Algorithm predicts Five Factor personality type better than Facebook friends

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/this-algorithm-knows-you-better-than-your-facebook-friends-do/

35 18 12 years ago

are partners good "matches" if their 5-factor personalities are approaching congruence?

svachalek• 12 years ago

That's a little off topic and I think you can probably find some relevant articles on the web but I remember reading about that before. As I remember, matching openness is pretty important for compatibility purposes, for neuroticism the important thing is that one or both scores are low, and for the others there are various advantages/disadvantages to matching up.

kelukelugames• 12 years ago

Trying to explain the results gives me a headache. "Programmers" indicates shyness makes sense but "In n' Out" burgers means calm and relaxed?

jameshart• 12 years ago

In n' Out Burgers correlates with California, which correlates with NOT being from the Northeast, which correlates with being, relatively, calm and relaxed.

sehr• 12 years ago

Why are Californians chiller than others? I wonder if it's actually true

Romdeau• 12 years ago

It's because you're looking at it from the wrong direction. The indicators are selected because people who are shy have a higher than average likelihood of liking "programmers". If you average out a bunch of likes and you know the general personality types of people who like those groups you end up with a pretty good general picture of someones personality.

I really want to see this run on one of those profiles that facebook marketing clickbots use.

stolio• 12 years ago

I had a whole joke I just had to erase because it was based on there being no way all the things in that list having facebook pages. I thought it was nonsense. But I was wrong:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/I-hate-it-when-people-lie-to-...

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Uncontrollable-swearing-after...

The list makes much more sense now

siegecraft• 12 years ago

This is like every undergraduate's machine learning first project ever, right up there with "using twitter and sentiment analysis to predict ____"

therealdrag0• 12 years ago

Isn't it a bit sandy of a foundation to base the whole thing on self-judgments? Is it surprising that self-judged personality tests is going to correlate well with self-picked likes?

peteretep• 12 years ago

It's not self-judgements, it's people expressing a like for something completely unrelated. Nobody "Like"d Nikki Minaj because they were hoping to show themselves as Outgoing and Active.

gwern• 12 years ago

The Big Five has a lot of external validity (as do the regression estimates of Big Five, if you read the paper), so that's fine. If things like Conscientiousness really do predict income, longevity, etc, then even if they're a 'self-judgment', why is that a problem.

threatofrain• 12 years ago

These self judgments also tend to be correlated with judgments made by friends, family, spouse, therapist, and with personality tests. In other words, even though there are differences between the groups, people are relatively self-aware.

I'd be interested to see here if friends in face-to-face contexts perform similarly to the Facebook context.

Houshalter• 12 years ago

I don't think it's self judgement, they are asked to take a personality test which is a bunch of questions. The personality traits are literally defined as the way people answer the questions on the test.

idiotclock• 12 years ago

The message is that our personalities are encapsulated by objects and media. These items of evident importance are of course legitimated by the benevolence of facebook's curation. Facebook is not a social experiment, it's a marketing tool.

Anyway, the accuracy of the study depends on a self-report.

dkarapetyan• 12 years ago

Right, the goal is to convince marketers that the digital shadow and the meat casting that shadow are one and the same.

gweinberg• 12 years ago

Based on the likes chart, I've concluded my big 5 profile is "grumpy old fart that doesn't like anything".

cheepin• 12 years ago

I came to that conclusion when they told me "Sorry, it looks like you don’t have a sufficient number of Facebook Likes for us to generate an accurate enough prediction!"

Algorithm predicts Five Factor personality type better than Facebook friends

Related Stories