Your Digital News Reading Habits Reflect Your Personality

The way people read digital news - as distinct from what news they read - has emerged as a significant concern for research in user modelling and personalisation. Intuitively, some people read the news frequently and broadly whilst others read it occasionally and selectively. It is likely that these differences in news reading behaviour arise in part from differences in peoples' personalities. We report a study that surveyed the digital news reading habits and personality traits of 241 people. We find correlations between most news reading characteristics (e.g., how much time over a day a person reads news) and some personality traits (e.g Openness-to-Experience). The correlations provide a better understanding of the different types of news reading user and why they read news in different ways. They indicate the value of extending user model profiles to include personality traits along with domain specific activity factors.

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