Every time you click on Facebook to “like” a publication, content or image, you are talking about yourself, giving details about your personality. This is the main conclusion of a recent study developed by researchers at the Psychometrics Center of the University of Cambridge (UK) and the department of Computer Science at Stanford University (USA).
For their research, the experts had the participation of 90,000 users of the social network Facebook who, apart from giving permission to track their “likes”, conducted a 100-question personality test.
Starting from the idea that our behavior on social networks offers reliable data about what a person really is like, they developed software like a digital psychologist to detect the main psychological traits of a person by only analyzing a few dozen “likes” . In the same way, they invited family and friends to carry out a psychological profile of the users under study.
The results revealed that with only 10 “likes”, the program was able to determine the personality in a much closer and more accurate way than the reflections made by those close to them . The more “likes” the machine analyzed, the more refined its assessment became with respect to the Facebook user.
With 300 “likes”, not even the user’s partner was a match for this software, concluding that a machine knows our personality better than human beings. “Computers can beat us at our best game. Predicting the psychological traits of others is a basic social skill, crucial for success and, in the past, for survival, honed over millions of years of evolution. And now, a relatively simple computer model based on a large database is very easy for us, ”explains Michal Kosinski, co-author of the study.
The conclusions of this research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), testify that 100 “likes” are enough to know the sex, race or ideology of a Facebook user .
Predicting personality is, like any other technology, morally neutral. We can use it to improve our lives or harm ourselves, just like with knives. Certainly, we have to proceed with caution, as current technology works well and could benefit (or harm) a large number of people, ”says Kosinski.
