On the Personality Traits of StackOverflow Users

In the last decade, developers have been increasingly sharing their questions with each other through Question and Answer (Q&A) websites. As a result, these websites have become valuable knowledge repositories, covering a wealth of topics related to particular programming languages. This knowledge is even more useful as the developer community evaluates both questions and answers through a voting mechanism. As votes accumulate, the developer community recognizes reputed members and further trusts their answers. In this paper, we analyze the community´s questions and answers to determine the developers´ personality traits, using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). We explore the personality traits of Stack Overflow authors by categorizing them into different categories based on their reputation. Through textual analysis of Stack Overflow posts, we found that the top reputed authors are more extroverted compared to medium and low reputed users. Moreover, authors of up-voted posts express significantly less negative emotions than authors of down-voted posts.