Perception of e-mail personality at zero-acquaintance: Extraversion takes care of itself; Neuroticism is a worry

We investigate the impact of computer-mediated interaction on person perception. In particular, we study how traits important for socialisation and collaboration—Extraversion and Neuroticism—can be detected from the text of an e-mail communication. We have previously shown how Extraversion influences people’s language production in electronic communication, in broadly intuitive ways. Here, we briefly outline the ways in which Neuroticism is expressed more through the high-level properties of a text. By their nature, these properties are less accessible to intuition. In subjective ratings of the texts for personality, we demonstrate that author Extraversion can be accurately perceived, given the limited cues, and that judges also exhibit relatively high agreement with each other for this trait. Neuroticism, however, appears more difficult. This result is consistent with previous findings, but suggests that e-mail exacerbates this discrepancy.