Re:Summary incorrect. --Caveats (Score 1)

Finally got the paper to download. It's interesting, and was obviously a very serious study that required a lot of work. Good on them for that.

But the mean interrater correlation is 0.41, meaning that it only explains about 17% of the shared variance. This looks to me like another psych study that mistakes statistical significance for practical significance.

To put it another way, there was really only an average of 17% agreement between rater and writer in their assessments. What this study finds is that judging people based on their profile, while not completely useless, isn't very useful.

To put it another way... It's basically just as you would assume: You can get an idea of what someone is like based on what they present about themselves, but the picture is going to be far from complete.

So, let's rename this Slashdot article correctly: "Your Online Profile Actually Tells a Little About You!"

True that the interrater correlation was .41. True that the r-squared is 17%. But interpreting this...turns out that peers who have known each other for a long time and even married couples only correlate around .50 or 25%. So although your online profile doesn't tell everything about you, it tells more than what a stranger in a grocery store would see, and nearly as much as your friends see.

Check out the table down on the page here to see how online profiles compare to other sources of info in conveying your personality.