Can Facebook Be Used To Accurately Determine Personality?

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
What you say and do on social media can be used by other people to accurately determine your personality traits, even if those individuals don’t know you personally, University of Kansas (KU) researchers report in the September 2014 edition of the journal New Media & Society.
Study authors Jeffrey Hall, an associate professor of communication studies at KU, doctoral candidate Natalie Pennington, and former Kansas doctoral student and current East Texas Baptist University assistant professor of communication studies Allyn Lueders sampled 100 Facebook users who paralleled the website’s demographics.
Each of those individuals were asked to complete a personality survey, then their Facebook activity was reviewed by a group of coders to determine whether or not certain personality types were more likely to perform specific activities. Finally, the researchers had 35 strangers spent between 10 and 15 minutes on each of the Facebook users’ profile pages in order to see if those individuals could correctly gauge the personality of a subject.
The investigation focused on which cues correlated to personality types, and whether or not the 35 strangers could correctly detect personality traits based solely on those cues, the researchers explained. The study revealed that extroversion was the easiest personality trait for strangers to determine, followed by agreeableness and openness. Conversely, only one cue revealed conscientiousness, and none helped detect neuroticism.
During the study, strangers were able to correctly guess certain types of activity with specific personality traits from the data which was collected in 2011. However, Facebook has changed since then. Hall, Pennington and Lueders explained that new algorithms recently put into place by the social network could make it more difficult to discern personality traits.
“Studies have given us really good evidence that we do know what people are like when we get a complete view of their actions on Facebook,” Hall explained in a statement. “However, since much of that research studied earlier versions of Facebook, it’s conceivable that people’s ability to accurately judge others will go down as a consequence of these changes.”
In the three years since the data was collected, Facebook has made changes to how and when users are able to see other people’s activity. In 2011, members saw actions performed by their friends, including likes and changes to their personal history.
Now those actions are less apparent, as they are limited to a small box in the upper right corner of the page. At the same time, the most prominent feature – Facebook’s newsfeed – is compiled using an algorithm that takes into consideration how recent a post is, the number of likes and comments it has received, and how frequently the viewer has interacted with the individual writing the post.
In terms of detecting personality traits, this shift is important because the KU researchers report that agreeable members tend to post less often, while an open individual is less likely to respond to another person’s post but more likely to make politically-related status updates, and conscientious people tend to agree more often with other people’s posts. The recent changes could cause users to form incorrect impressions of their friends.
“If Facebook suddenly starts highlighting people you may not have regularly interacted with and promotes a lot of posts from them, you may no longer think that person is agreeable,” said Pennington. “It may not be that they post that much, but that your feed has gotten smaller and shows a smaller subset of friends.”
Furthermore, changes to the types of information shown on the About page could also make detecting personalities more difficult. In the past, Facebook allowed members to list their favorite bands, books and movies, and those that chose to do so tended to have more open personalities, the authors said.
Now, the social network asks users to select from a list of options, which Hall said is a passive step versus an active one. “An open person is able to construct their personality through the process of making choices,” he said. “Facebook is essentially taking away agency and replacing it with algorithms.”
Even with the changes, however, the researchers state that some cues are still easy to spot – especially those associated with people who are extroverts, such as the total number of friends a user has, the number of other people who appear with that individual in pictures, or status updates that are usually more positive in nature.
One activity that was unreliable when it came to accurately detecting personality was the number of likes a person’s post received from other Facebook members. Hall called this phenomenon “unfortunate because that it is one of the main factors in how often other people are seeing posts, and it is probably worthless for knowing what their real personality is.”
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