Ramona Schödel on
Reading Between the Lines of Everyday Life: Personality Research Using Mobile Sensing
Date: Monday, 22-09-2025, 01:30 pm
Studying actual behavior has long been the permanent Achilles’ heel of personality psychology. However, new technologies like mobile sensing have recently brought personality researchers closer to people’s everyday behaviors. While linking behavior to personality traits, for example, has attracted considerable interest, many other applications of mobile sensing in personality research have not yet been thoroughly explored.
In this talk, I will begin with an overview of recent findings on individual differences in real-world and digitally mediated behaviors as captured through mobile sensing. In particular, I will emphasize the untapped potential of these methods for examining the dynamic interplay between persons and their daily situations. Using current empirical examples, I will demonstrate the exciting opportunities that emerge from integrating multi- and cross-modally collected digital data. Finally, I will discuss how this integration enables a shift from aggregated behavioral measures to the exploration of contextualized behaviors.
Tobias Ebert on
Spatial Insights for Personality Psychology: New Data, New Directions
Date: Tuesday, 23-09-2025, 01:15 pm
In the digital age, we are surrounded by an abundance of data. Importantly, most of these data carry some kind of geographic information. In other words, we often know where something or someone is located in space. Yet, despite its growing availability, spatial information often seems to remain underutilized in personality psychology. I will provide examples of how spatial information is embedded in diverse data sources, ranging from conventional survey data, via modern big data approaches, to unlikely places such as digital graveyards. This spatial information can be used to enrich psychological data with powerful additional information, often at no cost. I will then provide examples of how personality psychology can benefit from attending to spatial information. On the one hand, considering spatial information may uncover novel insights into core phenomena in personality psychology (such as how personality expresses itself in behavior and well-being in different contexts). On the other hand, considering spatial information allows us to build bridges with adjacent social scientific disciplines in which personality is typically overlooked. Doing so provides new avenues to highlight the power of personality in addressing pressing societal challenges (such as social polarization or the sustainability transition). In sum, this talk highlights how spatial data—if handled adequately—can enrich our understanding of personality and broaden the relevance of personality psychology.