Clicking “like” on Facebook on pages for Wikipedia, hugs and R&B doesn’t seem like you’re giving away profound information that provides a window into your soul. How much can such benign stuff say about you anyway?
Well, plenty.
University of Cambridge and Stanford University researchers found that taking stock of an individual’s Facebook likes creates a strikingly-accurate personality assessment – even more accurate than an assessment done by friends and family. Their findings appear in a new study published Monday by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers wanted to see how well a computer system could predict personality as measured by openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticisms — “the traits that human beings are especially good at predicting,” said co-lead author Michal Kosinski, a Stanford University postdoctoral fellow.
So they created a computer model that went through the Facebook “likes” of 86,220 volunteers who provided access to that data — including likes of pages, articles, musicians, books, statuses, you name it. Those volunteers also completed a 100-question surveys via the app myPersonality.
Researchers found certain likes correlated to particular traits. For instance, liking meditation and David Bowie correlated with liberal and artistic openness. Liking Lil’ Wayne and Mike “the Situation” Sorrentino went along with outgoing and active extraversion. Oh, and liking Wikipedia correlates with being shy and reserved; hugs with being cooperative; and R&B with being with well-organized. (You can try it yourself here. It may not work if you don’t have enough likes or if they are set to private).
MyPersonality users also had their personalities judged by friends and family on Facebook via a 10-question survey, and researchers also examined roughly 30 previous studies on how well humans judged others’ personalities.
Taking all of that data into account, the researchers found that their computer model more accurately predicted an individual’s personality than actual humans could.
“We were surprised to find that actually computers are beating us at something we excel at,” Kosinski said.
Knowing someone well does make a difference in how well they can judge another’s personality. The model only needed to analyze 10 likes to outperform a person’s coworker; it needed 70 likes to do better than that person’s friend or roommate, and 150 likes to do better than a parent or sibling.