Slashdot Mirror
Your Online Profile Actually Tells a Lot About You
An anonymous reader writes "Despite all the media reports that your Facebook profile is giving the wrong impression, a psychological study shows people really can understand your personality from your online profile. Turns out you're not giving the wrong impression with your profile; you're giving the right impression to the wrong people. You can actually learn more about someone's Agreeableness from their online profile than from a first date."
The only remotely suprising thing was that women were both easier to understand and understood people better through profiles. Which is somewhat suprising, given the fact that 90% of people who use the internets are perverts and stalkers.
Some profile elements are more revealing than others? No shit. Of course my "favorite movies" is going to reveal more about me than my birth date. Assuming as I do that astrology is crap.
you were being completely honest. I know that I certainly would never think to put a fake age, fake name or fake job when I fill out a profile online. ...nosireebub.
You can actually learn more about someone's Agreeableness from their online profile than from a first date.
This is going to go over a lot of Slashdoter heads. We need to rephrase this. How about:
"You can actually learn more about someone's Agreeableness from their online profile than from the geekiness of their t-shirts."
or
"You can actually learn more about someone's Agreeableness from their online profile than from the quality of their soldering."
or
"You can actually learn more about someone's Agreeableness from their online profile than from the quality of their code."
Oh, wait. The last one is probably wrong.
...why I nuked that account. That and the mass collecting of private data...douchbags...
It also assumes that you put a decent amount of effort into it. What does a sparse profile say about me? That I'm lazy? That I don't really care about MySpace? Who knows?
People post too much crap about themselves online. Facebook has some decent "security" features about whom can see their profiles, but people tend leave the option checked "anyone in my network" can see my profile without realizing the ramifications. Anyway, yeah, does the FA really surprise anyone???
At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care that you're not here with me
It says you're the kind of person that has a Facebook profile.
You might be able to correctly guess someone's personality via their profile, but you could also get it completely wrong -- there just isn't enough info there and people can be complicated.
What's on their bookshelf? What pictures do they hang up? The difference is, we usually don't let strangers wander around our homes looking at these things.
There's no way you can tell if you'll be date raped without going out on that first date.
The fake answers are just as interesting in some ways. When I see a fave album list that looks too carefully constructed (that perfect mix of obscure and popular, with those two horrible but the entire planet loves songs) that tells me as much about the person as an honest list would.
open source modern art: laser taggi
I only found out that Mandy was male when I tried to grope her.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
TFA is pretty lightweight in its scope. Attempting to generalise about all online profiles is a big call. I will say however, that my facebook profile is pretty accurate - the big difference being that my facebook friends are my actual real life friends, so I can't create a new alter-ego because my friends will call BS.
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
I can tell you as an employer, we scan all the popular "social networking" sites before looking at someone as a possible employee. You kids out there who think it is cute to have suggestive crap on your site be forewarned...employers look at these sites too, not just the 18-30 year old hotties you are trying to seduce.
I set up a profile at classmates.com, but it really just contains a "puzzle encrypted" email address and a picture (not of me) from hotchickswithdouchebags.com to add a little je ne sais quoi.
It's really surprising just how much we disconnect ourselves from our many social inhibitions when communicating over the internet versus when we're actually interacting with others in public, even when we're fully aware that the internet is far less private than physically going outside to any real-world, public location. On a sub-conscious level, mere text on a screen is somehow far less threatening to us than seeing another person or hearing their voice, even though the opposite is probably more true. (Likely due to the lengthy delay in reaction to our own actions, in addition to severely limited feedback accompanying those reactions.)
Perhaps if we retired text communications in favor of real-time teleconferencing, where you actually have to see who you're talking to, you'd see people become a lot more careful about what they say and do on the internet from day to day.
8==8 Bones 8==8
So you've figured out from my facebook page that I'm an antisocial loser with no social skills. HOLY CRAP; are you some sort of detective?
That's funny. I don't even have a Facebook profile. It's a rather lame thing to have. I prefer to do my 'social networking' in the real world.
I bet these guys believe in the MMPI, too.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
...douchebags?
An analysis of your posting history shows too many "Informative" mods and not enough "Funny". I'm looking for someone a little less serious-minded, someone who's not afraid to risk a "Troll" mod in the spirit of adventure.
