
• narcissistic
• extraverted

Based on the user's email address. The determinations were then cross-correlated against self-determinations by the users themselves. Of course, based on what I understand from my wife, I'm not sure narcissists would be that great at picking themselves out, but anyway ...

Participants were able to make good determinations about all the traits, except on extraversion. Strangely, participants usually had strong opinions about whether or not a user was an extravert; they were just wrong.

In sum, we were able to show that the e-mail addresses (‘‘nomen”) we use can influence the impressions we make on other people. Moreover—and even more interestingly—these impressions contain a kernel of truth (‘‘est omen”) for five of six personality dimensions. In light of the extreme narrowness of information and the complex processes involved in making accurate judgments, the mere existence of above chance level accuracy in personality judgments based on e-mail addresses is remarkable.

In other words, be careful what you pick as an email address: it shows something about yourself which others will judge you on, and for the most part, they will be accurate.

So you with the iamthebest@gmail.com email address: narcissistic much?