Audio Snippets of Personality
Conversations and ambient noise recorded with a smartphone provide more accurate information about a person's character than self-assessments using a questionnaire.
With almost every application you have to assess yourself at some point. Personality psychologists also use this method to compare and distinguish people from one another. But self-assessments are not necessarily correct, but are often unconsciously distorted or intentionally embellished. In addition, neither applications nor personality questionnaires provide a complete picture of a person. The former focus primarily on career milestones; The latter capture general character traits and ignore how someone actually behaves in everyday life.
In the early 2000s, one of us (Mehl), together with his colleagues, started not only interviewing study participants, but also listening to them, in order to survey people's personalities more precisely and more closely to everyday life. They developed the so-called Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR). In the beginning it was a dictaphone modified by hand, today it is a smartphone app. This accompanies the test subjects as a silent listener attached to their belts through everyday life and records all conversations and ambient noises for 30 seconds about five times an hour. Trained student assistants then write down the recordings and note everything that the acoustic logbook reveals: What situations does the person seek out? How is she acting? It's amazing what the collection of audio snippets reveals: when and how often someone laughs, cries or swears, whether someone is having deep conversations with friends in a café, chatting about the weather with a stranger on the bus and much more…
