Tracing Personality Structure in Narratives: A Computational Bottom–Up Approach to Unpack Writers, Characters, and Personality in Historical Context

Abstract

We present a new method for personality assessment at a distance to uncover personality structure in historical texts. We focus on how two 19th century authors understood and described human personality; we apply a new bottom‐up computational approach to extract personality dimensions used by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to describe fictional characters in 21 novels. We matched personality descriptions using three person‐description dictionaries marker scales as reference points for interpretation. Factor structures did not show strong convergence with the contemporary Big Five model. Jane Austen described characters in terms of social and emotional richness with greater nuances but using a less extensive vocabulary. Charles Dickens, in contrast, used a rich and diverse personality vocabulary, but those descriptions centred around more restricted dimensions of power and dominance. Although we could identify conceptually similar factors across the two authors, analyses of the overlapping vocabulary between the two authors suggested only moderate convergence. We discuss the utility and potential of automated text analysis and the lexical hypothesis to (i) provide insights into implicit personality models in historical texts and (ii) bridge the divide between idiographic and nomothetic perspectives. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology

A Model for Brand Personality Word Embedding: Identifying UNESCO World Heritage Personality Categories

“…The traditional approach of consulting psychologists or language experts was used for item validation (Geuens et al, 2009). The adjectives list was matched to personality items in psychology and BP studies used for this purpose, following the method employed by Fischer et al (2020). This study added WHS-relevant personality lists from BP studies.…”

“…Allport and Odbert (1936) scanned thousands of adjectives to select the best stable personality items to describe a person, resulting in a list of 17,954 personality descriptors (hereafter, the Allport List). The Allport List has been described as the longest established and most comprehensive personality list in English (Azoulay & Kapferer, 2003; Fischer et al, 2020). Moreover, 2,800 items were taken from Norman (1967), who refined and structured items on the Allport List.…”

“…Moreover, 2,800 items were taken from Norman (1967), who refined and structured items on the Allport List. Furthermore, Goldberg (1982) provided 1,710 personality items, which Fischer et al (2020) deemed to be more appropriate for their study, as they did not include appearance or physical characteristics. Later, Saucier (1997) provided a 500-item list that captures the most commonly used personality items, including appearance and physical items.…”

“…Although text mining and BP analysis using online textual data have proven useful in DP analysis (Pitt et al, 2007; Rojas-Méndez & Hine, 2017), they require further work. Text mining adopts two main approaches: the first uses content analysis in BP studies, the aim being to encode a specific corpus based on pre-defined personality categories; the second analyzes themes in the text, such as topic modeling, but without any previously defined categories (Fischer et al, 2020). This entails the use of computational approaches and algorithms to measure the between-words or the similarity of documents (Devlin et al, 2019); words are analyzed based on their appropriateness for describing human-like brands (Fischer et al, 2020).…”

Alternative four-factor structure of the Mini-IPIP in Thailand

“…It might be possible to collect observer ratings (Gurven et al, 2013), although these could be challenged on the basis of observer biases. Spontaneous self-descriptions of participants or solicited reports on their own behavior could be used for lexical analyses and content analysis (Boer & Fischer, 2012;Boyd & Pennebaker, 2017;Fischer et al, 2020). In summary, an analysis of a brief personality measure suggested a partially replicable alternative structure.…”