A new agenda for personality psychology in the digital age?

•The present paper hypothesizes how research in personality psychology will change with the recent emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). In a society, where humankind is digitally interconnected and all machines in one's own household or at work are linked to the Internet, manifold data fr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Personality and individual differences 2019-09, Vol.147, p.128-134
Main Authors: Montag, Christian, Elhai, Jon D.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Big data
Digital phenotyping
Falls
Humans
Internet
Internet of Things
Neuroscience
Personality neuroscience
Personality psychology
Psychoinformatics
Psychologists
Psychology
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Summary:•The present paper hypothesizes how research in personality psychology will change with the recent emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). In a society, where humankind is digitally interconnected and all machines in one's own household or at work are linked to the Internet, manifold data from human-machine-interaction can be used to predict psychological traits and states.•In the present theoretical paper, we first explain why it is (still) important to study personality and we also give a short (historical) overview on different theoretical and methodological approaches to study personality. Second, this work will focus on a recent addition to the toolbox of a personality psychologist, namely digital phenotyping via methods from Psychoinformatics, which falls into the realm of the aforementioned IoT. Aside from an introduction into these new concepts, we discuss strengths and limitations of this new data layer of interest for personality psychologists.•Finally, it is argued that in these modern times personality psychology research is conducted in many scattered scientific areas with researchers sometimes unaware of each other. Therefore, tremendous collaborative efforts need to be invested in order to reunify the psychological/neuroscientific oriented personality science to ultimately understand why we are the creatures we are.
ISSN:0191-8869
1873-3549
DOI:10.1016/j.paid.2019.03.045