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The Psychometrics Centre

Cambridge Judge Business School
 

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Biography

Dr David Stillwell is Academic Director of The Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge. He is also Professor of Computational Social Science at the Cambridge Judge Business School. He obtained his BSc in Psychology at Nottingham in 2007 before progressing to an MSc in Research Methods in 2008. He earned his PhD in Decision Making from the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham in December 2012.

In June 2007, between obtaining his first degree and embarking on his Masters, David began a personal side project designing applications for social networks. The result was the myPersonality Facebook application that allows users to take real psychometric tests and receive feedback on their results. Today myPersonality has collected data from more than 6 million people, and the resulting database has become a priceless academic resource used by numerous researchers all over the world.

Since these early successes, the influence of David's work has expanded considerably, so that today its impact ranges from targeted online advertising, psychometric adaptive test development, ipsative techniques in test design, the real-time analysis of online digital footprints, behavioural prediction and state-of-the-art school examinations. It is for very good reason that Pacific Standard Magazine has recently named him among their 'top 30 thinkers under 30', the young men and women they predict will have a serious impact on social, political and economic issues in the near future.  

To read more about myPersonality project click here.  

 to email David Stillwell

Publications

Key publications: 

Matz, S., Gladstone, J. & Stillwell, D. (2016) Money Buys Happiness When Spending Fits Our Personality. Psychological Science.

Park, G. J., Schwartz, A., Sap, M., Kern, M.L., Weingarten, E., Eichstaedt, J., Berger, J., Stillwell, D., Kosinski, M., Ungar, L.H. & Seligman, M. (2016) Living in the Past, Present, and Future: Measuring Temporal Orientation with Language. Journal of Personality. 

Wilmot, M.P., Kostal, J., Stillwell, D. & Kosinski, M. (2015) Using item response theory to develop measures of acquisitive and protective self-monitoring from the original Self-Monitoring Scale, Assessment. 

Kosinski, M., Matz, S., Gosling, S., Popov, V., Stillwell, D. (2015). Facebook as a Social Science Research Tool: Opportunities, Challenges, Ethical Considerations and Practical Guidelines. American Psychologist. [Link]

Aghaee, S., Blackwell, A., Kosinski, M. & Stillwell D. (2015). Personality and Intrinsic Motivational Factors in End-User Programming. Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC).

Liu, P., Tov, W., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D.J. & Qiu, L. (2015) Do Facebook Status Updates Reflect Subjective Well-being? Valence and Time Matter, Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.

Greenberg, D.M., Baron-Cohen, S., Stillwell, D.J., Kosinski, M. & Rentfrow, P.J. (2015) Musical Preferences are Linked to Cognitive Styles. PLoS ONE. [Link]

Schwartz, A., Park, G. J., Sap, M., Weingarten, E., Eichstaedt, J., Kern, M.L., Stillwell, D., Kosinski, M., Berger, J., Seligman, M. & Ungar, L.H. (2015) Living in the Past, Present, or Future: Extracting Human Temporal Orientation through Facebook. Proceedings of North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics Conference (NAACL).

Boyd, R. L., Wilson, S. R., Pennebaker, J. W., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D. J., & Mihalcea, R. (2015) Values in words: Using language to evaluate and understand personal values. Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM)

Youyou, W., Kosinski, M. & Stillwell, D. (2015) Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans. Proceedings Of The National Academy of Sciences of the USA. [Link]

Wilmot, M.P., DeYoung C.G., Stillwell, D. & Kosinski, M. (2015) Self-Monitoring and the Metatraits. Journal of Personality. [Link]

Farnadi, G., Sitaraman, G., Sushmita, S., Celli, F., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., Davalos, S., Moens, M-F. & De Cock, M. (2015) Computational Personality Recognition in Social Media. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction: The Journal of Personalization Research (UMUAI) [Link]

Collins, S., Sun, Y., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D. & Markuzon, N. (2015) Are You Satisfied with Life?: Predicting Satisfaction with Life from Facebook. Proceedings of 2015 International Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling and Prediction Conference.

 

Youyou, W., Kosinski, M. & Stillwell, D. (2015) Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans. Proceedings Of The National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

Wilmot, M.P., DeYoung C.G., Stillwell, D. & Kosinski, M. (2015) Self-Monitoring and the Metatraits. Journal of Personality. [Link]

Farnadi, G., Sitaraman, G., Sushmita, S., Celli, F., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., Davalos, S., Moens, M-F. & De Cock, M. (in press) Computational Personality Recognition in Social Media. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction: The Journal of Personalization Research (UMUAI)

Collins, S., Sun, Y., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D. & Markuzon, N. (2015) Are You Satisfied with Life?: Predicting Satisfaction with Life from Facebook. Proceedings of 2015 International Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling and Prediction Conference.

