Study: Money-spending habits can reveal your personality
By: Team Ifairer | Posted: 20-07-2019
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Participants' spending data was organised into broad categories including supermarkets, furniture stores, insurance policies, online retail stores, and coffee shops and the researchers used a machine-learning technique to analyse whether participants' relative spending across categories was predictive of specific traits.
Overall, the correlations between the model predictions and participants' personality trait scores were modest. However, predictive accuracy varied considerably across different traits, with predictions that were more accurate for the narrow traits (materialism and self-control) than for the broader traits (the Big Five).
Looking at specific correlations between spending categories and traits, the researchers found that people who were more open to experience tended to spend more on flights, those who were more extraverted tended to make more dining and drinking purchases, those who were more agreeable donated more to charity, those who were more conscientious put more money into savings, and those who were more materialistic spent more on jewellery and less on donations.
The researchers also found that those who reported greater self-control spent less on bank charges and those who rated higher on neuroticism spent less on mortgage payments.
The findings have clear applications in the banking and financial services industries, which also raises potential ethical challenges. For example, financial services firms could use personality predictions to identify individuals with certain traits, such as low self-control, and then target those individuals across a variety of domains, from online advertising to direct mail.
Source: hindustantimes.com