You Are Known by How You Vlog: Personality Impressions and Nonverbal Behavior in YouTube

An increasing interest in understanding human perception in social media has led to the study of the processes of personality self-presentation and impression formation based on user profiles and text blogs. However, despite the popularity of online video, we do not know of any attempt to study personality impressions that go beyond the use of text and still photos. In this paper, we analyze one facet of YouTube as a repository of brief behavioral slices in the form of personal conversational vlogs, which are a unique medium for selfpresentation and interpersonal perception. We investigate the use of nonverbal cues as descriptors of vloggers’ behavior and find significant associations between automatically extracted nonverbal cues for several personality judgments. As one notable result, audio and visual cues together can be used to predict 34% of the variance of the Extraversion trait of the Big Five model. In addition, we explore the associations between vloggers’ personality scores and the level of social attention that their videos received in YouTube. Our study is conducted on a dataset of 442 YouTube vlogs and 2,210 annotations collected using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.