The profiles on Facebook that people own and manage are very much a reflection of their personality. Each profile is as unique as a person’s fingerprint. A lot of personality traits can be inferred just by closely examining them.
The profiles on Facebook that people own and manage are very much a reflection of their personality. Each profile is as unique as a person’s fingerprint. A lot of personality traits can be inferred just by closely examining them. Following this line of thought, a study was published last week in PLOS ONE, where scientists at the University of Pennsylvania examined the language of over 75,000 users’ Facebook profiles — the largest study of its kind. The study enabled them to observe differences across ages, genders and even certain personality traits. Using this information, computer and information scientist H. Andrew Schwartz, along with his group of researchers, were able to make predictions about the profile of each user with alarming accuracy — they could predict a user’s gender with 92 per cent accuracy and also guess a user’s age within three years with over 50 per cent accuracy. The researchers used what is known as an ‘open-vocabulary approach’ — meaning allowing the data to offer a comprehensive exploration of language that distinguishes people, finding newer words or phrases that were once not considered important or often used. The open-vocabulary approach clusters words into coherent topics, allowing the discovery of categories not documented so far. The reason the researchers used this technique was to determine the users’ characteristics. Each participant was asked to fill out a questionnaire, scoring themselves on the ‘Big Five’ personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. The researchers then examined the status posts and comments on the users’ Facebook profiles for language that matched with the participants’ test scores, clubbing similar words and phrases into word clouds. Some of the findings were consistent with previous psychological studies. For example, neurotic people were more likely to use the word ‘depressed’ and ‘sick of’. But other new discoveries were possible due to the open-vocabulary technique — introverts were more likely to talk about Japanese ‘anime’ and ‘manga’, subjects living on high elevations talk about the mountains, and males use the possessive ‘my’ when mentioning their wife or girlfriend more often than females use ‘my’ with husband or boyfriend. The researchers are now hoping to conduct in-depth studies to figure out exactly what behaviour sets different types of people apart.
