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Algorithm predicts Five Factor personality type better than Facebook friends

killerpopiller 12y ago
are partners good "matches" if their 5-factor personalities are approaching congruence?
- svachalek 12y ago
  That's a little off topic and I think you can probably find some relevant articles on the web but I remember reading about that before. As I remember, matching openness is pretty important for compatibility purposes, for neuroticism the important thing is that one or both scores are low, and for the others there are various advantages/disadvantages to matching up.
kelukelugames 12y ago
Trying to explain the results gives me a headache. "Programmers" indicates shyness makes sense but "In n' Out" burgers means calm and relaxed?
- jameshart 12y ago
  In n' Out Burgers correlates with California, which correlates with NOT being from the Northeast, which correlates with being, relatively, calm and relaxed.
  - sehr 12y ago
    Why are Californians chiller than others? I wonder if it's actually true
    - kleer001 12y ago
      Californian here. Yes, we are. It's the nice weather.
- Romdeau 12y ago
  It's because you're looking at it from the wrong direction. The indicators are selected because people who are shy have a higher than average likelihood of liking "programmers". If you average out a bunch of likes and you know the general personality types of people who like those groups you end up with a pretty good general picture of someones personality. I really want to see this run on one of those profiles that facebook marketing clickbots use.
stolio 12y ago
I had a whole joke I just had to erase because it was based on there being no way all the things in that list having facebook pages. I thought it was nonsense. But I was wrong: https://www.facebook.com/pages/I-hate-it-when-people-lie-to-me/322361002793 https://www.facebook.com/pages/I-hate-it-when-people-lie-to-... https://www.facebook.com/pages/Uncontrollable-swearing-after-stubbing-your-toe-in-a-dark-room/70621254406 https://www.facebook.com/pages/Uncontrollable-swearing-after... The list makes much more sense now
siegecraft 12y ago
This is like every undergraduate's machine learning first project ever, right up there with "using twitter and sentiment analysis to predict ____"
therealdrag0 12y ago
Isn't it a bit sandy of a foundation to base the whole thing on self-judgments? Is it surprising that self-judged personality tests is going to correlate well with self-picked likes?
- peteretep 12y ago
  It's not self-judgements, it's people expressing a like for something completely unrelated. Nobody "Like"d Nikki Minaj because they were hoping to show themselves as Outgoing and Active.
- gwern 12y ago
  The Big Five has a lot of external validity (as do the regression estimates of Big Five, if you read the paper), so that's fine. If things like Conscientiousness really do predict income, longevity, etc, then even if they're a 'self-judgment', why is that a problem.
- threatofrain 12y ago
  These self judgments also tend to be correlated with judgments made by friends, family, spouse, therapist, and with personality tests. In other words, even though there are differences between the groups, people are relatively self-aware. I'd be interested to see here if friends in face-to-face contexts perform similarly to the Facebook context.
- Houshalter 12y ago
  I don't think it's self judgement, they are asked to take a personality test which is a bunch of questions. The personality traits are literally defined as the way people answer the questions on the test.
idiotclock 12y ago
The message is that our personalities are encapsulated by objects and media. These items of evident importance are of course legitimated by the benevolence of facebook's curation. Facebook is not a social experiment, it's a marketing tool. Anyway, the accuracy of the study depends on a self-report.
- dkarapetyan 12y ago
  Right, the goal is to convince marketers that the digital shadow and the meat casting that shadow are one and the same.
gweinberg 12y ago
Based on the likes chart, I've concluded my big 5 profile is "grumpy old fart that doesn't like anything".
- cheepin 12y ago
  I came to that conclusion when they told me "Sorry, it looks like you don’t have a sufficient number of Facebook Likes for us to generate an accurate enough prediction!"
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

are partners good "matches" if their 5-factor personalities are approaching congruence?

svachalek 12y ago
That's a little off topic and I think you can probably find some relevant articles on the web but I remember reading about that before. As I remember, matching openness is pretty important for compatibility purposes, for neuroticism the important thing is that one or both scores are low, and for the others there are various advantages/disadvantages to matching up.

Trying to explain the results gives me a headache. "Programmers" indicates shyness makes sense but "In n' Out" burgers means calm and relaxed?

jameshart 12y ago
In n' Out Burgers correlates with California, which correlates with NOT being from the Northeast, which correlates with being, relatively, calm and relaxed.
- sehr 12y ago
  Why are Californians chiller than others? I wonder if it's actually true
  - kleer001 12y ago
    Californian here. Yes, we are. It's the nice weather.
Romdeau 12y ago
It's because you're looking at it from the wrong direction. The indicators are selected because people who are shy have a higher than average likelihood of liking "programmers". If you average out a bunch of likes and you know the general personality types of people who like those groups you end up with a pretty good general picture of someones personality. I really want to see this run on one of those profiles that facebook marketing clickbots use.

stolio 12y ago

I had a whole joke I just had to erase because it was based on there being no way all the things in that list having facebook pages. I thought it was nonsense. But I was wrong: https://www.facebook.com/pages/I-hate-it-when-people-lie-to-me/322361002793 https://www.facebook.com/pages/I-hate-it-when-people-lie-to-... https://www.facebook.com/pages/Uncontrollable-swearing-after-stubbing-your-toe-in-a-dark-room/70621254406 https://www.facebook.com/pages/Uncontrollable-swearing-after... The list makes much more sense now

siegecraft 12y ago

This is like every undergraduate's machine learning first project ever, right up there with "using twitter and sentiment analysis to predict ____"

therealdrag0 12y ago

Isn't it a bit sandy of a foundation to base the whole thing on self-judgments? Is it surprising that self-judged personality tests is going to correlate well with self-picked likes?

peteretep 12y ago
It's not self-judgements, it's people expressing a like for something completely unrelated. Nobody "Like"d Nikki Minaj because they were hoping to show themselves as Outgoing and Active.
gwern 12y ago
The Big Five has a lot of external validity (as do the regression estimates of Big Five, if you read the paper), so that's fine. If things like Conscientiousness really do predict income, longevity, etc, then even if they're a 'self-judgment', why is that a problem.
threatofrain 12y ago
These self judgments also tend to be correlated with judgments made by friends, family, spouse, therapist, and with personality tests. In other words, even though there are differences between the groups, people are relatively self-aware. I'd be interested to see here if friends in face-to-face contexts perform similarly to the Facebook context.
Houshalter 12y ago
I don't think it's self judgement, they are asked to take a personality test which is a bunch of questions. The personality traits are literally defined as the way people answer the questions on the test.

idiotclock 12y ago

The message is that our personalities are encapsulated by objects and media. These items of evident importance are of course legitimated by the benevolence of facebook's curation. Facebook is not a social experiment, it's a marketing tool. Anyway, the accuracy of the study depends on a self-report.

dkarapetyan 12y ago
Right, the goal is to convince marketers that the digital shadow and the meat casting that shadow are one and the same.

gweinberg 12y ago

Based on the likes chart, I've concluded my big 5 profile is "grumpy old fart that doesn't like anything".

cheepin 12y ago
I came to that conclusion when they told me "Sorry, it looks like you don’t have a sufficient number of Facebook Likes for us to generate an accurate enough prediction!"

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]