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
That is why on the NYT registration page I am a 16 year old female attorney from Afghanistan named Osama Bin Laden. Honest!
My rights don't need management.
what if i actually like obscure and popular music, and have bad taste, you insentitive clod!
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Or maybe that you actually cared about your security and the concept of identity theft. Or maybe you just prefer meeting gurls in real life, as opposed to some vague flirtation online that could easily have been with someone lying about their details.
Or maybe you are just way to busy spamming slashdot and raiding Sunwell (or whining on the AoC forums) to care about some stupid MySpace/Facebook page.
The Long Now Foundation
Talk about setting the bar high. Maybe if they had said third date I could save some money.
Yup,
---1 music player bumping the track "the thong song"
---4 flash movie players showing boy bands, men kissing and the finding nemo kung fu crab clip
---39 hotlinked images from music, tv, friends and familys, funny pictures to animated gifs
---10 different personality tests including whos your lover, best matched, which celeb looks like you, etc
---300+ friends that you know nothing about beyond what is on thier page
---the blog that contains why your last 3 relationships failed, why so emo and why did biker week turn out the way it did.
goes on and on and on...
Oh, all this from a nurse with a 4 year degree? Lets hire her!
lmao, I can learn alot about you..
You're my soul mate? I like the pretentious stuff everyone says they like but nobody really does, the popular stuff nobody wants to admit to liking, and everything in between. (Well with respect to movies more so than music.) I figure most people are like that. It's all in that mix and the stuff you choose to highlight.
open source modern art: laser taggi
I'm actually much more careful about my online persona than my offline one. Love, AC
So this is what happens to all posts where the connection is dropped because the feds just busted in on the poster as he was posting to /.
I dnt think that people who see my profile are so interested in knowing me .. thats y i wrote in the "About me" column as "As if you care sooo much " ..
I should remove the bloodninja quotes from my facebook profile. No wonder I don't get any dates :'(
I made up the whole Orion Blastar space pirate ninja from 4096AD profile to use to be anonymous on the Internet and not allow anyone to learn anything about me, long ago.
If you think I am really Orion Blastar, I got the Brooklyn bridge to sell you really cheap. Because you are the most gullible person alive if you actually think my online profiles are true and not fiction.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Nope. Most people, in my experience, genuinely like the 10 generic songs they hear on their favorite pop radio station. They might also like other stuff, but they won't like it any more no matter how good it is, so what's the point?
ResidntGeek
yes.. details certainly can be fake, but not everybody is as paranoid as your average slashdotter. The majority of people I know who use Facebook have a disgusting quantity of true details, without so much as a second thought as to why they should or should not be there.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/
Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
What's the nope in response too? I'm sort of failing to see where we disagree. I agree with you that quality doesn't impact taste in the least, but I've seen a lot of online profiles that don't want to admit that. (It tends to be a certain type of people who have those profiles, which is why they're important even while being untrue, but still.)
open source modern art: laser taggi
Well, we know a few things about you. One, that you like space fantasy fiction, at least somewhat. Also you're a computer oriented geek, because you chose a power of two for the year (4096). Geeks know their powers of 2 forwards and backwards.
This paper is not about Facebook. It's about a Facebook personality-assessment app ("YouJustGetMe") that allows people to do a personality self-assessment, then create a profile with the app based on likes and dislikes. This "YouJustGetMe" profile would then appear on the user's Facebook profile.
So the research question is not "Can people assess others' personalities based on their Facebook profiles," but, rather, "Can people assess others' personalities based on their own assessments of their own personalities," a very different thing. It then looked for interrater agreement between the writer of the profile and the viewer of the profile.
This is a salient point because what is revealed in a real Facebook profile is very little, and can actually be nothing (like mine--I just use it to keep tabs on my friends strewn around the world who use it). It's totally uncontrolled. The researchers addressed this by placing much tighter controls on the profile creation, limiting it to personality-specific items.
The research is still interesting, but not as interesting as the Slashdot summary makes it sound. It does, however, seem to have some major selection flaws (not a random sample), but I can't seem to load the paper to check on that.
I don't think these psychologists have read the chapter on how people lie about everything they put online. The only thing you can get from a Facebook profile is that the person is lame enough to *have* a facebook profile.
