Do you have a neat signature, or a messy one? Do you let the dishes pile up in the sink, or do you clean them as soon as you are done using them? Do you prefer coffee or tea? The purpose of 2 Kinds of People, by João Rocha is to sit down with another person and go through the dozens of side-by-side drawings to find out how compatible you are. It isn't supposed to be a serious exercise, but you will probably learn some interesting things about yourself and your friends and partners by doing it. For instance, not only did I learn that Carla likes to hang her toilet paper with the hanging side towards the wall, she was also able to convince me that her preferred way is superior.

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"The IBM Watson Personality Insights service uses linguistic analytics to extract a spectrum of cognitive and social characteristics from the text data that a person generates through blogs, tweets, forum posts, and more." Watson found Trump "boisterous." Read the rest

Genetically speaking, identical twins ought to be two copies of the same person. Environmentally speaking, if the twins grow up together, they ought to even be influenced by the same things. But if you actually pay attention to identical twins, they aren't identical in personality or interests. How do naturally occurring clones become individual people? That's the subject of a mouse study that Scicurious writes about on her blog. Fascinating stuff. Read the rest

A review analysis of 13 studies — encompassing more than 13,000 individuals — found that there were more differences in personality, behavior, and preferences from one woman to another woman, and one man to another man, than there were between men and women as groups. In other words: The opposite sex isn't an alien life form. Men and women are both from Earth, not Mars or Venus. Diversity abounds, but you can't really classify those differences as "women are like this" and "men are like that". Instead, it's more like "this person is like this" and "that other person is like that". Read the rest