It's a good thing my job is conducive to feeding my deep-seated need to take as many personality tests as possible and publicly share my results, because here we are with another one: TheIBM Watson Personality Insights serviceclaims it can tell you exactly who you are based on a writing sample of at least 100 wordswhich naturally means I had to give it a test run.Because, I meanreally, Watson' You're pretty amazing and allbut do youreallythink you can explain the inner workings of my psyche to me' We don't evenknoweach other, so you'll excuse me if I think that's a bit presumptuous of you.According to IBM itself, theIBM Watson Personality Insightsservice uses linguistic analytics to infer cognitive and social characteristics, including Big Five, Values, and Needs, from communications that the user makes available, such as email, text messages, tweets, forum posts and more.Why would we need a computer to analyze our writing' Seemingly in order to help us understand, connect to, and communicate with other people on a more personalized level.We've gone over theBig Five personality modelbefore (as well as why it might be flawed), but in case you need a refresher, it consists of the following traits: Extroversion, Openness, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism (or, as I like to call it, theWhy I See Faces In Inanimate Objectspersonality trait).So basically, for any chunk of text of 100 words or more, the IBM Watson Personality Insights service will take your writing, run some analyses on it, and allegedly be able to tell you all about your personality type.I'll be honest: I was a little skeptical going into this whole thing. IBM has certainly been doing some interesting things lately, but as we saw in the case of theIBM Tone Analyzer, I'm still not convinced that computers really know what to do with writing penned by actual humans.Besides, we don't all show the same side of ourselves all the time, either live and in-person or when we express ourselves in writing. We're multi-faceted beings, so I was fairly certain that the output would likely change based on the style of writing used as the sample.To test it out, I ran two of my own pieces of writing through the program, one about something kind of serious, and the other about one of the goofiest topics I've ever covered. Here's what it said about me when I used an excerpt from this post about the bad a--, feminist, body positive wonderfulness that isShameless Photography's modern pin-up work:And here's what it had to say about me:My personality traits visualization looks like this:To be fair, it got a lot of things right; I do generally strive towards well-being, and I think it's important to take care of others around me. I'm also not huge on tradition, mostly because I don't consider "because that's the way it's always been to be a valid reason not to change if change is necessary.However, I'm not at all intermittent (anyone who knows me knows how single-minded I can get while working on difficult tasks for a long period of time), and hilariously, I scoredveryhighly on extroversion. Spoiler: I amvery much an introvert.Then, for contrast, I used a few paragraphs from this post about asexy chicken nugget(Ididsay it was goofy):Here's my second personality description:And my second visualization:It's worth noting that there are some similarities between this one and the previous one; apparently in this clip, I still don't really do tradition very well, for example. I did, however, scoremuchlower on extroversiononly 20 percent, as opposed to 81. That's probably more in line with how I actually am, but the difference between the two figures is staggering.So: Does the IBM Watson Personalight Insights service work' Sort of, but only to an extent. In order to get a really accurate reading on your personality, you'd have to plug a huge variety of different pieces of writing into itone for each of the many faces we all haveand take a look at them all togetherwhich, to be honest, seems like a pretty tall order to me. Still, thoughmaybe it's useful in another way. It's proof of the power of writing, and of the fact that we can express so much by choosing our words carefully.Remember what I was saying the other day aboutwhat our word choices reveal about us' Consider this whole thing another piece of the puzzle. Words matterso pick them wisely.SEE ALSO:IBM has created the most powerful computer chip yetJoin the conversation about this storyNOW WATCH: Why we have to give our business partners the power to destroy us
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