That's pretty much it. I spent a great deal of my time creating fake information about me that makes me look favorable for possible employers. According to the bits and pieces you find about me online when you enter my name in a search engine I'm an accomplished freelancing game creator, writing articles for a local newspaper, who spends his spare time as a volunteer with the fire brigade, and so on.
Actually, I have written a few games but hardly anything to write about, never wrote for a paper (I was doing computer maintainence for them, which must have somehow made me an editor...) and the last time I saw a fire department from the inside was in my youth (I'm just still on their roster, despite me moving away from there about 15 years ago).
Let's be honest here, employers assume that you lie on your CV. So they start looking for other sources of information about you, the the easiest is to run your name through Google (provided you're not John Smith or similar). That they're actually using it can be seen in my mailbox.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Finally got the paper to download. It's interesting, and was obviously a very serious study that required a lot of work. Good on them for that.
But the mean interrater correlation is 0.41, meaning that it only explains about 17% of the shared variance. This looks to me like another psych study that mistakes statistical significance for practical significance.
To put it another way, there was really only an average of 17% agreement between rater and writer in their assessments. What this study finds is that judging people based on their profile, while not completely useless, isn't very useful.
To put it another way... It's basically just as you would assume: You can get an idea of what someone is like based on what they present about themselves, but the picture is going to be far from complete.
So, let's rename this Slashdot article correctly: "Your Online Profile Actually Tells a Little About You!"
a/s/l?
I think most people would give out information like this, even or especially when they use fake names and birthdays.
15/f/Pakistan
So what you're saying is that it's bad taste to have too good of taste in a given subject?
And it's times like these that I feel totally lost and confused in this world.
I'm a 17 year old Caucasian law student and Olympic trainee for Tantric Beach Volleyball.
Will you go out with me?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
facebook sucks and its just a big brother scheme where corporations can monitor you and your friends every move. there are already facial recognition software and cameras setup in various cities across the globe.
does it make you feel more secure knowing that you're being monitored all the while you go for that walk to the corner store to get a bag of chips
or maybe go into a department store and they know you as soon as you enter
just wait, they'll be using this information to target you for personalized ads
then when you walk into these places or walk down the road the billboards will change to advertise you things related to your purchasing profile which they also happen to have on hand
people who get sucked into facebook annoy me to the nth degree and stop fucking sending me the god damned spam to view your shit profile which happens to be nothing but a "hey this person has a profile give us all YOUR personal information as well so you can actually SEE something"
FACEBOOK, FUCK YOU
That just tells me you're a pathological liar with a fetish for far-west Asian teens and extreme hatred of the US government.
And you also read the NY Times.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
n.t.
That is why on the NYT registration page I am a 16 year old female attorney from Afghanistan named Osama Bin Laden. Honest!
Sounds like the basis for a sitcom...
Communication operates at many levels.
You may agree that the specific subject is a subject of "low importance". However, what they are engaging in is building the conext of communication, which is a signal "I am here for you, sharing my time with a Null topic, and I am available if you have something more difficult to discuss."
Men often use the heuristic that such material "worsens the noise-signal ratio". At the extremes, you get taciturn men whose entire speech for the day is "Your wall's burning."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
You can actually learn more about someone's Agreeableness from their online profile than from a first date.
A statement only Slashdot readers could believe.
Property is theft.
All chickens are taken to slaughter, but they still have to spend their chicken-energy.
Facebook is a great big behavioral data collection engine which is perfectly suited for the monitoring and control of millions. Is it used this way? I don't know. I suspect there is far more data gleaned from our collective lifetimes spent traveling through the education and medical systems, and in adulthood, through the banking systems, than is collected from facebook. --And those other systems are either run directly by the government or are tightly intertwined with government, whereas Facebook is still somewhat private. Though I can certainly see how something like Facebook sheds light into areas which those previously mentioned systems have a harder time quantifying, namely your associations with other people. (Though, that kind of thing is not invisible; there are phone records and email records; Facebook just kind of collects it all with a nice GUI for the MIB's.)
However. . , it's still a system which binds friends and communities together. Much like the phone system. --You're not going to stop using the phone to call your parents or friends just because you KNOW the government is recording everything in paranoid anxiety.
