Computers aren’t just doing hard math problems and showing us cat videos. Increasingly, they judge our character.

Maybe we should be grateful.

A company in Palo Alto, Calif., called Upstart has over the last 15 months lent $135 million to people with mostly negligible credit ratings. Typically, they are recent graduates without mortgages, car payments or credit card settlements.

Those are among the things that normally earn a good or bad credit score, but these people haven’t been in the working world that long. So Upstart looks at their SAT scores, what colleges they attended, their majors and their grade-point averages. As much as job prospects, the company is assessing personality.

“If you take two people with the same job and circumstances, like whether they have kids, five years later the one who had the higher G.P.A. is more likely to pay a debt,” said Paul Gu, Upstart’s co-founder and head of product. “It’s not whether you can pay. It’s a question of how important you see your obligation.”

Read more here…

Read the article “Using Algorithms to Determine Character” on bits.blogs.nytimes.com.