It’s official: Facebook knows you better than your family or friends
Your loved ones know you best, right? Well, apparently not. A recent Cambridge University study has found that a computer program that analyses your Facebook “likes” is a better judge of your personality and character than your closest family and friends.
The study looked at the Facebook of 86,220 volunteers who also completed 100 questions on a personality test using an app called “myPersonality”. The volunteers also gave researcher’s access to their Facebook “likes”, pages on interests, objects, products and brands which you have clicked the “thumbs-up” sign to like. The participants personality scores was categorised under the “big five” psychological traits – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
The users then invited friends and family’s to judge their psychological traits by taking a 10-item personality test on the myPersonality app. More than 17,000 were judged by one family member or friend, and more than 14,000 were judged by two.
The research team found the computer could predict a participant's personality more accurately than a work colleague by analysing just 10 “likes”. It needed just 70 Facebook likes to predict your personality over friends, 150 for parents or siblings and 300 likes for a spouse.
“In the future, computers could be able to infer our psychological traits and react accordingly, leading to the emergence of emotionally intelligent and socially skilled machines,” said lead author Wu Youyou, from Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre.
“As openness is largely expressed through individuals’ interests, preferences, and values, we argue that the digital environment provides a wealth of relevant clues presented in a highly observable way,” he continued.
Co-author Michal Kosinski from Stanford University said computers were able to sift through data without being sidetracked by memorable moments.
“Big data and machine-learning provide accuracy that the human mind has a hard time achieving, as humans tend to give too much weight to one or two examples, or lapse into non-rational ways of thinking,” he said.
The study, reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, adds to growing research into the area that found a many psychological and demographic characteristics could be predicted through Facebook “likes”.
Related links:
Facebook allows users to control their accounts from beyond the grave
How to prevent your Facebook being hacked
Do you use FaceTime (aka the new Skype)? Here’s a how-to guide