Videos are the New First Impressions!

Think about the approximate number of video calls you have been a part of since March, 2020. Now, compare it to the number of video calls you were a part of before that. I am sure the difference is huge for most of us. Meetings with family, friends, and colleagues have shifted to video calls.

Video calling has also made it possible for us to keep expanding our networks and meet new people while maintaining social distancing. Hence, it is not wrong to say that, we are making quite a few personal as well as professional first impressions over videos. The personality perception through first impressions can be quite subjective and even lead to first impression bias. Of course, there are self-reported personality assessment tests but they can often suffer from a social desirability bias. And this gives us an opportunity to leverage AI to find a more objective approach to apparent personality analysis.

Keeping this in mind, the aim of this blog post is to show one such deep learning approach which uses videos to predict the scores for the Big-5 personality traits.

Created by Author

What are the Big-5 Personality Traits?

Most contemporary psychologists believe that there are 5 core dimensions to personality: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Openness, Conscientiousness, and **Neuroticism; **often referred by the acronym **OCEAN. **[Unlike many of its previous counterparts ](https://www.simplypsychology.org/big-five-personality.html#:~:text=The Big Five personality traits are extraversion (also often spelled,throughout most of one’s lifetime.)which believe in the binary aspect of personality traits, the Big-5 Personality trait theory asserts that each personality trait is a spectrum.

Let’s look at how each trait is characterized followed by a map of how some popular fictional characters would score on the Big-5 personality traits…

Created by Author using Character Images from their Wiki Profiles

An interesting aspect of the Big-5 personality trait theory is that, these_ traits are independent but not mutually exclusive_. For example, we can see in the above image that Sheldon Cooper (The Big Bang Theory) would score low on Extraversion but would also score high on Neuroticism, Phoebe Buffay (Friends) would score low on conscientiousness but score high on openness and so on…

#artificial-intelligence #computer-vision #personality-types #towards-data-science #keras #data science