Can spending habits uncover aspects of your personality?
| Jul 19, 2019, 11:28 IST
You might not admit it, but deep down you do love to go shopping. It might not be that 'sale is here let's go berserk like I'm a girl in my 20s' shopping, but you have your own interests and you do love to buy certain things, don't you? While you may not think that there's more to this, turns out, your shopping and spending habits might just be able to reveal certain aspects of your personality.
Research conducted on data from over 2000 individuals shows that spending habits can help determine certain personality traits such as how much money a person likes to spend on certain things or how much self-control people have over themselves. “Now that most people spend their money electronically - with billions of payment cards in circulation worldwide - we can study these spending patterns at scale like never before. Our findings demonstrate for the first time that it is possible to predict people’s personality from their spending,” said Joe Gladstone, who co-led the research.
People normally spend on basic requirements like food and bills but then are there also multiple other things that people spend on purely out of desire. The researchers wanted to figure out whether this spending habit of people might correlate to how different people are from each other. “We expected that these rich patterns of differences in peoples spending could allow us to infer what kind of person they were,” said Sandra Matz, another researcher of the project.
For the study, researchers tried to centre on the 'Big Five' traits of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The spending data of these participants was gathered and surveyed. It was found that people spent more on things that they liked. So, if someone was more open to different experiences, they spent more on booking flights, if someone was extraverted they spent on restaurants and outings, someone who agreed to things easily spent more on donations and so on and so forth.
The researchers even found that those who reported greater self-control spent a lot less on bank charges whereas those who reported greater neuroticism spent less on mortgage payments. The researchers also raised concern over how these things could be related to the banking and financial industry and could also pose ethical challenges. People could identify these personality traits and then send targeted emails to customers to lure them. Stay tuned for more updates.
Research conducted on data from over 2000 individuals shows that spending habits can help determine certain personality traits such as how much money a person likes to spend on certain things or how much self-control people have over themselves. “Now that most people spend their money electronically - with billions of payment cards in circulation worldwide - we can study these spending patterns at scale like never before. Our findings demonstrate for the first time that it is possible to predict people’s personality from their spending,” said Joe Gladstone, who co-led the research.
People normally spend on basic requirements like food and bills but then are there also multiple other things that people spend on purely out of desire. The researchers wanted to figure out whether this spending habit of people might correlate to how different people are from each other. “We expected that these rich patterns of differences in peoples spending could allow us to infer what kind of person they were,” said Sandra Matz, another researcher of the project.
For the study, researchers tried to centre on the 'Big Five' traits of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The spending data of these participants was gathered and surveyed. It was found that people spent more on things that they liked. So, if someone was more open to different experiences, they spent more on booking flights, if someone was extraverted they spent on restaurants and outings, someone who agreed to things easily spent more on donations and so on and so forth.
The researchers even found that those who reported greater self-control spent a lot less on bank charges whereas those who reported greater neuroticism spent less on mortgage payments. The researchers also raised concern over how these things could be related to the banking and financial industry and could also pose ethical challenges. People could identify these personality traits and then send targeted emails to customers to lure them. Stay tuned for more updates.