Five Qualities That Reveal More About You Than You Think
There’s a reason the ordeal of being known is considered a mortifying one. We spend a lot of time and energy trying to hide our bodies, keeping our weirdness inside, and masking our insecurities on top of it all. But the truth always comes out — sometimes in ways we never expected. Such as…
Your Phone Data
A 2015 study revealed that psychologists could predict 57 percent of personality traits just by observing how a person uses their phone. For example, a lot of phone calls indicate a more extraverted person, long text messages suggest someone emotionally receptive and nightly weather app checks are for huge nerds (sorry, “conscientiousness”). They even have an algorithm that can learn more about you than your spouse through nothing more than your social media likes. It would probably please you better sexually, too.
Your Browser
We form a lot of meaningless tribes over tech brands — Microsoft vs. Apple, Android vs. iOS, etc. — but there actually is a difference between people who use Firefox and Chrome and those who use the default browsers, Internet Explorer and Safari. They’re more likely to stay at their jobs longer, take fewer days off and just generally perform better at work, regardless of their overall technological competence. The difference seems to lie solely in the browser’s default status — people who unquestionably accept the status quo are just more likely to suck. No, Mozilla didn’t pay us to say that.
Your Pronoun Use
No, not the kind of pronouns that live in bio. People who talk a lot about “I” and “me” aren’t just more self-absorbed -— they’re also more likely to be depressed, insecure and even dishonest. Psychologists think it’s because depressed and insecure people are more isolated and liars focus on distinguishing “between what they did do and what they did not do.” On the other hand, greater use of “we,” “you” and “them” indicates better social ties and wellbeing. Incidentally, women are more likely to use more of those. Gotcha! It was those pronouns all along.
Your Facial Hair
Speaking of the gender binary, a man who wants to appear more masculine might spend a lot of time focusing on his facial hair, but all that’s doing is broadcasting his insecurity. According to a 2024 study, “men who are more strongly motivated to enhance their social status, experience higher competition from other males and are more stressed about their gender roles” were the ones most likely to put a lot of time and effort into maintaining their facial hair, whether that meant shaving every six hours to appear younger or waxing their mustaches into the perfect industrialist twirls. We’d suggest letting it grow wild, but the incapability is kind of the point.
How You Count
You probably think there’s only one right way to count on your fingers, and that’s because you grew up somewhere. It turns out that people from different places have wildly different methods of finger counting. Europeans start with the thumb and end with the pinky, Americans start with the index finger and end with the thumb, Middle Easterners start with the pinky, Indians count finger segments to reach higher numbers, people from China perform some complicated finger choreography to accomplish the same, and Antarcticans count the lines on their fingerprints.
Okay, that last one was fake, but one now-extinct indigenous Californian tribe counted the spaces between their fingers, and we can all agree that that’s wrong.