Yeah, humans are hopelessly manipulable, perfect candidates for conquest, domination and liquidation on a whim. Be we still have to fall in love and make friends and exchange ideas. Even this post right now is easily traceable to yours truly, I have no doubt whatsoever. But am I going to stop living because there are monsters in our midst? Hmm. Nope. It's sort of a race to the finish line using the same track; we can share information and build strong ties as a community which can prepare and help prevent attack, and while we do this, the enemy learns all the clever ways it can attack by secretly watching as we form our communities. Who will win?
Not sure what the answer is, but the people I've seen who spend their days clinging to anger at the unfairness of it all tend to make themselves sick and miserable and don't generally DO anything productive with their knowledge. There are other ways, and communication is a vital part of it. And so is awareness. Knowing that Facebook makes you naked is important. What you choose to do after that is up to you.
-FL
are females allowed in pakistan?
Hi John Smith, I googled your name and it seems like you've done a lot with your life so far. You're hired!
"Negotiation" is one way to put it. In practice, you get a whole gamut ranging from outright submissive, to (rarely) threats of violence. I know at least one who's pretty proud that her negotiations with her late husband were along the lines of "you do thing my way, and I won't bash your head in." With various shades in between, that include:
- nagging. Literally pointing those perceived failings out again and again and again, until hopefully you get the idea that chest thumping doesn't work anyway.
- manipulation.
- indirect threats and manipulation. There are a couple of whole cultures where a woman's only power was gained by, for example, manipulating her sons against their father. Or I only have to look at my own deranged family, where grandma manipulated mom and dad against each other, and my mom tried more than once to manipulate me and my brother against each other. (Thankfully though, she's such a socially inept nerd, that it was just funny to see her try.)
- annoying passive aggression
- basically, "if you don't do as I say, you're getting no sex"
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically, _some_ women are nice, and _some_ are nasty in various ways. Sociopathy/Psychopathy exists in women too, not only in men, for example. Four times fewer, yes, but that's far from zero.
Note that I'm not especially vilifying women here. I'm just saying that there's a whole range of them, ranging from saint to Antichrist, so to speak. From Mother Theresa to such fine gals as Johanna Langefeld, Maria Mandl, and Elisabeth Volkenrath, who led the women's camp at Auschwitz. IIRC Maria Mandl alone ordered the death of _half_ _a_ _million_ women. She was known as "The Beast" and also known to have people killed for as little as looking at her. Or Ilse Koch, The Witch of Buchenwald. Now that's a sadistic gal.
In other words, cute, but as false as all blanket generalizations.
Again, spare me the blanket generalizations, please.
The grammar/spelling/punctuation trolls are a rather tiny group of trolls. Annoying and visible, yes, but in no way representative for a whole gender.
So, anyway, you found one message from one of those retards. And he was answering to a woman. Whop-de-do. They do that to anyone, and to each other.
How's that representative for males as a whole?
In fact, I'll go on a limb and say that most people on Slashdot, male or female, look down upon that group of retards. Most of us aim upwards, not find some "look, someone typoed a 5 letter words that I knew!" claims to glory. It's only when you're near the bottom of the proverbial barrel, that "look, there's someone (arguably) lower than me!!" starts looking like some claim to glory. Some people just are that low, have no achievements worth bragging about, and are building their sole claim to glory out of such "OMG, you typoed a 5 letter word that I know how to spell! You must be more stupid than me!!!" lameness. It's not even pedantry, it's being a worthless loser and knowing it. Nothing more.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Consider filling out just enough to let others find you online in the case of you being away from your hometown or a frequent traveler and have lost contact with old friends. I put a lot of correct information myself and people I know keep finding me on Social networks like facebook, hi5...etc
To be entirely fair, though:
1. I have seen extreme cases where the talk included no intention of communicating anything whatsoever.
2. It was by men too.
The most pathologic case I've seen was one co-worker who just couldn't shut up. Literally. You could go out of the office and hear him still talking in an empty room.
But to illustrate why I say that communication was not the purpose: I've had him come to me once to ask about what one of my methods did. The talk went sorta like this:
Me: "Well, that's easy. Let's look at this data object, 'cause that's what tells it what to do..."
Him: "Oh, I get it, it takes the user name and cross-references it in the other table and..."
Me: "Err...nope..."
