Personality Profiling, Personality Testing
How are Psychological profiles also known as Personality profiles deduced?
What are Psych Scores?
What is the definition of Psychological, Personality or behavior Profiling?
What can affect the relevancy of Profiles?
Psychological Profiles also known as Personality profiles can be deduced from any public information such as demographic data, internet search, media, opinions, blogs, social networking services, wikis, newsgroups, words, voice, pictures, videos, biological features, physical features, body language, forums, message boards including other methods such as statistical comparisons with peer groups. Factors such as how people create various usernames, emails, IM Names, the way people write, the style and method of writing, the words they use, their pictures, videos, voice, biological features, physical features, body language, their comments etc also have relevance. This can also help understand and estimate behavior in different social situations. Abikas' proprietary system deduces Personality profiles from your input and anypublic information on the internet and media. There is no necessity to take written or verbal tests and no necessity of lengthy question and answers as in the Myers-Briggs tests. The more input you provide and the more information available about you the more comprehensive the personality profile. Personality profiling can help estimate behaviors, habits, personal traits and special talents.
What is the definition of Psychological, Personality or Behavior Profiling?
Personality profiling also sometimes referred to as Psychological or Behavior profiling is defined as deducing patterns from available information that are then compared to the patterns and behavior of others in similar circumstances who have been studied in the past. All deduced results are protected by copyright.
In the information age there is a glut of information and everyone can see and has access to a lot of information, however what is more important is noticing what one sees and reasoning from what one sees.
What can affect the relevancy of Profiles?
Relevancy of a personality profile also known as psychological profile is proportional to the accuracy of the background information you provide. The fundamental axiom of profiling is comparing a subject's behavior with the behavior of others in similar circumstances who have been studied in the past. The key to good profiling is in deducing what background effects what trait and identifying patterns. Often times what most people commonly consider to be irrelevant pieces of information could be very relevant for any trait. It is also possible that people have a certain trait but do not act upon it due to external circumstances that make it very difficult for them to act in accordance with their natural trait. In these situations when the external circumstances are removed people revert to their natural trait. Another behavioral factor that may influence relevancy is called Recency bias. This is human behavior that leads one to place far more weight on what happened recently than what happened years earlier.
There are no traits that are all bad or all good. Good or bad is very relative and defined according to the society one lives in or the circumstances. Certain traits in certain situations would be extremely desirable and those same traits in a different situation could be extremely undesirable. And even within the same society, concepts of good or bad may change over time, particularly if influenced by evolving societal values or expectations.
Often times people's own perceptions about their behavior, thoughts or functioning are biased by their own ideal image and experiences. Objective observers, on the other hand can provide a more unbiased assessment of these behaviors. To you your own traits, may seem perfectly normal, typical or not typical. Yet to those around you, they may seem typical, odd or abnormal. Normal is often defined by what's statistically average. Most people fall in the middle ground, the average, while others fall to one extreme or the other. And what is normal also changes over time particularly when influenced by evolving societal values or expectations.
Excerpts and comments on Research in this field:
Standardizing traits is an emerging field. Just as credit scores are used by creditors to determine how good a credit risk you are. Psych scores confer predictive value for estimating how likely it is that someone behaves in a certain way. People having similar scores for certain aspects of their behavior tend to act similarly for those particular behaviors. You can compare psychological profiles of two people and find out how similarly they would tend to be like each other for particular behaviors.
Information such as the types of music, magazines, books, movies clothes a person likes, membership preferences, convey a lot about that persons behavior. Research, published in the June issue of the Journal of Psychological and Social Psychology, indicates that your musical tastes may indeed reflect more about your psychology than previously realized. This research shows that music preferences can offer some important insights into a person's psychology, and might even serve as a tool when trying to learn more about someone," says study author Sam Gosling, a professor at the University of Texas. Many studies show that preferences in music, movies, TV shows, books, plays, even favorite movie or pop stars says a little something about who a person is, and that information about someone can help discover a person's tastes and likes and dislikes. A study by Alan Hirsch M.D., director of Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation states that even favorite pizza toppings of a person show a correlation to their behavior. Shopping habits of a person reveal a lot about the individuals psychology. An individuals shopping habits can provide insights on traits like, if the person drinks, smokes, has hemorrhoids or practices safe sex. Most major retailers and web portals collect detailed data from users. This includes geographic area, ISP information, and what was queried. Nearly all major retailers also track and archive shopping habits of their customers. Many retailers use services of The Return Exchange, to track customers' return habits. The Return Exchange maintains a database of shoppers' return habits by combining data from a number of retailers into one database.
