Rating E-mail Personality at Zero Acquaintance*

Electronic media are pervasive in daily communication. But how well can personality traits be perceived through a short e-mail message? Working independently and under experimenter supervision, thirty judges each rated 18 short e-mail texts. These texts were written under experimental conditions by authors of known personality, who briefly described their recent activities, and were collected as part of a previous study, which demonstrated linguistic projection of personality. As predicted by the literature, we find that even with minimal textual cues there is relatively high agreement for ratings of author Extraversion, and lesser agreement for Psychoticism. However, agreement for Neuroticism ratings, especially between target and judges, appears to be further reduced by the environment. We suggest that these judgements may be mediated by stereotypes. In addition to reducing the cues available for personality rating, the study extends previous work in two main ways: it uses the three-factor model of personality, and thus measures Psychoticism; and it adopts exemplar-based and subjective measures of personality perception.