Back in July, we reported on new research demonstrating that people's Facebook profiles could accurately portray a lot of their personality to strangers. New results from similar studies, provided to U.S. News by the researchers, presents further evidence that online profiles are fairly faithful representations of one's essence offline.
In a related line of research, the original study's author, Samuel Gosling of the University of Texas, partnered with several other psychologists and developers to create YouJustGetMe.com, a social networking site designed specifically for allowing members to guess one another's personalities. After making a simple profile, members take a personality test known as the Big Five, which measures openness to experience, consciousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. (The test, which is widely accepted in the field, is sometimes abbreviated as OCEAN.) Then, based only on another member's profile, one predicts that user's personality by the same metric.
Recently, the group also released a version of YouJustGetMe for Facebook, which members can install as a third-party application, and reported that 5,000 personality judgments have been made through Facebook to date.
The measure accuracy, the guessers fill out the same Big Five survey for another person, rating a list of statements like "I see myself as someone who can be somewhat careless" from 1 (disagree) to 5 (agree). On a scale of 0 to 1, where 0 represents a completely wrong guess of a person's personality, and 1 is a perfectly accurate guess, research has shown that married couples score about .50, while strangers who interact for 15 minutes score around .25. On Facebook, users averaged a .42 accuracy, while on YouJustGetMe.com they averaged .33, indicating that in both cases, viewing a person's online profile was a better portrayal of personality than brief exposure in person.
Psychologist David Evans, who founded the company that runs YouJustGetMe, points out that the limitations of the Facebook model, in which one cannot generally view the profiles of strangers, means people were more likely to know the person whose personality they were guessing. On YouJustGetMe.com, users tend to guess the personalities of people they do not know, so the average accuracy of .33 is particularly interesting.
While Evans was careful not to draw too many specific conclusions from the data yet, since the experiment is ongoing, he did offer some basic observations. Those who uploaded a photo onto their profile were guessed more accurately than others—a difference of .34 to .30. While those who answered the question "the proudest thing I ever did was ... " were not guessed more accurately compared with those who left it blank, while those who answered the question "the most embarrassing thing I ever did was ... " were guessed with higher accuracy.
Because the study compares one's own personality test with another person's prediction based only on the profile, the differences in what people think and feel about themselves and what others predict can be illuminating, Evans says—particularly when that other person is an acquaintance.
"When you take a key person, like your spouse, and look at the mismatch, it's really revealing about yourself and about the misunderstanding and drama in your life," Evans says. "I think that if people will use the site and really look at the mismatches, those often are most revealing."
—Chris Wilson
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