What Your Email Address Says About You  
by Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. - 1 Comment, Last updated 08/13/2008

Researchers in Germany have come out with a very interesting study about what your choice of email address says about you. We’ve already talked about what the domain of your email address says about you (such as do you send from aol.com, hotmail.com, yourowndomain.com, etc.), but this new study looks specifically at the username side of your email address. Such as, are you “onehottie@”, “buttoneddown@”, or “uptight@”? In fact, the title subject is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de (that is the German arm of Hotmail).

According to the researchers, Mitja Back, Stefan Schmukle, and Boris Egloff, all of the Department of Psychology at the University of Leipzig, five of six standard personality traits are often inferred - and with some degree of accuracy - from one’s choice of email address.

The traits which were measured for in the study were: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeablenes, conscientiousness, and narcissism. The measurements were tracked by having 599 people provide their email addresses, and complete a brief personality questionnaire.

Then the study participants were asked to rate each email address based on those six personality traits.

And it turns out that there was a very high degree of accuracy in how the raters inferred personality traits from the email addresses, and the actual personality traits of the owners of those email addresses.

In fact, of those six personality traits, only extraversion was not accurately inferred from the email addresses!

Now, it’s important to remember that the email address owners were self-describing themselves as having these traits (or not). So a positive correlation in what the perceiver inferred from the email address and what the email address owner said about themself means, primarily, that the person selecting the email address for themselves, and the person seeing the email address, agree about the email address owner’s personality.

In other words, the person who selects “PeaceDove at example dot com” may report themselves as having conscientious tendancies, and the person who receives email from “PeaceDove at example dot com” will tend to agree.

While this may at first seem a basis for dismissing the findings (well of course what you put out there is how people will perceive you), it actually turns out to be a very important piece of information for you!

Because what it says is that the email address you select - what you put out on the Internet about yourself - is how people will see you.

Put another way - be careful how you advertise yourself - even down to the email address you select.