Research published by David Dunning of Cornell University, Chip Heath of Stanford University and Jerry M. Suls of the University of Iowa reveal that other people who are not involved in any type of relationship with an individual are better judges of an individual's relationships and abilities. These researchers have been studying a large body of research into self-evaluation, and much of it reveals that most of us have flawed views about us and our relationships. That can have very serious consequences, because if we don't know about our relationships and who we are, we could be endangering others as well as ourselves. People deceive themselves because they lack the necessary information to make an accurate assessment; and they often ignore or undervalue the information they do have.
Psychology also has a great influence on the Stock Market. Investors are people and like most people react emotionally to news and other facts. And a person's perception of fundamental and technical factors can be influenced by many things including money. Markets are all about perceptions of the future. If investors expect things to get better, stocks go up and if investors think things will get worse, stocks go down. And these expectations are constantly being adjusted, as investors digest every possible detail -- such as economic news, earnings reports, economic data, political events and news and any other factor that might give them a clue about what the future holds. More important than the details themselves is how investors perceive those details and react to them. Facts do matter, but the only thing that really counts is how investors react to the facts. This perception of the details and facts depends a great deal on the individual psychological profile of investors and the total market is the collective psychological profile of all the investors. Yale professor Robert Schilling who correctly predicted the Stock Market crash in his book "Irrational Exuberance" and who may have lent Alan Greenspan the word Irrational Exuberance quoted to the Financial Times "One of the great innovations of our time is, bringing psychology back into economics." Princeton University Psychology Professor Daniel Kahneman, won a Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002 for his work merging psychology and economics. He is a pioneer in the field of behavioral finance. Research in behavioral finance shows that people are generally emotional, biased, irrational, overly impressed with their acumen and what they believe to be familiar to them. And this behavior practiced in masse tends to create bubbles and seasonal swings.
Donald trump's how-to-get-rich strategies also include comments on the importance of Psychology in making deals. He discusses how knowing the psychology of people involved in his deals has contributed to his success as a dealmaker. According to him, his interest in psychology came late, after dismissing it in college. Now Trump says Jung the renowned Psychologist's work is "important to financial success." Jung has been a big "help in my business as well as in my personal life. He recommends that Reading Jung will give you insights into yourself and the ways in which you and other people operate." And when he says that he's talking to all of us.
The emerging field of Data Mining and Profiling:
Data Mining and profiling is an emerging field that attempts to organize, understand, analyze, reason and use the explosion of information in this information age. The process involves using algorithms and experience to extract patterns or anomalies that are either very complex, difficult or time consuming to identify. The founder of Microsoft's Exploration Group, used complex data mining algorithms to solve a problem that had haunted astronomers for many years. The problem of reviewing, defining and categorizing 2 billion sky objects recorded over a time period of 3 decades. The algorithm extracted the relevant patterns to classify the sky objects as stars or galaxies. The algorithms were able to extract the qualities that defined sky objects as stars or galaxies. This emerging field of data mining and profiling has numerous frontiers where it can be used.
Data mining processes are also used by public health authorities to detect or estimate the outbreak of infectious disease. Available Medical data is sorted through and patterns are extracted which point to any outbreaks of infectious disease before the outbreak becomes uncontrollable. Mayo Clinic uses data mining to scan the notes of physicians to extract patterns that point to evidence about the effectiveness of treatments.
