Behaviors Of Weibo Use Predict The Big-Five Personality Traits

From the outset of internet, researchers have began to try to understand the differences of online and offline behaviors of internet users. The key to understand these differences is the personality of internet users, because internet is motivated by the interact of people who use it. Especially after the emergence of social network site, people have interacted with each other frequently on it, and left a large amount of behavioral data on it. To make sense of the behaviors of users of social network site by their personalities is easier, but to predict their personalities by the behaviors of them is a chanllenge for researchers. Consequently, more and more reseachers have began to focus on this issue.Microblog is a new social network site that recently arisen, users can update their life activities, provide real-time information, follow the profile of whom interest them and interact with them, etc. For the microblog appeared later than other traditional social network sites, such as blog, Facebook etc., it has unique features compared with them. For these reasons, the relationship between microblog and personality has aroused little concern of researchers. Big five personality model is a comprehensive and systematic personality trait theory. Previous studies show that Big five model related to the behaviors of social network sites usage strongly, therefore the present study employs Big five model as the personality indicators to examine the behavioural differences between different personality traits on microblog. As a result, each of users personality traits can be predicted precisely by observing their behaviors on microblog.According to the unique features of microblog, the present study proposes different hypotheses suitable for it based on the studies of Ross et al. and Amichai-Hamburger and Vinitzky. Results show that corresponding behavioral data can be found related to each dimension of big five model. Extraversion is related to the number of the profiles the user follows, the number of the profiles of offline acquaintance the user follows, and the number of reposts. Neuroticism is related to the number of posts, reposts, posts that contain pictures, and "personal statement". Agreeableness is related to icons that used in the users’profiles. Openness is related to the number of posts and the original posts, the level of microblog, active days, the number of followers and the pictures in the profile. Conscientiousness is related to the number of profiles of offline acquaintance the user follows and the number of items of education and work information in the user’s profile.Finally, the limitation of the present study is reflected on from participants sampling and use condition of microblog of participants, and the future work of this area is pointed out.