What does your email address say about you?
Three researchers from the University of Leipzig published an interesting paper titled ‘How extroverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de? Inferring personality from e-mail addresses’ (PDF). From the abstract: ‘Email addresses represent the thinnest slice of information that people receive from one another. Using 599 e-mail addresses of young adults, their self-reported personality scores and the personality judgments of 100 independent observers, it was shown that personality impressions based solely on e-mail addresses were consensually shared by observers. Moreover, these impressions contained some degree of validity. This was true for neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and narcissism but not for extroversion.
My email work email is ‘bsenter@domain.com’ while my personal emails are ‘vlvtlvs@domain.com’ (got to love some velvet Elvis abstract art) and ‘ilovevanillaice@domain.com’ (everybody danced to ‘Ice Ice Baby’ at some point). What does that say about me? Let’s not go there.