CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Purpose:This work aims at analyzing the relationships between the personality traits of users who are related in online social networks. First, we tried to discover relation patterns between personality dimensions in conversations. We also wanted to verify some hypotheses: whether users? personality is stable throughout different conversation threads and whether the similarity-attraction paradigm can be verified in this context. We used the Five Factor Model of Personality or Big Five, which has been widely studied in the Psychology area. Design/Methodology/Approach: One of the approaches to detect users? personalities is by analyzing the language they use when they talk to others. Based on this assumption, we computed users? personality from the conversations extracted from MySpace social network. Then, we analyzed the relationships among personality traits of related users to discover patterns. Findings: We found that there are patterns between some personality dimensions in conversation threads, for example, agreeable people tend to relate to extroverted people. We confirmed that the personality stability theory can be verified in social networks. Finally, we could verify the similarity-attraction paradigm for some values of personality traits, such as extroversion, agreeableness, and openness to experience. Originality/value:The results we found provide some clues about how people relate within online social networks, particularly who they tend to relate to depending on their personality. The discovered patterns can be used in wide range of applications, such as suggesting contacts in online social networks. Although some studies have been made regarding the role of personality in social media, no similar analysis has been done to evaluate how users relate in social media considering their personality.