Abstract
This study investigated when and how people used the term “personality” in weblogs to examine the pragmatic meaning of the concept of personality. Over a 24-hour period, 714 weblog entries that contained the word personality were extracted and categorized using a bottom-up analysis. We identified 17 categories (132 examples) where the term referred to another person's personality and 26 categories (encompassing 220 examples) of usage referring to the writer's own personality. Writers referred to another person's personality not only when explaining or making a prediction about that person's behavior, as previous research suggested, but also when evaluating another person along emotional lines as someone the writer likes or dislikes, often accompanied by a claim that the other person is good or bad. In contrast, writers were likely to describe their own personality as impossible to control and to ask others to accept them. These results suggest that there are some neglected topics in the field of personality psychology but the concept of personality is important for lay persons' daily conversation.
