LIKES TELL A LOT

EVERY TIME you click on a Facebook “Like,” you’re telling something about yourself—and a lot more than your preference for cat videos. This observation comes from a team of psychologists at the University of Cambridge in England, as detailed in the 11 March 2013 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported in the 15 March 2013 issue of Science, the magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and summarized in what follows.

The researchers devised a Facebook app they call myPersonality. (See http://goo.gl/Kbwcl.) Then they assembled a volunteer group of 58,000 Facebook users who agreed to answer questions and engage in some psychological testing.

Among the characteristics assessed were the volunteers’ intelligence, competitiveness, extra- versus introversion and general satisfaction with life.

Armed with these assessments as well as other data from the users’ Facebook profiles and friends’ networks, the researchers built a statistical model that predicted personal attributes based on Facebook Likes.

Were men more likely to Like car photos? Women to Like cat videos? Much more subtle inferences as well.

The most accurate predictions were for gender (93 percent correct in identifying male or female) and race (95 percent in gauging Caucasian versus African-American). But Likes also predicted rather more private attributes: political party membership (85 percent), religion (82 percent) and homosexuality (88 percent for men, 75 percent for women).

Other significant prediction successes—based on nothing more than one’s Facebook Likes—included use of tobacco (73 percent), alcohol (70 percent) or drugs (65 percent).

Noted the lead author, Michal Kosinski, “What was traditionally laboriously assessed on an individual basis can be automatically inferred for millions of people without them even noticing—which is both amazing and a bit scary.”

The researchers noted that some predictions had intuitive basis: those clicking on Like for “Jesus” were Christian. A significant number of men Liking “Glee” were gay.

But there were oddities as well, such as a strong association between having a high IQ and Liking “curly fries.”

A sample prediction tree from the researchers’ myPersonality Project. Image from Science, 15 March 2013.

Other Likes associated with brainy types included “Morgan Freeman’s voice,” “The Colbert Report,” “science,” “Mozart” and “thunderstorms.”

If it were included in the assessments, I’m confident that Liking “SimanaitisSays.com” and high IQ would have strong correlation too. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2013