Clinton Psychoanalyzed by Artificial Intelligence
Source: Jennifer Golbeck Ph.D

Last week, I used Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze Donald Trump's personality traits from his Twitter profile, and followed that up with an analysis of his Washington Post interview. This week, we look at Hillary Clinton.

As a reminder, AI is making a best guess. It's plain wrong 10-15% of the time and often off by 10-15% in its numerical guesses. These are not diagnostic results and should be taken with an appropriately sized grain of salt.

For Clinton especially, I want to introduce a caveat. Part of this analysis is done using the text from her Twitter account. The majority of those messages are not written by Clinton herself but by staff. They are also mostly focused on election events, though a good number include quotes from Clinton. The analysis of the tweets will be more turned to to the personality projected on her behalf online and less to what her own tweets might reveal.   

I have also analyzed Clinton's answers in her Washington Post interview, just as I did for Trump in the follow up analysis. This data is all her own words as she has spoken and will give a more accurate insight.

As with the Trump analysis, I used two main tools: Receptiviti, a psycholinguistic text analysis tool, and Analyze Words, which does a good job analyzing tone.

Receptivity painted this general picture of Clinton based on her last 500 tweets:

        Type A

        Likely a workaholic with a very intense drive to succeed. May often talk over and interrupt other people, can be lacking in patience, frequently stressed, and may have a short temper.

        Well-adjusted

        Likely has good social skills and typically gets along well with others. Likely a relatively grounded person who values friendships, works hard, and has healthy life goals.

        Persuasive

        Has an intuitive sense of persuasion and is able to create rapport with others by sensing what it is they might want. Strives for success, appreciates loyalty and responds strongly to signs that others are interested.           

When run on her Washington Post answers, it also reports her as Type A. The other two attributes drop out of this high level profile, replaced by these:
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        Power-driven

        Has a strong need to exert power and influence, and may sometimes be domineering and overly assertive. Likes to be consulted about decisions, even when the decisions are of little importance.

        Conscientious

        Likely regarded by others as intelligent and reliable.           

Her personality trait scores were put in context of the percentile, showing what percentage of the population had a score lower than her (99th percentile means she is    in the top 1% while the 10th percentile means only 10% of people had a lower score).



Jen Golbeck
Source: Jen Golbeck

Here is a selection of traits where she had very high or low scores:

She scores very low for emotional awareness, empathy, and agreeableness. Her scores are not quite as low as Trump's, but they are close to them.

Interesting, her liberal-ness score puts her in the 26th percentile on Twitter- that is lower than Trump whose value was in the 36th percentile. However, her interview score is much higher (and higher than Trump).

Like Trump, she scored in the 99th percentile for having a Type A personality, the highest possible value. She also scores very high for being well-adjusted, stressed, persuasive, and anxious.
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You can also see that her percentile scores are very close in almost every case shown. This means the AI is agreeing about those traits even with two different inputs. The big stand out is family orientedness, but that's almost certainly because her interview was focused on economic issues while her tweets are on all topics.

An analysis of the tone of her tweets from Analyze Words shows that she is extremely upbeat, with high values for being personable, analytic, but that she also uses "Valley Girl" language (as a scientist who studies this, I think this last one is a weird fluke of the algorithm and not an accurate picture of the tweets).




Source: Jen Golbeck

Finally, coping style. Coping style describes if people deal productively or poorly with stressful situations. The tool we developed in my lab classifies Clinton as having a good coping style, as was the case with Trump. There are two major factors that play into this: an analytical thinking style and well-adjusted social support system. Clinton is very well adjusted socially (seen in the table of scores above - she's in the 97th percentile) and also scores in the top 3rd of people for her analytic thinking style. Thus, it's no surprise we see this result.