Him: "... and then the contract number is put in an XML used via Wally's module and..."
Me: "No, that's not..."
Him: "... and then it prints stuff on the screen..."
Me: "Dude, you came to ask me. Please _listen_."
Him: "Yeah, but just to see if I got it right."
Me: "No, you got it all wrong. It's not printing anything yet, and..."
Him: "Oh, I get it. The user name is..."
Me: "Stop! Here it's for logging purposes _only_!"
Him: "... and then it's the other table that stores the rest of the info..."
I get annoyed at this point, go outside to smoke a cigarette. I take my time. I hear him faintly, still talking. I go back inside, he's still parked next to my desk, talking.
Him: "... and then I thought the chip was fried, but it turns out I just had to download new video drivers. But I had already reinstalled Windows, so I had to download all game patches all over again..."
I remember I needed some clarification from another guy on a totally unrelated matter. I was planning to write an email, but wth, let's see him in person. I leave Mr Chatterbox there and go talk to that other guy for some quarter of an hour. I come back, wouldn't you know it, he's still talking. I think he was up to what happened in his vacation.
It wasn't just signal-to-noise ratio. He just wasn't interested in anything I had to say about that module, or generally about anything. He just needed to ventilate his tonsils.
Ok, now that one was a pathologic case, and I'm not saying that anyone else is literally like that. (Hopefully;)
It does however make me think. I don't think most talks happen because we genuinely need to know something, or communicate something. Sure, it's inevitable that some information is exchanged too, even when it's useless and promptly forgotten. But that's not the purpose. The purpose is just to fill one's time.
Or to put it otherwise, look at Slashdot. How many people do you think are in this thread because they genuinely need to know about what you can infer from online profiles? How many are here genuinely to impart valuable expert knowledge? No, most of us are here simply to waste some time. The information exchange may exist, but it's more like side-effect than real purpose of the exercise.
Heck, in a lot of cases the actual topic isn't even side-effect, it's a mean to an end. The end being to have that Null conversation. See how many people watch football or whatever sport, just to have something to talk about at the pub the next day. They're not exchanging information about football, the information is just some extra effort in order to have a talk.
We're wired to need to _do_ something. Otherwise we get bored. And for some people (both men and women) talking is a way to not get bored. Nothing more.
And if I'm to get even more cynical, here's a parting thought: in a lot of cases the real information exchanged is neither the thing discussed, nor then "I am here for you, sharing my time with a Null topic, and I am available if you have something more difficult to discuss" message. I'm getting the impression that in a lot of cases the only real information is "let's see if you still pay attention to me" or similar.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
here here
Cousin!
One of the above statements is redundant - I'm not sure which :o)
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
My online profile shows that I prefer to remain anonymous
Since I don't have a Facebook account, I must be playing "hard to get."
Invenio via vel creo
gotta change some stuff on my profile
but I have had no such luck yet. I wish some smart, intellectual girl would stumble upon my Facebook profile. I joined the geekgirls group, but so far no messages to my sexy self. Until then, I will continue using my leisure time reading. I just finished "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and is was great. Now to move onto "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Once Diablo III is released, that will be my new love. Other than that, I have my right hand to give me lovin. Cheaper too, actually it is free! Other than the material for clean up.
"Without curiosity and knowledge, the mind is a vast void. Without the mind, curiosity and knowledge are nonexistent."
Green eyes, dark hair, intelligence. Tell me what you think you know.
Depends on context - which is better If your wall IS burning, sound of bucket being filled and water thrown or
"Hmm Call that a bucket, Dont you have a larger one?"
"When did you last clean this?" etc.
Still too many words !
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
There's no such thing as an average slashdotter.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
You mean people can create fake profiles on popular social networking sites?! I'm shocked...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thesquirrel/
According to the bits and pieces you find about me online when you enter my name in a search engine I'm an accomplished freelancing game creator, writing articles for a local newspaper, who spends his spare time as a volunteer with the fire brigade, and so on.
Plug my name into Google and of the at least half dozen people in North America with the same name as me, a semi-famous comedian fro Colorado fills the first several pages of hits. Once on slashdot I made this same point, and one poster, sure he had found my true identity, posted the address and phone number of some poor schmuck from Canada who had the same name as me.
