Is just 140 characters enough to identify a psychopath ? This is the question launched by the Online Privacy Foundation, which has launched a social experiment to find a connection between the words the content of the tweets posted by Internet users and psychopathy . To carry it out, they have teamed up with Kaggle, an original company specialized in data mining that works under the motto “we turn data science into sport”.
The experiment is called Twitter Big 5 , and it applies to the microblogging platform the previous work of Professor Jefferey Hancock of Cornell University on the relationship between psychopathy and the words we use. The experiment will be carried out in the form of an online competition in which scientists who are experts in data management have been invited to develop the best possible algorithm to identify a psychopathic tweeter . To do this, they have collected three million tweets and the personality profiles of 3,000 subjects, from which they have extracted 337 variables, including the frequency with which they write on the microblogging platform, the number of retweets, as well as traits of the personality. Likewise, among the data that the experts will work with in this original challenge are the answers to forty simple questions.
Chris Sumner of the Online Privacy Foundation hopes that Twitter Big 5 will provide an accurate method to identify the personality traits that make up the so-called “dark triad”: psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism .
