Today, the normal thing is not to have a more or less active profile in a social network, but to register in several of them , although later we abandon our public avatars to fate. In principle, they all serve the same purpose – to connect with our peers – but as a new study led by experts from Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology and King’s College London indicates, we are not the same if we tweet, we share a link on Facebook, we update our LinkedIn status or upload a photo of our vacation to Instagram.
Researchers have found that in each social network we adopt different personalities, depending on the rules of etiquette or the culture of those platforms. And they have reached this conclusion after analyzing the profiles of some 100,000 people with an account on the About.me website, a kind of directory where users themselves post photos, biographies and links to the networks where they are present. In fact, just by looking at the image and the description they were able to guess which network it belonged to with a success rate of between 60% and 80% .
Some general trends are curious. For example, women were more reluctant to wear glasses in their profile picture, while young people under the age of 25 smiled less . The authors of the work believe that this does not respond to premeditated attitudes: “Despite all our efforts, in the end we subconsciously conform to stereotypes of sex and age, ” says Nishanth Sastry, researcher at King’s College.
“Understanding how we interact, even in a virtual way, through social networks teaches us who we are in the online world. In these times, we all leave a digital trail , and if we analyze it, we will learn a lot from our behavior,” he adds .
