Birds do it, ants do it, even honeybees do it: they flock, herd, and swarm en masse. How does this apply to the way humans gather together in crowds to behave as a multitude? Could flocking behavior play a role in online interactions? Li and Chignell, deliberating on how principles of social psychology are displayed in online situations, investigate how these interactions may be characterized. Rather than approach the entire area of online interactions, the authors’ study is limited to personality. They explore whether readers can sense the personality of a blog author, in order for them to be induced to “flock” to a blog that corresponds to certain personality choices.

Do birds of an e-feather e-flock together? In order to understand how personality affects flocking to blogs, the authors consider whether personality can be conveyed in a blog and whether blog personality can trigger responses in the readers, including how the blog genre influences this response. The authors reviewed earlier work on personality, as portrayed online, and found that personality and attraction have been established in a number of studies. For example, “people strongly prefer to interact with and become friends with strangers who have similar personalities.” The authors’ two studies support their hypothesis regarding blogs. The studies’ two blog formats--personal diary and commentary--were evaluated on linguistic formats and personality judgments.

As the authors present in the paper, personality was evaluated on a five-factor model:

• Extraversion (talkative, assertive) versus introversion (quiet, reserved);
• Emotional stability (calm, stable) versus neuroticism (anxious, moody);
• Agreeableness (friendly, sympathetic) versus disagreeableness (unfriendly, cold);
• Conscientiousness (organized, self-disciplined) versus unconscientiousness (disorganized, careless); and
• Open to experience (imaginative, complex) versus closed to experience (conventional, uncreative).

The evaluation considered how personality was expressed in written text, along with the viewers’ perceptions of an author’s personality. Blogs were written specifically for the study, in order to maintain a controlled environment.

Study 1 had participants write blog entries for both commentary and personal journal blog genres. Eight participants from the University of Toronto, all fluent in English, were recruited; four of the eight had previous blogging experience, and gender was not a consideration. They all took the five-factor personality evaluation study prior to the experiments. Study 2 consisted of 12 participants with varied exposure to blogging. They read Study 1’s blogs and then evaluated them by how well they were liked and by rating each blog using the same personality scale all of the participants had used earlier.

The results indicate that participants agree as a group about the personalities of unknown blog authors. Interestingly, their assessments “did not always match [with the] author’s self-reported personality.” There were also differences between journal and commentary genres, suggesting that how a reader judges the personality of a blog author may be affected by the different choices of topics and wording for each. It is also suggested that less-educated readers may not be as astute in perceiving personality distinctions as the highly educated study participants. Differences between journal and commentary blogs, with each genre exhibiting different personality and judgment characteristics, require further exploration.

Despite the limited participant sample, Li and Chignell’s research demonstrates that “personality can be expressed and perceived,” even with a relatively short blog sample, and that personality may have a role in affecting the way people respond to blogs. As they conclude:

Understanding these issues will provide insight into how people behave and interact in online social networks and allow for the design of messages and features that account for the personalities of users in those virtual communities.

Our human propensity to flock, copy, and herd, just like birds, bees, and ants, shows up in some of the criteria developed in this study. For readers who wish to understand the psychology of blogging and how blogs can be used to inform, persuade, market, lobby, politicize, and confide in others, framed by the personality bias, this limited study is a must-read. Sarah Palin’s Twitter feed exemplifies how this type of blogging influences events and news, without resorting to actual person-to-person interviews and large information Web sites.