1. Personal Branding
Ref: 0041
What your email address says about you
October, 2008
Psychologists at the University of Leipzig have found people make consistent and
accurate judgments on others’ personalities based on their email addresses.
Researchers Mitja back, Stefan Schmukle and Boris Eglo discovered that test subjects inferred information from
email addresses about the owners’ neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness and narcissism with
a high level of accuracy. However, the researchers found test subjects’ judgments’ about email address owners’
extraversion were much less accurate.
Their paper, ‘How extraverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de? Inferring personality from email addresses’ was
published in February this year in the Journal of Research in Personality.
The researchers asked 100 test subjects to make judgments about the personalities of the owners of 599 email
addresses. They then compared these results with personality tests the email address owners had filled in.
The giveaway signs, according to the research, were the presence of dots or numbers in the address, the email
provider and whether the person uses his or her real name or a made-up name.
Email addresses with dots in then were rated as conscientious, while those with lots of numbers were considered
more extraverted and narcissistic. Test subjects also judges those with creative, salacious or self-enhancing made-
up email names as extraverted and narcissistic.
“In sum, we are able to show that the email addresses we use can influence the impressions we make on other
people,” the paper concluded. “Moreover – and even more interestingly – these impressions contain a kernel of
truth for five of six personality dimensions. In light of the extreme narrowness of information and the complex
processes involved in making accurate judgments’, the mere existence of (this) level of accuracy in personality
judgments’ based on email addresses is remarkable.”
The conclusion for Nett readers? Using bigboy1974@hotmail.com for business correspondences is probably not
going to impress customers as much as an address like your.name@youcompany.com.au
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