EPJ Data Sci. (2018) 7: 18
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-018-0146-8

Regular article

Extroverts tweet differently from introverts in Weibo

¹ State Key Lab of Software Development Environment, Beihang University, Beijing, China
² School of Economics and Management, Beihang University, Beijing, China
³ Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Big Data and Brain Computing, Beijing, China

^* e-mail: jichang@buaa.edu.cn

Received: 23 November 2017
Accepted: 22 June 2018
Published online: 3 July 2018

Abstract

As dominant factors driving human actions, personalities can be excellent indicators to predict the offline and online behavior of individuals. However, because of the great expense and inevitable subjectivity in questionnaires and surveys, it is challenging for conventional studies to explore the connection between personality and behavior and to gain insight in the context of a large number of individuals. Considering the increasingly important role of online social media in daily communications, we argue that the footprints of massive numbers of individuals, such as tweets on Weibo, can be used as a proxy to infer personality and further understand its function in shaping online human behavior. In this study, a map from self-reports of personalities to online profiles of 293 active users on Weibo is established to train a competent machine learning model, which then successfully identifies more than 7000 users as extroverts or introverts. Systematic comparison from the perspectives of tempo-spatial patterns, online activities, emotional expressions and attitudes to virtual honors show that extroverts indeed behave differently from introverts on Weibo. Our findings provide solid evidence to justify the methodology of employing machine learning to objectively study the personalities of a massive number of individuals and shed light on applications of probing personalities and corresponding behaviors solely through online profiles.