People have long used language to infer associates’ personality. In quantitative research, the relationship is often analyzed by looking at correlations between a psychological construct and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC)—a program that tabulates word frequencies. We compare LIWC to a machine learning (ML) language model on the task of predicting grandiose narcissism (valid N = 471).We use the ML model discussed in Cutler and Kulis and formulate it as an extension of LIWC. With a strict validation scheme, the LIWC prediction was not more accurate than chance. The ML representation did moderately better (R2 = .043). This indicates that the ML model was able to preserve personality information where LIWC failed to do so, suggesting that precautions are warranted for social-personality research that relies solely on LIWC.
AckermanR. A.WittE.DonnellanM.TrzesniewskiK.RobinsR.KashyD. A. (2011). What does the narcissistic personality inventory really measure?Assessment, 18(1), 67-87. https://doi.org/10.1177/1073191110382845
2.
BackM. D.SchmukleS. C.EgloffB. (2011). Why are narcissists so charming at first sight? Decoding the narcissism-popularity link at zero acquaintance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(1), 132-145. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016338
3.
BagwellL. S.BernheimB. D. (1996). Veblen effects in a theory of conspicuous consumption. The American Economic Review, 86(3), 349-373. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016338
4.
BuffardiL. E.CampbellW. K. (2008). Narcissism and social networking web sites. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(10), 1303-1314. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167208320061
5.
CareyA. L.BrucksM. S.KüfnerA. C. P.HoltzmanN. S.Grobe DetersF.BackM. D.DonnellanM. B.PannebakerJ. W.MehlM. R. (2015). Narcissism and the use of personal pronouns revisited. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(3), e1-e15. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000029
6.
CisekS. Z.SedikidesC.HartC. M.GodwinH. J.BensonV.LiversedgeS. P. (2014). Narcissism and consumer behavior: A review and preliminary findings. Frontiers in Psychology, 5(232). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00232
7.
CutlerA.KulisB. (2018). Inferring human traits from Facebook statuses. In StaabS.KoltsovaO.IgnatovD. I. (Eds.), Lecture notes in computer science: Vol. 11185. Social informatics. (pp. 167-195). Springer International. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01129-1\_11
8.
DevlinJ.ChangM.-W.LeeK.ToutanovaK. (2018). BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. Cornell University. arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.04805
9.
DeYoungC. G.QuiltyL. C.PetersonJ. B. (2007). Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the big five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 880-896. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.93.5.880
10.
DietterichT. (1995). Overfitting and undercomputing in machine learning. ACM Computing Surveys, 27(3), 326-327. https://doi.org/10.1145/212094.212114
11.
DonnellanM. B.OswaldF. L.BairdB. M.LucasR. E. (2006). The Mini-IPIP Scales: Tiny-yet-effective measures of the big five factors of personality. Psychological Assessment, 18(2), 192. https://doi.org/10.1037/1040-3590.18.2.192
12.
EatonW. W.SmithC.YbarraM.MuntanerC.TienA. (2004). Center for epidemiologic studies depression scale: Review and revision (cesd and cesd-r). In MaruishM. E. (Ed.), The use of psychological testing for treatment planning and outcomes assessment: Vol 1. Instruments for adults (3rd ed., pp. 363-377). Lawrence Erlbaum. https://doi.org/10.1037/t29280-000
13.
EganV.AustinE.ElliotD.PatelD.CharlesworthP. (2003). Personality traits, personality disorders and sensational interests in mentally disordered offenders. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 8(1), 51-62. https://doi.org/10.1348/135532503762871237
14.
FastL. A.FunderD. C. (2008). Personality as manifest in word use: Correlations with self-report, acquaintance report, and behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(2), 334-346. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.94.2.334
15.
GiacominM.RuleN. O. (2019). Eyebrows cue grandiose narcissism. Journal of Personality, 87(2), 373-385. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12396
16.
GignacG. E.SzodoraiE. T. (2016). Effect size guidelines for individual differences. Personality and Individual Differences, 102, 74-78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.06.069
17.
GrijalvaE.NewmanD. A.TayL.DonnelanM. B. (2015). Gender differences in narcissism: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 141(2), 261-310. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038231
18.
