Personality Adjectives in Twitter Tweets and in the Google Books Corpus. An Analysis of the Facet Structure of the Openness Factor of Personality

摘要

Language changes over time. Useful words gain in popularity and useless words become extinct. We may assume that personality words that are highly popular refer to important aspects of personality while rarely used words refer to more marginal features. This study examined the frequency of the use of 29 adjectives that describe the openness to experience/intellect (OE) factor of personality. Two adjectives, intelligent and creative, accounted for 50 % of OE adjective usage as attributes of person in the Google books corpus. In Twitter tweets (week 48/2013), intelligent was used 702 times, ignorant 125 times, clever 92 times, open-minded four times, and narrow-minded once as an attribute of woman. The results imply that intelligence is a more central aspect of personality than attitudinal flexibility is. It is concluded that the criterion of social relevance/functional significance should play a bigger role in facet scale selection for personality models and tests.