Interesting questions but the findings lack rigor

From Predicting Personality from Book Preferences with User-Generated Content Labels by Ng Annalyn, Maarten W. Bos, Leonid Sigal, and Boyang Li.

I am a big reader and collector of books and am fascinated by the possible implications between reading volumes, reading choices, and personal life outcomes. Fascinated, but also skeptical. I suspect that there is a link but I also suspect it is a very complicated link. Moreover, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes are always convinced that freedom of speech (and reading) is a threat to their legitimacy and seek to control what is allowed to be read. Trying to link what is read in a causative fashion to subsequent behaviors and values is therefore a popular predicate for control among authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies. Makes me nervous.

Postmodernists are very keen to make a link between what a child reads and later life outcomes. I see virtually no evidence to support that position.

From the abstract:

—Psychological studies have shown that personality traits are associated with book preferences. However, past findings are based on questionnaires focusing on conventional book genres and are unrepresentative of niche content. For a more comprehensive measure of book content, this study harnesses a massive archive of content labels, also known as ‘tags’,
created by users of an online book catalogue, Goodreads.com. Combined with data on preferences and personality scores collected from Facebook users, the tag labels achieve high accuracy in personality prediction by psychological standards. We
also group tags into broader genres, to check their validity against past findings. Our results are robust across both tag and genre levels of analyses, and consistent with existing literature. Moreover, user-generated tag labels reveal unexpected
insights, such as cultural differences, book reading behaviors, and other non-content factors affecting preferences. To our
knowledge, this is currently the largest study that explores the relationship between personality and book content preferences.

It is not encouraging that their first paragraph cites a 2009 study purporting to demonstrate a linkage between fiction reading and increased empathy. That study had a terribly flawed design structure. The design was critiqued at the time of publication and it is surprising these researchers seem unaware of the problems.

Francis Bacon may have been the first to suggest a correlation–perhaps even a causal relation–between book
preferences and the personality of readers. Indeed, research has found that reading fiction leads to changes in personality [1] and increased empathy [2].

The discussion is interesting about both their methods and their findings. None-the-less, I view this research as simply among the first forays into a field of research and that the findings lack rigor.