Behavioral Consistency in the Digital Age. (March 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Shaw, Heather; Taylor, Paul J.; Ellis, David A.; Conchie, Stacey M.
• Is Part Of: Psychological science. Volume 33:Number 3(2022)
• Page Start: 364
• Page End: 370
• Publication Date: 2022-03
• Subjects: behavioral consistency -- personality -- digital footprint -- intraindividual -- open data -- preregistered; Psychology -- Periodicals; 150.5
• DOI: 10.1177/09567976211040491
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0956-7976

Abstract

Efforts to infer personality from digital footprints have focused on behavioral stability at the trait level without considering situational dependency. We repeated a classic study of intraindividual consistency with secondary data (five data sets) containing 28, 692 days of smartphone usage from 780 people. Using per-app measures of pickup frequency and usage duration, we found that profiles of daily smartphone usage were significantly more consistent when taken from the same user than from different users ( d > 1.46). Random-forest models trained on 6 days of behavior identified each of the 780 users in test data with 35.8% accuracy for pickup frequency and 38.5% accuracy for duration frequency. This increased to 73.5% and 75.3%, respectively, when success was taken as the user appearing in the top 10 predictions (i.e., top 1%). Thus, situation-dependent stability in behavior is present in our digital lives, and its uniqueness provides both opportunities and risks to privacy.