Na, J., Kosinski, M. & Stillwell, D.J. (2014) When a New Tool Is Introduced in Different Cultural Contexts Individualism-Collectivism and Social Network on Facebook. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology

Schwartz, A., Eichstaedt, J., Sap, M., Kosinski, M. & Stillwell, D. (2014) Developing Age and Gender Predictive Lexica over Social Media. Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Park, G., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., Eichstaedt, J., Schwartz, A., Kern, P., Ungar, L. & Seligman, M. (2014) Automatic Personality Assessment through Social Media Language.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP)

Rife, S.C., Cate, K. L. , Kosinski, M. & Stillwell, D. (2014) Participant recruitment and data collection through Facebook: The role of personality factors. International Journal of Social Research Methodology (IJSRM)

Bachrach, Y., Graepel, T., Kohli, P., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D.J. (2014) Your Digital Image: Factors Behind Demographic And Psychometric Predictions From Social Network Profiles. AAMAS 2014.

Farnadi, G., Sitaraman, G., Rohani, M., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D.J., Moens, M., Davalos, S. & De Cock, M. (2014) How are you doing? Emotions and Personality in Facebook. EMPIRE 2014 Workshop at UMAP Conference. [Link]

Schwartz, A.H., Eichstaedt, J., Kern, M.L., Park, G., Sap, M., Stillwell, D.J., Kosinski, M. & Ungar, L. (2014) Towards Assessing Changes in Degree of Depression through Facebook. ACL2014 Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology.

He, Q. Glas, C.A.W., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D.J. & Veldkamp, B.P. (2014) Predicting self-monitoring skills using textual posts on Facebook. Computers in Human Behavior. [Link]

Yarden E., Lathia, N., Mascolo, C., Rentfrow P.J., Stillwell D.J., Kosinski, M., McNamara, L. (2014). The Personality-aware Music Recommender ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM)

Mahalingam, V., Stillwell, D., Kosinski, M., Rust, J. & Kogan, A. (2013) Who Can Wait for the Future? A Personality Perspective. Social Psychological and Personality Science published online 11 December 2013. DOI: 10.1177/ 1948550613515007

Kern, M., Eichstaedt, J., Schwartz, A.H., Park, G., Ungar, L.H. Stillwell, D.J., Kosinski, M., Dziurzynski, L., & Seligman, M. (2013). From "sooo excited!!!" to "so proud": Using Language to Study Development. Developmental Psychology.

He, Q., Glas, C., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D. & Veldkamp, B. (in press) Predicting self-monitoring skills using textual posts on Facebook. Computers in Human Behaviour.

Kern, M., Eichstaedt, J., Schwartz, A.H., Dziurzynski, L., Ungar, L.H. Stillwell, D.J., Kosinski, M., Ramones, S., & Seligman, M. (in press). The Online Social Self: An Open Vocabulary Approach to Personality. Assessment.

Kosinski, M., Bachrach, Y., Kohli, P., Stillwell, D., & Graepel, T. (in press) Manifestations of user personality in website choice and behaviour on online social networks. Machine Learning.

Schwartz, A.H., Eichstaedt, J., Kern, M., Dziurzynski, L., Ramones, S., Agrawal, M., Shah, A., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., Seligman, M., & Ungar, L.H. (2013). Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach. PLoS ONE [Link |Press].

Cantador, I., Fernandez-Tobias, I., Bellogin, A., Kosinski, M. & Stillwell, D. (2013) Relating Personality Types with User Preferences in Multiple Entertainment Domains. EMPIRE 2013 Workshop at UMAP Conference [Link].

Rentfrow, P.J., Gosling, S.D, Jokela, M., Stillwell, D.J., Kosinski, M., & Potter, J. (2013) Divided We Stand: Three Psychological Regions of the United States and their Political, Economic, Social, and Health Correlates. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. [Link | Press]

Schwartz, A.H., Eichstaedt, J., Dziurzynski, L., Kern, M., Blanco, E., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., Seligman, M., & Ungar, L.H. (2013). Toward Personality Insights from Language Exploration in Social Media. In AAAI-2013 Spring Symposium: Analyzing Microtext.Stanford, California. [Summary Paper | Poster]

Celli, F., Pianesi, F., Stillwell, D.J., & Kosinski, M. (2013) Workshop on Computational Personality Recognition (Shared Task). ICWSM (Boston)

Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D.J & Graepel, T. (2013) Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. [Link | Press]

Hogarth, L., Stillwell, D.J., & Tunney, R.J. (2013) Impulsivity and acute nicotine exposure are associated with discounting global consequences in the Harvard game. Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical and Experimental.

Rentfrow, J., Goldberg, L.R., Stillwell, D.J., Kosinski, M., Gosling S.D., & Levitin, D.J. (2012) The Song Remains the Same: A Replication and Extension of the MUSIC Model. Music Perception. [Link]

Stillwell, D.J. & Tunney, R.J. (2012) Individuals' insight into intrapersonal externalitiesJudgment and Decision Making, 7, 390-401. [Link | Data]

Academic Director
Professor of Computational Social Science
Not available for consultancy

Affiliations

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