Most banks and credit card companies sort through millions of transactions every day and extract patterns that then help them identify and detect money laundering and fraudulent credit card transactions. In many instances banks are able to minimize their losses by identifying fraud during its initial stages. Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover use data mining methods in the form of their Advanced Authorization system to detect fraud patterns instantaneously and prevent counterfeit transactions at the checkout line. Whenever a debit card, check card or credit card is swiped, the Advanced Authorization system estimates the likelihood that the transaction is fraudulent by comparing each authorization request to data on all transactions in the card network. It is also compared to other patterns of activity of past compromised accounts where personal information had been stolen. It then sends the information to the issuer of the card, which then uses the information to decide whether or not to approve the sale. This Advanced Authorization system identifies fraud sooner, in many instances at the root and does a better job of analyzing risk with greater accuracy and thus cutting losses for the banks, card issuers and the consumer.
Pharmaceutical researchers and companies use the method called Syndromic association which involves pattern analysis, comparisons and matching to discover individuals who could be prone to similar diseases.
Many businesses, especially the big retailers analyze what type of consumer buys their products by extracting patterns from their sales data. These patterns help them identify what other products a consumer will like, what to stock, where to stock and how and where to present it to the consumer.
Government agents use data mining to identify insider trading or linkages between terrorist groups. Intelliseek Inc., and the Factiva information service offers a service called "reputation insight." Intelliseek scans millions of Web logs and e-mail list servers. Factiva scans through news stories, radio transcripts, TV transcripts, the internet and many other types of media. Factiva is a joint venture between Dow Jones & Co. and Reuters Group PLC. By scanning these sources they extract patterns that identify how the public thinks about any company or individual at any moment. It extracts and determines popular sentences, phrases or words that relate to a business, organization or an individual and also identify if those terms are increasing or decreasing in significance. Even comparisons with competitors can be produced. This helps in finding out if what may appear to be irrelevant or unrelated bits of geopolitical, business or other news tend to affect sales or demand or patterns can be gleaned about problems with a product that could lead to expensive recalls or variation in consumer demand. Intelliseek is backed by the CIA.
Los Angeles Police Department has installed a system that mines through details of complaints, investigations, pursuits, lawsuits, uses of force and many other types of records to detect patterns that may be missed or intentionally ignored by humans. The system compiles detailed performance profiles of officers and helps identify potential abusers unusual conduct. The system gives a statistical overview for superiors to inspect.
Richard Johnson of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y analyzed more than 100 paintings by Van Gogh and his imitators to derive patterns of Van Gogh's baseline visual pattern. The method involves dividing a painting into components such as texture, strokes, tones, visual frequencies, light and dark portions and then comparing these components to authentic works of the same artist. Authentic works have statistically uniform components and the components of imitations stray from uniformity. Jose Binongo of Emory University used similar methods to resolve the controversy on who wrote the book "The Royal Book of Oz". Fans of Oz claimed the book was written by Frank Baum. Many others claimed that it was written by Ruth Thompson. Binongo analyzed writings by Baum deriving patterns and then compared those patterns to the writing in "The Royal Book of Oz" concluding that the book was written by Frank Baum thus ending the controversy. Pattern matching and statistical analysis can also determine the originators of writings, opinions, comments, letters, messages, communications, literature, texts, music, voice, video, pictures, graphics and compositions.
In today's information age there is a glut of information and everyone can see and has access to a lot of information, however what is more important is noticing what one sees and reasoning from what one sees.
The fields of psychological profiling, data mining, analysis, induction and deduction is the basis of a few primetime hit shows on CBS such as "Criminal Minds" and "Numbers"
Additional Comments:
Frank Schmidt and John Hunter, industrial psychologists at the University of Iowa and Michigan State University, respectively, have completed studies indicating that hiring based on personality ability could raise US industrial output by $150 billion.
Dr Michael Moynagh and Richard Worsley have completed studies whose patrons include the Archbishop of Canterbury and the foreword is written by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The study concludes that Personality profiling will be the way to screen one's ideal partner - and with all this matchmaking, the divorce rate could fall, the study says.
Some major corporations use personality profiling. Nokia the largest manufacturer of mobile phones in the world uses personality profiling to understand consumer needs and drive their business strategy. Norwegian energy giant Norsk Hydro used detailed personality evaluations to match businesswomen with senior mentors from the public and private sectors. Other corporations that use personality profiling are Dell Computer, General Electric, Motorola, Bristol Myers, Hewlett Packard and many more.