The Most Personal Device: Researchers Probe How Much Psychological Data Smartphones Generate
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich via Phys.org | 5/17/2020

Everyone who uses a smartphone unavoidably generates masses of digital data that are accessible to others, and these data provide clues to the user’s personality. Psychologists at LMU are studying how revealing these clues are.

For most people around the world, smartphones have become an integral and indispensable component of their daily lives. The digital data that these devices incessantly collect are a veritable goldmine—not only for the five largest American IT companies, who make use of them for advertising purposes. They are also of considerable interest in other contexts.

For instance, computational social scientists utilize smartphone data in order to learn more about personality traits and social behavior. In a study that appears in the journal PNAS, a team of researchers led by LMU psychologist Markus Bühner set out to determine whether conventional data passively collected by smartphones (such as times or frequencies of use) provide insights into users’ personalities.

The answer was clear cut.

“Yes, automated analysis of these data does allow us to draw conclusions about the personalities of users, at least for most of the major dimensions of personality,” says Clemens Stachl, who used to work with Markus Bühner (Chair of Psychological Methodologies and Diagnostics at LMU) and is now a researcher at Stanford University in California.