University of Alabama Makes "Discovery": Bloggers are Neurotic

We’ve all heard that Gawker is a haven for bitter snark-maniacs, that Perez Hilton reinvented the bitchy queen paradigm, that those people at Daily KOs practically knock themselves out with their bloviating. Now University of Alabama has conducted a study to determine the personality traits of bloggers, and the verdict is in: bloggers are neurotic. Well actually, female bloggers are neurotic.

Business Week reports:

In the Web 2.0 world, the big question is (paraphrasing Butch Cassidy): Who are those bloggers? Scientists from the University of Alabama came up with an answer by grouping bloggers into the Big Five personality inventory measures.

 

According to the Big Five theory, widely used by psychologists, most people are a combination of five personality traits—extraversion, agreeableness, openness to new experience, conscientiousness and neuroticism. The results, reported in the journal Computers in Human Behavior: Bloggers are high in openness to new experience (good, good) and high in neuroticism (Oh no!).

It gets worse, as far as I’m concerned: Highly neurotic women are more likely to blog than women lower on the neurosis scale, whereas there was no such difference in men. They’ll blog even if they are cool as a cucumber. Neuroticism is defined in the Big Five as “the tendency to experience negative emotions, such as anger, anxiety, or depression. It is sometimes called emotional instability.”

Writers? Neurotic? Didn’t see that one coming. Next thing you know, University of Alabama is going to be “discovering” that doctors rate high in conscientiousness. Oh wait, I’d best stop now before I succumb fully to my blogger “tendency to experience negative emotions.”
 

More fascinating perhaps, is the question of what the personality traits are of blog daddies like Nick Denton, the former Financial Times writer who built the Gawker empire? What kind of person wants to gather the neurosis together in a tumor of cubicles and have to deal with all of us neurotic bastards on a daily basis? If bloggers are neurotic, blog daddies are masochistic.