After conducting various personality and intelligence tests on 58,000 Facebook users in the United States , a group of researchers from the University of Cambridge and Microsoft concluded that Facebook “likes” were often correlated with IQ, extraversion and the seriousness of the users.
The results of this study were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and were further proof of how our behavior on the internet can reveal aspects of ourselves that may go unnoticed even by ourselves.
Mozart and thunderstorms
The “like” represent a very generic class of digital records, similar to web search queries, web browsing histories and credit card purchases. For example, looking at user “likes” related to music provides information similar to looking at records of songs listened to online or songs and artists searched using a web search engine.
One of the most curious correlations between IQ and “likes” is that users who press this button on potato chip and thunderstorm pages have the highest IQ . It also happens with those who “like” Mozart, which is no longer so counterintuitive.
However, people with lower IQs tend, according to this study, to hit the “like” button for Harley-Davidson motorcycles, the country music group Lady Antebellum, or the “I love being a mom” page.
Thus, this study suggests the extent to which relatively basic digital records of human behavior can be used to automatically and accurately estimate a wide range of personal attributes that people tend to assume as private .
For that reason, polls are not as reliable as big data or big data (the huge data sets we inadvertently leave on the internet) when it comes to telling us the truth about our private lives .
Even our most intimate feelings can surface on social media, as Patrick Baylis of the Vancouver School of Economics and Nick Obradovich of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated in a study published in Plos One . In it, 2.4 billion Facebook messages and 1.1 billion Twitter messages were collected between 2009 and 2016, identifying various correlations with the messages and the weather. For example, days with a humidity level of 80% or higher were associated with negative expressions, as were days with a large amount of clouds.
However, it should be noted that the correlations are not causal links . The fact that people with high IQ indicate with a “like” that they have a predilection for a certain book or magazine does not necessarily mean that the most intelligent people prefer those publications. Not to mention that many users could be giving “likes” to certain things just to pretend that they are something they are not: after all, social networks are also exhibitors of our ego, of what we aspire to be and, above all, how we want others to see us.
