Smartphone choice and personality

You make hundreds of decisions very day. Let’s be honest, not all of those decisions are optimal but they are you and as such they reveal something about you. It would be possible to infer aspects of your personality from any choice you make but if you want to go down that road why not start with one of the most popular consumer items of our time; the smartphone. That is exactly what researchers did in a new study and they found that your choice of smartphone may reveal something about your personality.

In the first of two studies the researchers asked subjects to complete a survey where they indicated what personal characteristics they associated with users of each smartphone brand. In the second study they tested these results against personality traits of people who were iPhone versus Android users.

In the first study people said they perceived Android users as being more honest, humble, agreeable and open than iPhone users. The majority of people also thought that iPhone users are more extroverted.

In fact though the results of the second study only showed that honesty and humility were slightly more associated with Android users, the rest of the personality traits did not actually link to phone choice.

A couple of things that the researchers did find was that women were more than twice as likely to own an iPhone as an Android phone. Additionally, Android users were more likely to try and “avoid similarity” while iPhone users thought “high status” was more important than Android users.

So Android users tend to be honest, humble, non-conformists while iPhone users are status

Source: British Psychological Society