What do your status updates tell others about your personality??

We can’t help but make assumptions sometimes. We do this even on our social networks. When you see one of your Facebook friends constantly engaging in a certain kind of Facebook activity – from being negative or fabulous to posting lots of food pictures – you start to wonder what’s the intent?

In a study published in September 2013, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania examined the language used in 75,000 Facebook profiles. Differences across ages, genders, and certain personality traits were found, leading scientist H. Andrew Schwartz to make certain predictions about the profile of each user. The study adds to a growing body of research suggesting that analyzing our activity on social media may be one of the best ways to learn about human psychology.

The researchers found that they could predict a user’s gender with 92 percent accuracy and could guess a user’s age within three years,more than half of the time.

To date, this is the largest study of its kind. Its magnitude allowed the researchers to use an “open-vocabulary approach”—that is, they let the data drive which words or phrases were considered most important. Most studies rely on a closed-vocabulary approach, using previously established lists of related words. That technique forces researchers to look at trait markers they already know, rather than discover new ones.

“Automatically clustering words into coherent topics allows one to potentially discover categories that might not have been anticipated,” the authors wrote. They were able to consider all words and thus adapt to the evolving language being used in social media.

The group was particularly interested in using this approach to determine users’ characteristics. Each participant filled out a questionnaire, scoring themselves on the “Big Five” personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. The researchers then looked at the profile updates for language that aligned with the participants’ test scores, clumping common words and phrases into word clouds. (Some of this data is publicly available at The World Well-Being Project.)

While some of the language is obvious and consistent with previous findings (for example, the idea that an extravert would talk about a “party”), other connections are less straightforward (Who knew that an extravert would also be likely to use the word “tanning” or “thinkin?”)

Some of the other novel discoveries included: introverts were more likely to talk about Japanese media like “anime” and “manga,” neurotic people were more likely to use the word “depressed,” people who were less neurotic mentioned social events like “vacation,” “church,” and “sports” more often, people who scored as less open were more likely to use shorthands like “2day” or “ur,” while older users were less likely to use the word “I” and more likely to mention family members.

This University of PA research comes on the heels of a similar study, which looked at the Facebook “likes” of over 58,000 participants who made their Facebook walls available to researchers and took a range of personality questionnaires and IQ tests. In that study, the results were even more striking. Based exclusively on the items people had “liked” on Facebook, researchers could discriminate between homosexual and heterosexual men 88% of the time, African Americans and Caucasians 95% of the time, and Democrats and Republicans 85% of the time. Researchers could even predict with 60% accuracy whether a person’s parents had split up before that person turned 21. One finding (which generated a lot of media attention) was the fact that people with high IQs tended to like curly fries.

In a way, all of this research has allowed us to take a step beyond simplistic stereotypes (think: extraverts are outgoing and introverts are shy) that have shaped the past near-century of personality psychology. It also generate hypotheses that create tremendous opportunities for further research. If emotionally stable people tend to talk more about athletics, is being part of a sports team a key component of a healthy lifestyle? If older people are more inclined to mention their family members, do relationships become more important as we age?

This research has the potential to provide more insight into what behaviors set different types of people apart and may make us reconsider our posts and “likes” in the future.

Does Facebook Help Users with Low Self-Esteem?

Some may argue that social networking sites could be a great tool for people with lower self-esteem. It is perceived that it gives them an opportunity to share information and build relationships which strengthen an individual’s confidence and personal esteem. But, the reality is that people with low self-esteem seem to behave counterproductively, bombarding their friends with negative tidbits about their lives and making themselves less likeable, according to a study in the Psychological Science journal.

A graduate student at the University of Waterloo, Amanda Forest , co-wrote the study with her advisor Joanne Wood. Within their research they found that people with low self-esteem were more likely to think that Facebook provided an opportunity to connect with other people, and to perceive it as a safe place that reduces the risk of awkward situations.

The study investigated what people actually wrote on Facebook in their last 10 status updates (what is visible to their Facebook friends and people in their network). These updates were rated as positive or negative. For each statement, a neutral Facebook user/coder also rated how much they liked the person who wrote the statement. Forest and Wood found that people with low self-esteem were more negative in their updates than others and less likely to “liked” by the coders in the study. It was also discovered that people with low self-esteem got more responses from their real Facebook friends when they post highly positive updates compared to less positive ones. People with high self-esteem, on the other hand, get more responses when they post negative items, perhaps because these are rarer for them.

In conclusion, people with low self-esteem may feel safe making personal disclosures on Facebook – but they may not be helping themselves. Forest notes that, if you are talking to somebody in person and you say something that the other person does not like, you usually get an indication that they are tired of the negativity (body language, comment, etc). However, on Facebook when people have a negative reaction to a post they usually keep it to themselves. Thus Facebook does not help users with low self-esteem gain confidence but rather gives them a false sense of confidence to post updates that overtime may be more isolating and less likely to be helpful in personal growth.