Personality Computing Network

Living in the digital age, the variety and amount of digital data we leave behind is becoming seemingly infinite. Smartphones and other off-the-shelf consumer electronics nowadays allow the intensive longitudinal collection of digital footprints in people’s daily lives. 

This development opens up the possibility for psychological research to get closer to daily behaviors and situations, contributing to the acquisition of ecologically valid findings. 

As a consequence, new methodological approaches are arising in research across different subfields, including personality psychology. Accordingly, Personality Computing has started to emerge as a discipline applying methods from the data sciences, like machine learning, to the analysis of digital data with the goal of investigating personality. However, Personality Computing is still in its infancy and there are many open questions waiting to be answered. 

Our mission as Personality Computing Network (PCN) is to address these conceptual and methodological questions and to foster the use of digital footprints for investigating human behavior across situations in daily life. 

In doing so, we aim to contribute new perspectives to the study of personality and to establish Personality Computing as a complementary approach in the toolbox of personality research. 

We, a group of nine young scientists, founded this network in May 2023. PCN is a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).