Using Facebook Status Updates To See What Kind Of Person You Are
By Melony Roy
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- A group of University of Pennsylvania researchers studied the Facebook status updates of 75,000 volunteers and have found an entirely different way to analyze human personality.
Researchers at Penn used social media to understand how "updates" and "likes" differ between personality types.
Computer and Information scientist Andrew Schwartz says, "we were able to predict people's gender 9 times out of 10 and it was a little surprising to me that a statistical model could get such a high accuracy just looking at status updates."
Through a Facebook app, volunteers completed a personality questionnaire, scoring themselves on the "Big Five" personality traits.
"We found that people who mention more sports and social activities are more stable. For conscientious people not only do they talk more about business and planning, they also talked a lot about weekends and vacations," said Schwartz.
The researchers hope to use their findings to provide more insight into what behavior sets different types of people apart.
