Who Wants to Self-Track Anyway? Measuring the Relation between Self-Tracking Behavior and Personality Traits

TL;DR

This empirical study investigates how personality traits, especially conscientiousness and narcissism, relate to self-tracking app usage, revealing a link with conscientiousness but no connection to narcissism.

Contribution

The paper provides new insights into the relationship between personality traits and self-tracking behavior through a large-scale empirical analysis.

Findings

Self-tracking correlates with higher conscientiousness.

No significant relation between narcissism and self-tracking.

Analysis based on 796 participants using questionnaires and app logs.

Abstract

We describe an empirical study of the usage of a mobility self-tracking app, SensibleJournal 2014, which provides personal mobility information to N=796 participants as part of a large mobile sensing study. Specifically, we report on the app design, as well as deployment, uptake and usage of the app. The latter analysis is based on logging of user interactions as well as answers gathered from a questionnaire provided to the participants. During the study enrollment process, participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire including a Big Five inventory and Narcissism NAR-Q personality tests. A comparison of personality traits was conducted to understand potential differences among the users and non-users of the app. We found a relation between self-tracking and conscientiousness, but contrary to the view in popular media, we found no relation between self-tracking behavior and narcissism.