A peek into personality
Turns out you can size up personality just by looking at a person's Facebook profile. While that may not seem like a big deal, it is providing fodder for academics who are trying to predict temperament based on the things we post online.
If such predictions prove accurate, employers may have good reason to poke around our Facebook pages to figure out how we would get along with others at the office. And Pentagon officials want to use personality assessments to make better decisions on and off the battlefield.
A recent study by researchers at the University of Maryland predicted a person's score on a personality test to within 10 percentage points by using words posted on Facebook.
"Lots of organizations make their employees take personality tests," said Jennifer Golbeck, an assistant professor of computer science and information studies at the University of Maryland. "If you can guess someone's personality pretty well on the Web, you don't need them to take the test."
Golbeck and her colleagues at the university's Human-Computer Interaction Lab surveyed the public profiles of nearly 300 Facebook users this year. They looked at users' descriptions of their favorite activities, TV shows, movies, music, books, quotes and membership in political organizations. They also looked at Facebook's public "About Me" and "blurb" sections.
The 300 participants then took a standard psychological exam that measures the "big five" personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
People who tested as extroverts on the personality test tended to have more Facebook friends, but their networks were more sparse than those of neurotics, meaning that their friends were less likely to know one another than were the friends of other Facebook users. People who tested as neurotic had more "dense" networks of people who know one another and share similar interests.
The researchers also found that people with long last names tended to be have more neurotic traits, perhaps because "a lifetime of having one's long last name misspelled may lead to a person expressing more anxiety and quickness to anger," according to the study. People who tested high on the neurotic scale also tended to use a lot of anxiety-associated words, such as "worried," "fearful" and "nervous," on their Facebook posts.
They also use words describing ingestion: "pizza," "dish," "eat." Golbeck says she can't explain that last correlation.
"You'd have to get a psychologist or psychiatrist on that one," she said. "It could be that people that are neurotic talk more about what they are eating. It could be a deep correlation that we can't understand on the surface."
Golbeck said that gauging a person's personality is important to anticipating how well they will get along with others in school or a job.
But some critics say you can't use social media to figure out human behavior.
Sherry Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that people who spend a lot of time online actually may be more isolated from the world than in touch with it. Trying to understand someone's "real" personality from their postings on Facebook and Twitter misses too much information, according to Turkle, author of "Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other."
"If we are taking what people do on Facebook as a measure of their sociability, does it measure how well they can apologize and say they are sorry?" said Turkle, a clinical psychologist. "Does it measure their emotional strength or weakness? It isn't capturing their voice, their facial expressions, the visual cues and how you feel with this person next to you in the room."
Turkle, who interviewed hundreds of people for her book, said many of them felt they must "perform" on social media sites to act cooler, more interesting or funnier than they really are.
