"Macintosh" people are open to experience
A report from the folks at Hunch (Mac vs PC People: Personality Traits & Aesthetic/Media Choices) tells us what we already knew: Mac users like to be different while PC users prefer to stick with what they're comfortable with. While the questions are nominally about aesthetics, media and consumer choices, and "personality," for the most part they've actually made a questionnaire that captures several facets of the personality dimension Openness to experience.
A lot of the questions hit on the facet of Artistic interests ("Which type of art do you prefer?", mostly through the choice of Modernism, and I would hazard that most folks who chose the Impressionist painting were picking 'flowers' rather than 'Monet'; all of the items about aesthetic or design preferences) although there are a few questions related to Extraversion ("How often do you throw parties?") and Agreeableness (attitude to authority). Other questions probably hit on both high Openness and low Conscientiousness at the same time (task preference). NB: the sample size for some of these items is huge! (N > 50,000) Of course, as I tell my students, a little more methodological details would be nice:Summary findings in this report are noted when there is a statistically significant difference in the answers of the two subsets being compared.graphic cc-by Rétrofuturs
