Analysis of networking characteristics of different personality types

1 Introduction For many years it has been assumed by psychologists that it is possible to classify an individual according to his personallity. The pioneer in this field was the renowned psychologist C.G.Jung [6] and his contributions led to the new field of study of the so called jungian typology. Regardless of the benefits in prevention and identification of mental illness, typology is used by human resources departments as a guidance for constructing groups with compatible personalities or for personel selecton [5] and job orientation companies to give personallity compatible recommendations. However there is little definitive quantitative evidence of the existence of psychological types or the validity of the testing procedure. It is the purpose of this study to try and identify if there is any correlation between the social networking behavior of individuals and their personality type, and if the interpretation of their personality type results in intuitively valid observed social networking behavior. The tool used for the classification of the survey participants was a test for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) [9] and a portion of their facebook social network was acquired through the face-book API as it is visible from the authors perspective (connection of common friends). Jungian typology assumes that personality is shaped with an individual's preference to gather information directly with the sensory organs or through reflection and imagination (cognitive functions of sensation and intuition respectively) and the way a person takes decisions (psychic functions of feeling and thinking). Moreover, he classified these functions as rational or Judging(thinking and feeling) or irrational or Perceiving (sensing and intuition). Jung theorized that all people use all four functions but the effect of personality emerges due to the fact that different people seem to prefer to use one of them more often (the dominant or primary function). The type description is complemented with the so-called attitudes. Jung's definition of an attitude is " readiness of the psyche to react in a certain way " [6]. Myer and Briggs tried to capture the attitude's effect by refering to how a person is getting motivation and " energy ". The two main attitudes recognised in this 2 setting is Introversion, who describes the attitude of people with the tendency to feel more comfortable and gain their " energy " when alone and Extraversion which describes the attitude of people who feel more comfortable and " recharge " in social situations. …