How your eyes predict your personality - 6 Minute English

Neil: Hello and welcome to 6 Minute English. I'm Neil.

Rob: And I'm Rob.

Neil: Now, Rob, would you say that you are an introvert

or an extrovert?

Rob: What a good question!

Well, extroverts are confident in their personality.

They're outgoing and comfortable in social situations.

So I would have to say that, if anything, I’m the opposite.

I’m more of an introvert. I’m really quite shy.

I feel uncomfortable in social situations.

For example, if I go to a party

where I don’t know anyone,

I usually feel very embarrassed

and I find it impossible to start conversations

with strangers.

Neil: But you do all of this on the radio and videos

for Learning English, don’t you?

Some would say

you have to be an extrovert to do what we do.

Rob: Ah! Well, maybe I’m pretending to be an extrovert

to hide the fact that I’m an introvert.

It’s quite a common thing, you know.

Neil: Well, it might not be so easy to hide in the

future because researchers have developed

a computer program that can tell your personality

from looking at where you look,

by tracking your eye movements.

Rob: Wow! That sounds pretty hi-tech, and scary.

Neil: Well, we’ll learn more shortly, but first

a question on the topic of clever computers.

The letters 'AI' stand for Artificial Intelligence

but what are the letters 'AI'? Are they

A) an abbreviation

B) an acronym, or

C) an initialism?

Rob: OK, I thought that was going to be easy, but

I think it’s an abbreviation, isn’t it?

Neil: Well, you’ll have to wait to the end of

the programme to find out!

Sabrina Hoppe is a researcher

at the University of Stuttgart.

She was interviewed on the BBC Radio programme

All In The Mind.

She spoke about an experiment in which they tracked

the eye movements of people in real situations.

This is what she said about the research.

Was she confident

the experiment would work in the real world?

Sabrina Hoppe:The main finding in our study is that it is

possible at all to just look at eye movements

and then predict something about their personality.

And before our study it was not clear at all if

this would be possible from eye movements

in such an unconstrained real world setting.

Neil: So, was she confident this would work?

Rob: No, not really.

She said that before the study it wasn’t clear if it would

be possible in an unconstrained real-world setting.

'Unconstrained' here means that there wasn’t strict

control over the conditions of the experiment.

It took place in the ‘real-world’ – so not in a laboratory.

Neil: The result of the experiment

- or the 'finding', as she called it -

was that by following eye movements,

a computer programme was able to work out the

personality of the subjects.

Let’s listen again.

Sabrina Hoppe: The main finding in our study is that it is

possible at all to just look at eye movements

and then predict something about their personality.

And before our study, it was not clear at all

if this would be possible from eye movements

in such an unconstrained real world setting.

Rob: So how does the software work, for example,

what are the differences in the eye movements

of extroverts compared to introverts?

Sabrina Hoppe: We still don't really know in detail

what makes the difference.

We can only tell that there are differences

and that we know computer programs that can pick up

those differences.

Maybe extrovert people look up a lot because

they want to look at people's faces,

whereas some super introvert

person maybe just stares at their own shoes,

if you want to take the extreme examples.

So, probably it somehow changes gaze.

But we only know that this information is

there and somehow our program figured out

how to extract it.

Neil: So how does it work?

Rob: Well, that’s the strange thing.

She said that she didn’t really know,

at least not in detail.

She did say that our personality

somehow changes gaze.

'Gaze' is another word for looking at something.

So maybe we gaze in different ways

depending on our personality.

Extroverts may look up more

and introverts, like me, may look down more.

Neil: Yes, it was interesting that she said that she

didn’t know how it did it,

but the program somehow managed to figure it out.

The phrasal verb 'to figure something out'

means 'to understand or realise something'.

Time to review today’s vocabulary, but first,

let’s have the answer to the quiz question.

I asked what are the letters 'AI'? Are they

A) an abbreviation

B) an acronym

C) an initialism

Rob, what did you say?

Rob: I said A) an abbreviation.

Neil: Well sorry, no, AI is C), so to speak.

It's an initialism.

It’s the first letters of the words 'artificial intelligence',

but it’s not pronounced like a new word,

just the initial letters.

Right, time now to review today’s vocabulary.

Rob: Yes. We had the word 'extrovert'. This describes

someone who has a very outgoing personality.

An extrovert is confident and socially comfortable.

Neil: By contrast, an introvert is someone who is

shy and not comfortable in social situations

and doesn’t like being the centre of attention.

Rob: Our report today talked about the findings

of some new research.

A 'finding' is something that has been learnt, discovered

or indeed, found out.

It is the conclusion that is reached.

Neil: Then we had 'unconstrained' to describe the

experiment which was not carried out

in a controlled environment.

So 'unconstrained' means

'not limited or restricted'.

Rob: Our next word was 'gaze'. This is a word that

means 'our way of looking at something'.

Neil: Yes, the findings of the research suggest

that our personality can affect our gaze.

Rob: And this was something the computer was able

to figure out.

To 'figure out' means 'to study something

and reach an answer to a particular

question or problem'.

Neil: Right! Well, you know what I’ve just figured out?

Rob: Do tell!

Neil: It’s time to bring this edition of 6 Minute English

to an end. We hope you can join us again,

but until then we are bbclearningenglish.com

and you can find us on social media, online

and on our app. Bye for now.

Rob: Bye-bye!