Researchers use Facebook data to predict users' age, gender and personality traits

(PHOTO:) Word clouds that compare the language that extraverts (top) and introverts (bottom) used in their status messages.

In the age of social media, people's inner lives are increasingly recorded through the language they use online. With this in mind, an interdisciplinary group of University of Pennsylvania researchers is interested in whether a computational analysis of this language can provide as much, or more, insight into their personalities as traditional methods used by psychologists, such as self-reported surveys and questionnaires.



In a recent study, published in the journalPLOS ONE, 75,000 people voluntarily completed a common personality questionnaire through a Facebook application and made their Facebook status updates available for research purposes. The researchers then looked for overall linguistic patterns in the volunteers' language.

Their analysis allowed them to generate computer models that were able to predict the individuals' age, gender and their responses on the personality questionnaires they took. These prediction models were surprisingly accurate. For example, the researchers were correct 92 percent of the time when predicting users' gender based only on the la
nguage of their status updates.

The success of this "open" approach suggests new ways of researching connections between personality traits and behaviors and measuring the effectiveness ofpsychological interventions.


READ MORE (EXTERNAL LINK)

CLICK HERE FOR MOBILE SITE VIEWING (open using mobile opera mini or uc web browser)

LIKE VEECUBED ON FACEBOOK

Facebook like

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER

Twitter Handle

ARE YOU A MEMBER? JOIN US TODAY AT VEECUBED!

Be a member of this site