GriskeviciusV.TyburJ. M.SundieJ. M.CialdiniR. B.MillerG. F.KenrickD. T. (2017). Blatant benevolence and conspicuous consumption: When romantic motives elicit strategic costly signals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(1), 85-102. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.93.1.85
19.
HastieT.TibshiraniR.FriedmanJ. (2009). The elements of statistical learning: Data mining, inference, and prediction. Springer Science & Business Media.
HoerlA.KennardR. W. (2000). Ridge regression: Biased estimation for nonorthogonal problems. Technometrics, 42(1), 80-86. https://doi.org/10.2307/1271436
22.
HoltzmanN. S. (2011). Facing a psychopath: Detecting the dark triad from emotionally-neutral faces, using prototypes from the Personality Faceaurus. Journal of Research in Personality, 45(6), 648-654. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2011.09.002
HoltzmanN. S.StrubeM. J. (2011). The intertwined evolution of narcissism and short-term mating: An emerging hypothesis. In CampbellW. K.MillerJ. D. (Eds.), The handbook of narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder: Theoretical approaches, empirical findings, and treatments (pp. 210-220). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118093108.ch19
25.
HoltzmanN. S.StrubeM. J. (2013). Dark personalities tend to create a physically attractive veneer. Social Psychological & Personality Science, 4(4), 461-467. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550612461284
26.
HoltzmanN. S.TackmanA. M.CareyA. L.BrucksM. S.KüfnerA. C. P.Grobe DetersF.BackM. D.PennebakerJ. W.ShermanR. Y.MehlM. R. (2019). Linguistic markers of narcissism: An exploratory LIWC analysis of 15 samples. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 38(5-6), 773-786. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X19871084
27.
HoltzmanN. S.VazireS.MehlM. (2010). Sounds like a narcissist: Behavioral manifestations of narcissism in everyday life. Journal of Research in Personality, 44(4), 478-484. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2010.06.001
JohnsonC. E. (2019). Does sharing information with friends and family cause men to adhere more strongly to masculine norms?Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 1914. https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/etd/1914
30.
JonasonP.BaughmanH. M.CarterG. L.ParkerP. (2015). Dorian Gray without his portrait: Psychological, social, and physical health costs associated with the Dark Triad. Personality and Individual Differences, 78, 5-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.01.008
31.
KernM. L.EichstaedtJ. C.SchwartzH. A.DziurzynskiL.UngarL. H.StillwellD. J.KosinskiM.RamonesS. M.SeligmanM. E. P. (2014). The online social self: An open vocabulary approach to personality. Assessment, 21(2), 158-169. https://doi.org/10.1177/1073191113514104
32.
KosinskiM.MatzS. C.GoslingS. D.PopovV.StillwellD. (2015). Facebook as a research tool for the social sciences: Opportunities, challenges, ethical considerations, and practical guidelines. American Psychologist, 70(6), 543-553. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039210
33.
MannH. B.WhitneyD. R. (1947). On a test of whether one of two random variables is stochastically larger than the other. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 18(1), 50-60. https://doi.org/10.1214/aoms/1177730491
34.
PaulhusD. L. (1998). Interpersonal and intrapsychic adaptiveness of trait self-enhancement: A mixed blessing?Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1197-1208. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1197
35.
PaulhusD. L. (2001). Normal narcissism: Two minimalist accounts. Psychological Inquiry, 12(4), 228-230.
36.
PaulhusD. L.JohnO. P. (1998). Egoistic and moralistic biases in self-perception: The interplay of self-deceptive styles with basic traits and motives. Journal of Personality, 66(6), 1025-1060. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6494.00041
37.
PaulhusD. L.WilliamsK. M. (2002). The dark triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Journal of Research in Personality, 36(6), 556-563. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0092-6566(02)00505-6
38.
PennebakerJ. W.BoydR. L.JordanK.BlackburnK. (2015). The development and psychometric properties of LIWC2015. University of Texas at Austin.