Anyone who uses Google to find out about a prospective employee is incredibly stupid, and there's no way I would work for a fucktard like that. I mean, who wants to be unemployed in only six months when the firm goes bankrupt after having your blood pressure raised daily by an idiot who is dumb enough to think they can find you using the internet?
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
In summary for Slashdot users your profile can either:
1) Tell that you are a Karma whore .... 1) .... 2) .... 3) .... 4) ???? .... 5) Profit! :) )
2) Tell that you are always baiting to be flamed
3) You actually have good Karma
4) Never take anything seriously if everything is modded +5 Funny
5) Are way too serious and boring if everything is +5 Interesting
6) You ask too many questions if +5 interesting
7) Show you take too much pride in being the first at anything (first post or low UID)
8) Have too much spare time if you post on Slashdot!
9) If you link to Goatse you have a very troubled mind
10) Take advantage of others if you post an article on your website for ad-revenue
11) Fail to recognize patterns for posting dupe articles
12) Are greedy if you always post
13) You are Cowboy Neal. ( I think this was obligatory
Speaking of details, you think that's her real hair color? That her skin really looks like that? That she's that height? Those are her real nails? That she's acting interested because she likes you, not your wallet?
Boy, you're gonna get burned.
You can't take the sky from me...
I bet it's as accurate as this book.
The Secret Language of Birthdays: Personology Profiles for Each Day of the Year
http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Language-Birthdays-Personology-Profiles/dp/0670858579
It's a great coffee table book because everyone sees it and can't resist looking up what the book has to say about their birthday. They then flip it to a few family members to just see. You'll then get them telling you about their family/friends and if they match the book's profile or differ. It's a fun religious neutral book. ;) The authors describe the whole astrology and horoscope thing, but the way they really compiled most of the book was researching lots and lots of famous people and comparing them.
It's sort of like the make a list of your 10 most liked books, movies, video games, or even websites. and we'll know just how to stereotype you. There are days where I'd love to see the results if some AI data mined the census, face book, myspace, and google news to try to compile this book based on the info of everyone in the US. It would take an AI to do it, but I wonder if it would learn if there was anything useful or if it's a just for fun info.
There are other times that I'd want some one to seriously study astrology, history, and politics just to see if gravity or those visible lights in the sky have any effect on human politics or human migration patterns in general. It would be fun just to see the results.
Or maybe you just prefer meeting gurls in real life, as opposed to some vague flirtation online that could easily have been with someone lying about their details.
"Details" meaning "Gender"?
He's generalizing everyone else to make himself sound more interesting.
He's trying to make himself more interesting by saying no one else can like the obscure pretentious stuff because they're just trying to sound interesting. This is all an effort to make himself appear more interesting and deep because he's above trying to do things to get chicks. This is why I never answer the favorite band question. So am I calling out his fronting of fronting to sound more interesting myself?
He's pointing that out to make himself more interesting. I'm pointing out him pointing that out to make myself more interesting. This is why I never answer the favorite band when people ask me. It leads to this. Anyway I like White Stripes and Radiohead. OMG they're the best!
He's pointing that out to make himself sound more interesting. I'm pointing this out to make myself sound more interesting. This is why I never answer the my favorite band question... it leads to this. BTW I like Radiohead and White Stripes. OMG!! they're the best!
No, I'm just saying that a certain mix of answers read false.
open source modern art: laser taggi
You're anti-social.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
And you also read the NY Times.
+1 Redundant?
Your IP address is 192.168.0.1
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Finally got the paper to download. It's interesting, and was obviously a very serious study that required a lot of work. Good on them for that.
But the mean interrater correlation is 0.41, meaning that it only explains about 17% of the shared variance. This looks to me like another psych study that mistakes statistical significance for practical significance.
To put it another way, there was really only an average of 17% agreement between rater and writer in their assessments. What this study finds is that judging people based on their profile, while not completely useless, isn't very useful.
To put it another way... It's basically just as you would assume: You can get an idea of what someone is like based on what they present about themselves, but the picture is going to be far from complete.
So, let's rename this Slashdot article correctly: "Your Online Profile Actually Tells a Little About You!"
