I was chewing the fat with one of my colleagues the other day about how, from an IT support point of view, in any given team or organisation certain people seem to have a lot more trouble with technology than others. Superficially it would seem that the amount of trouble they have is usually correlated to seniority (and therefore age), but, as we explored the data more and knowing the people involved, there seemed to be other possible correlations in the mix too.
After some analysis, we summarised that there also seemed to be an important correlation between personality type and the volume of technology woes experienced. We reckoned that the more outgoing, gregarious or simply "loud" a person is then the more likely it is that they will have issues with their phones, computers, software or photocopiers, high on extraversion and high on neuroticism would be how I would position this in the "big-five". Of course, our data-set was pretty small, but this would be quite an interesting experiment to run on a bigger scale; maybe I could get a university grant? For completeness, those people who almost never seem to have IT issues were high in openness and also high in conscientiousness but usually low on extraversion. Interesting, this personality stuff.
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