PennebakerJ. W.KingL. A. (1999). Linguistic styles: Language use as an individual difference. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1296-1312. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1296
PenningtonJ.SocherR.ManningC. (2014). Glove: Global vectors for word representation. In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) (pp. 1532-1543). https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/D14-1162
43.
PincusA. L.PimentelC. A.CainN. M.WrightA. G. C.LevyK. N. (2009). Initial construction and validation of the pathological narcissism inventory. Psychological Assessment, 21(3), 365-379. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016530
44.
Preotiuc-PietroD.CarpenterJ.GiorgiS.UngarL. (2016). Studying the dark triad of personality through Twitter behavior. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM international on conference on information and knowledge management (pp. 761-770). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2983323.2983822
RaskinR.TerryH. (1988). A principal-components analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and further evidence of its construct validity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5), 890-902. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.5.890
47.
RauthmannJ. F.Gallardo-PujolD.GuillaumeE. M.ToddE.NaveC. S.ShermanR. A.ZieglerM.JonesA. B.FunderD. C. (2014). The situational eight DIAMONDS: A taxonomy of major dimensions of situation characteristics. Journal of Personal and Social Psychology, 107(4), 677-718. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037250
48.
RodriguezA. J.HolleranS. E.MehlM. R. (2010). Reading between the lines: The lay assessment of subclinical depression from written self-descriptions. Journal of Personality, 78(2), 575-598. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2010.00627.x.
49.
SaltonG.BuckleyC. (1988). Term-weighting approaches in automatic text retrieval. Information Processing & Management, 24(5), 513-523. https://doi.org/10.1016/0306-4573(88)90021-0
50.
SchmittD.AlcalayL.AllikJ.AlvesI. C. B.AndersonC.AngeliniA. L.AsendorpfJ. B.AustersI.BalaguerI.BaptistaA.BenderS. S.BennettK.BianchiG.BirashkB.Bleske-RechekA.BoholstF. A.BoothroydL.BorjaT.BosA.… KökényT. (2017). Narcissism and the strategic pursuit of short-term mating: Universal links across 11 world regions of the International Sexuality Description Project-2. Psychological Topics, 26(1), 89-137. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.5.890
51.
SchwartzH. A.EichstaedtJ. C.KernM. L.DziurzynskiL.RamonesS. M.AgrawalM.ShahA.KosinskiM.StillwellD.SeligmanM. E. P.UngarL. H. (2013). Personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: The open-vocabulary approach. Plos One, 8(9), e0073791. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0073791
52.
SedikidesC.GreggA. P.CisekS.HartC. M. (2007). The I that buys: Narcissists as consumers. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 17(4), 254-257. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1057-7408(07)70035-9
53.
ShiramizuV. K. M.DozmaL.DeBruineL. M.JonesB. C. (2019). Are dark triad cues really visible in faces?Personality and Individual Differences, 139, 214-216. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2018.11.011
54.
SotoC. J.JohnO. P. (2017). The next Big Five Inventory (BFI-2): Developing and assessing a hierarchical model with 15 facets to enhance bandwidth, fidelity, and predictive power. Personality and Individual Differences, 113(1), 117-143. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000096
55.
StillwellD. J.KosinskiM. (2012, January). myPersonality project: Example of successful utilization of online social networks for large-scale social research [Paper presentation]. Tenth International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys) 2012, Low Wood Bay, Lake District, United Kingdom.
56.
SumnerC.ByersA.BoocheverR.ParkG. J. (2012, December). Predicting dark triad personality traits from Twitter usage and a linguistic analysis of tweets. In Proceedings of the 2012 11th international conference on machine learning and applications (Vol. 2, p. 386-393). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICMLA.2012.218
57.
VazireS.NaumannL. P.RentfrowP. J.GoslingS. D. (2008). Portrait of a narcissist: Manifestations of narcissism in physical appearance. Journal of Research in Personality, 42(6), 1439-1447. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2008.06.007
58.
VizeC. E.LynamD. R.CollisonK. L.MillerJ. D. (2018). Differences among dark triad components: A meta-analytic investigation. Personality disorders: Theory, Research and Treatment, 9(2), 101-111. https://doi.org/10.1037/per0000222
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