True that the interrater correlation was .41. True that the r-squared is 17%. But interpreting this...turns out that peers who have known each other for a long time and even married couples only correlate around .50 or 25%. So although your online profile doesn't tell everything about you, it tells more than what a stranger in a grocery store would see, and nearly as much as your friends see.
Check out the table down on the page here to see how online profiles compare to other sources of info in conveying your personality.
Let's be honest here, employers assume that you lie on your CV. So they start looking for other sources of information about you, the the easiest is to run your name through Google (provided you're not John Smith or similar). That they're actually using it can be seen in my mailbox.
My name isn't a common one, but if you look it up on Google, someone with the same name as me has been convicted of embezzlement.
That can't be good.
That is why I only date people without hair or facial features. At least then you know what you get. And I don't really have a wallet, and if I did there wouldn't be anything it in. So anyone interested in me pretty much have to be in it for my charming personality; it's all I have (took me five years of only living of cookies to ensure that none are interested in my body either). Take that superficial society!
The Long Now Foundation
Of course there is. He is 97.5% male, 176cm tall, 283.7 lbs, has 1.78 arms, 8.43 toes and 0.83 children. And prefers orange Jello to red.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
Plug my name into Google and of the at least half dozen people in North America with the same name as me
I dare you to try mine
What the hell is with the moderation lately?
-1 Offtopic
Hmmm, that has to be one of the most inaccurate personality tests I have taken.
I have no idea why but it was wrong on more points than these types of things typically are.
It could be because I had a hard time answering some of the questions because they assume I know what they are asking (I may be in the Autistic spectrum which doesn't help). The result was very inaccurate though. It seems like many of the questions may be incorrectly weighted or something.
And now I have to find someone else's musical taste list to copy...
Ya or plus 1 funny maybe. I get the most inane mod points whenever I try to be funny.
Sorry, I don't see the table you're referring to.
I see where you're going with that, but doesn't it bother you that the r for married couples is only 0.50? I would argue that online profiles are such bad indicators of (people's self-assessment of their own) personality that they render even the person you know best virtually unrecognizable!
So yeah, a complete stranger doesn't fare much worse than your husband or wife, but, to me, that's not a good thing!
I suspect some major problems with the self-report data and/or the information selected to represent themselves, to be honest.
It's like this: When people ask me what kind of music I like, I say industrial. And it's true. I have lots and lots of industrial, from the 70s until now. I love it. But you know what the last music I played on my iPod was? Amy Winehouse. Before that? Jimmie Dale Gilmore (country!). Okay, so a few days ago I listened to NIN, but Trent's not really that industrial anymore.
So why do I say "industrial?" Because it sets me apart and I like to think it makes me look cool. It hints at my industrial goth past, before the ties and statistics.
But does it have anything to do with who I am today? No. I present what I want you to think about me; not what I am. And I think this behavior probably accounts for the giant pink elephant of error in this study.
I teach the odd workshop on using survey data in (language acquisition) research, and I always begin and end the thing with "remember that people lie, so if there's a better way of getting the data, do it." This is why!
To put it another way... It's basically just as you would assume: You can get an idea of what someone is like based on what they present about themselves, but the picture is going to be far from complete.
Ahhhh psych studies. Using statistics to prove the bleeding obvious, and earning a living at it. Where do I sign up?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The fact that you went to the effort to put in fake information tells a good bit about yourself.
Like I said, it works certainly not in an English speaking country. Too many of them around, too high a chance that someone has the same name as you. The same applies to other languages that are spoken in a fairly large amounts of the countries. Like I said, it won't work for John Smith or Juan Gonzales.
It's different when you have a name that is almost unique on the planet.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Please, I'm so tired of that sentiment on Slashdot.
The point of psych research is to quantify. It is rare that you find something that isn't obvious... in hindsight. The real point is to get it down, on paper, with a quantitative measure. This narrows and guides the discussion, allowing for alternative hypotheses to be created and tested.
Furthermore, statistics doesn't "prove" anything--it just says how likely it is that something is not random. This is useful. It is useful to know that what we think is happening is indeed what's happening.
You know what you would have said if this study had found massive correlations between rater and writer?
"Well, of course! The people put down what they were like, and then people knew what they were like! Ahhhh psych studies. Using statistics to prove the bleeding obvious, and earning a living at it. Where do I sign up?"
