Email Addresses Really Reveal Our Personalities

How much time did you spend thinking before choosing the right alphanumeric or whatever type of characters to represent you in the Internet community? Yes, we're talking about email, and yes, you guessed right that email addresses seem to label us from the moment someone who doesn't know us receives a message from us. A survey conducted by the Leipzig University shows that people usually mark others with attributes regarding their neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness or narcissism by simply seeing their email addresses.

The participants in the survey were nearly 600 men and women (although women were more numerous), with an average age of 16.04. They offered their email addresses, along with a brief description of their personality, having in sight the six characteristics mentioned above. Other 100 students had to classify the email addresses according to patterns regarding the email client, the choice for real names or for made up ones or the way they could say if the owner of an email address is a man or a woman.

"Targets with fantasy names as opposed to own names as well as those with funny e-mail addresses and 'hotmail' as provider were rated as more extraverted. Self-enhancing aspects [...] of e-mail addresses influenced impressions of narcissism. Furthermore, observer ratings indicated the usage of gender stereotypes: Targets that appeared to be female were rated as more neurotic, open, agreeable and conscientious," proves the survey aftermath.

The Leipzig researchers say that preconceptions don't always indicate fake details of someone's personality. This because most of the observations the control group made about the addresses matched the way the 599 people who took part in the survey described themselves. Only one of the six characteristics seems to be harder to be tracked down, and that is extraversion. Although intuition could tell us that this feature is the easiest to identify in a person, the survey reveals the contrary.