The present paper hypothesizes how research in personality psychology will change with the recent emer- gence of the Internet of Things (IoT). In a society, where humankind is digitally interconnected and all machines in one's own household or at work are linked to the Internet, manifold data from human-machine- interaction can be used to predict psychological traits and states. • In the present theoretical paper, we fi rst explain why it is (still) important to study personality and we also give a short (historical) overview on di ff erent theoretical and methodological approaches to study person- ality. Second, this work will focus on a recent addition to the toolbox of a personality psychologist, namely digital phenotyping via methods from Psychoinformatics , which falls into the realm of the aforementioned IoT. Aside from an introduction into these new concepts, we discuss strengths and limitations of this new data layer of interest for personality psychologists. • Finally, it is argued that in these modern times personality psychology research is conducted in many scattered scienti fi c areas with researchers sometimes unaware of each other. Therefore, tremendous colla- borative e ff orts need to be invested in order to reunify the psychological/neuroscienti fi c oriented personality science to ultimately understand why we are the creatures we are.