--The thing about psych findings is that they should wash with our experience of the world. They should predict individual data points in our lives. If they don't, either the study was flawed, or our understanding is flawed (fairly unlikely).
In the case of the Slashdot title, I felt that the findings reported didn't wash. So I looked at the study, and found that, as expected, the findings were not robust enough for me to be convinced to reject my hypothesis that online profiles tell one little about the person writing them. In fact, I'd say that the findings confirm this hypothesis, in the real world. The researcher has shown that the effect is not random, but I pointed out that, in real-world terms, that doesn't cut it.
This is psychology. Making hypotheses about the human experience, testing them, and then arguing about which seemingly equally plausible hypothesis is closer to the truth. Then figuring out how to test it, then testing it.
You know, the scientific method.
Psych is a mixed-class field. We pull from biology, sociology, neurology, and lots of mathematics. This is what irritates pure-class scientists, and what irritates pure-class humanities people. We actually try to apply the scientific method to the human condition.
None of us would argue that what we're doing is akin to curing cancer. None of us would argue that it was akin to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. But what we are at least trying to do is unlock the mysteries of our experience of the universe. To quantify it and make it align with the findings in the harder sciences.
It's not easy, and most studies find nothing. But as I always tell my students and my colleagues who come for research design help: Even finding nothing is finding something.
The real trouble is that it's hard to get "nothing" published, even though it is often more interesting, than finding "something," so there is intense career pressure to, as I think this study is an example of, convince yourself that you found something when you actually found nothing.
That could apply to almost all Slashdot readers. So what was your point again?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
> That could apply to almost all Slashdot readers.
Oh, yeah. I overlooked that. Thanks for pointing it out.
So... We also know that you're probably a, um, "lonely" (shall we say) male who lives in his mom's basement.
Prepare for the targeted ads.
No I don't live in my mother's basement and I am married. But you won't get that from my profile. Which means it works.:)
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Please, I'm so tired of that sentiment on Slashdot.
Too bad. It's well deserved.
The point of psych research is to quantify.
There is a difference between quantifying something scientifically and assigning it a number.
It is rare that you find something that isn't obvious... in hindsight.
It is rare that you read about a psych study on /. where it wasn't obvious with foresight.
Furthermore, statistics doesn't "prove" anything--it just says how likely it is that something is not random. This is useful. It is useful to know that what we think is happening is indeed what's happening.
Yes you're right, a statistical correlation is just that. Proving causation is a different kettle of fish.
There are subjects that are worthy of study, and then there's garbage. For example I could easily do a statistical analysis of how much my toenails grow. Correlate it to the season, what I was eating, what I was watching. However a statistical study with a sample size of 10 (toes) isn't useful. Even with a much larger sample size, you have to have a goal. Are we studying toenail growth for a reason? Is there anything interesting at all that we've learnt from the study? Could the time and resources be better spent on other lines of enquiry.
You know, the scientific method.
Yes. Actually I have a Masters in Astronomy. What of it.
Psych is a mixed-class field. We pull from biology, sociology, neurology, and lots of mathematics.
A lot of Psych and Medicine is completely unscientific. I've seen doctors come to bone headed conclusions that aren't supported by the evidence laid before them. That doesn't make the study of medicine worthless, but it speaks volumes about the practioner. Likewise all I see here is a worthless study that comes to no good conlcusion and bears no new insight. Perhaps it was a null result in which case why report it on /. of all places. It's suppose to be news for nerds, not a catalogue of the boring and obvious.
Now are you done ranting? That and making assumptions about who you're talking to seem to be your fortes.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Yes, true, but most peoples' names aren't like that. Any idea how many Johnsons are in the Chcago phone book? The movie Die Hard made a joke of it, with the black FBI agent and the white FBI agent both named Johnson. "No relation" one says of the other.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
A well-done sparse profile answers the basic question of "Who the hell is this person?"
If you're trying to get laid on MySpace instead of face-to-face contact, well, you're doing it wrong.
The thing I find annoying about psychology is best illustrated by an example from the Chicago Tribune Magazine. There was some woman working in advertising using psychology, who claimed to know what men want, then bemoaned her inability finding one. All I'm asking for is say, at least the level of understanding that spam emails selling ebooks about being "cocky and funny" for success picking up women have.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.