The Psych Student

Fig. 8B from patent application number: 11/716,378, "Selective user monitoring in an online environment" by Gary Hayato Ogasawara et al, filed in 2007.

Previously on this blog I’ve talked about using inventories to measure feelings, burnout, etc. These are assessment tools to gauge unhappiness among a wide swathe of individuals. Inventories are good ways to measure something as opposed to hiring the hundreads of trained psychologists and sending them out en masse to question every single person you want and individually quantify their wellbeing. But measuring tools still have trained practitioners at the controls. What happens when we start to outsource this to technology? There are all sorts of psychological profiles people can get of themselves by taking quizzes online. These are hardly individualized things. The answers are pre-written and the possible responses are weighted. But a new flock of these computer generated shrinks are emerging. These actually read your accumulated online postings, emails, etc, and then make their judgments. Some are pretty simple. A while back I tried out an online toy called TweetPsych which, as you might guess, reads your your last 1,000 Twitter posts (a number I’m still no where close to yet) and tells you about yourself based on what it finds.

TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis algorithms (RID and LIWC) to build a psychological profile of people based on the content of their tweets. When you enter a URL in the form below TweetPsych will create a similar profile of the content of that page and then show you a list of the 50 Twitter users who’s profiles indicate they’re mostly likely psychologically aligned with the site you provided. This is not based on the topical content of their tweets or your site, but rather it is based on mental characteristics. As we have more people profiled we’ll be able to provide more accurate matches.

According to TweetPsych, I often use twitter to tweet about my various senses, discuss positive sensations and feelings, talk about various cognitive processes like learning, thinking, knowing, etc., talk a lot about jobs and  work, and often tweet about the future. My Social behavior rating is much higher than my moral imerative rating. Some people who think like me include drapetomaniac, werner, Phil_Adams, nickflare and renn. TweetPsych doesn’t include a narcissism rating, which I guess must just be a given considering you have to be using Twitter in the first place and thus think you can distill your Wisdom Tooth like insights into 140 characters to the eternal delight of your impending masses of followers. Still, the concept of analizing people based on their public content has potential, and at least can lead more insight into a person’s online persona. The PsychTweet page also has a site profiler. Again, not too much insight. The blog makes references various social behaviors, talks about school and learning and myself. Hardly Freud, but it’s interesting that psychological analysis is entering the automated stage, and for far more important issues than some web page telling me how full of myself I am, such as whether a person is on the verge of killing themselves. The mobiletype program that uses mobile phones to track the mental health of 14 to 24-year-olds with depression.

One article on this summarizes: “Participants answered the mobiletype program questions on a programmed mobile asking them about how they were feeling. The responses were sent to a website interface which evaluated and assessed each patient’s mental well-being and produced an individual report for the doctor to help them determine what treatment was required.” Elsewhere, software is quietly sifting though employee emails at a rather large internet company to determine who’s suffering from a lack of job satisfaction.

The same Google algorithm that helps you find everything from which restaurants in your neighborhood have decent reviews to how to repair a leaky pipe is also sifting through the personnel files of Google’s 20,000+ employees to determine who among the staff are feeling unhappy, disgruntled, unappreciated or under-utilized. According to other reports, this sort of analytical use doesn’t stop internally. The company that has charged itself with the lofty task of organizing the world’s everything is also developing ways to enable its software to psychoanalyze millions of web users as well.

The Guardian a couple of years ago reported that Google announced plans to record psychological profiles of millions of web users by monitoring their use of online games. Now, I don’t actually suffer from Googlephobia, that twitch some people seem to have where they think the company somehow is taking over their lives. Google is still basically recording and organizing information sitting in the public realm or somehow voluntarily supplied to it. One thing that is always astounding and confounding about the online persona is that its a hybrid of public and private self perception. We can sit alone on our computers doing things we’d never discuss in polite company, all the while participating in activities on public servers in which anyone can see what we’re up to.

“The plans are detailed in a patent filed by Google in Europe and the US last month. It says people playing online role playing games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft would be particularly good to target, because they interact with other players and make decisions that probably reflect their behaviour in real life.” — Guardian

"What the Little Bird Told Me About You: Three Twitter Apps for Psych Analysis" by Jolie O'Dell

It certainly reflects something about them, but I don’t know if that is actually their behaviour in real life, whatever that is. The story quotes Sue Charman of online campaign Open Rights Group: “I can understand why they are interested in this, but I would be deeply disturbed by a company holding a psychological profile.” Several companies already do now, though. And we willingly play along all in the name of a better user experience.

he social network Facebook is contantly recording the groups you join, the ads you click on, the applications you install on your profile, the amount of time you spend on their site and more. You can even givve thumbs up or thumbs down to the ads it shows you in the sidebar. I click on these all the itme, myself, approving ads about books, music, and other things I like and voting down banking, gambling and other ads I find annoying.

Is this helping advertisers see what I respond to and thus target me better? Sure. But it’s also showing me what I want to see online and not showing me what I don’t want to see, and this is another aspect of the online persona and these forms of automated psychological profiling. This type of profiling isn’t exactly a tool for creating a better balanced person. It’s about reinforcing your tendencies — whatever they may be and however potentially unhealthy they may be — and even encouraging them.