People can reliably detect aspects of someone’s personality based solely on the stickers on their laptops, a recent study has found.
It’s clear that students are using laptops as social advertisements, said Gregory Webster, a social psychologist at the University of Florida. The concept led him and then-graduate students Jessica T. Campbell and Imani N. Turner to wonder if the stickers could provide some insight into students’ personalities.
“I think people are thinking about the stickers they choose to display,” Webster said. “It’s just another aspect that people use to market themselves to others.”
To determine if they were right about the stickers, the researchers took roughly 140 pictures of UF students’ laptops (with their permission). The images included computers with three or more stickers. They had laptop owners complete a personality questionnaire about their own personality traits, including extraversion and openness to new experiences. They then had eight raters look at the pictures and guess personality traits based on the photos alone.
“What we found was — above the level of chance — that people could reliably detect another person’s extroversion and, also, their openness to new experiences just from looking at stickers on a laptop,” Webster said.
The findings fit into the broader field of personality perception research, which focuses on how people judge a person’s personality based on small pieces of information and how first impressions are formed. They are also consistent with similar studies that have found that people can pick out accurate personality cues from dorm room or office decorations.
However, this latest study can only generalize to college-age students, as they are the most likely to have stickers on their laptops. The study did not investigate what laptop stickers say about people in older age groups. In addition, the study cannot tell us what it says about those who choose not to display anything.
“We don’t know what people without stickers are trying to project or not project,” Webster said. “It’s possible they want to remain a mystery.”
The study, “Open Laptops, Open Minds: Consensus and Accuracy in Big Five Personality Perceptions Based on Laptop Stickers,” was recently published in the Journal of Research in Personality. You can find a free preprint here.
March 2, 2022