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."
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.
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.
The only remotely suprising thing was that women were both easier to understand and understood people better through profiles.
For me it isn't, but maybe just 'cause I'm a girl who's spent far too much time in heavily female online communities. I think it's just an extension of how people work in the real world; women, just by generally being more communicative (not being sexist so much as that's what most studies find), drop more hints, and probably 'cause they drop so many know what to look for.
open source modern art: laser taggi
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
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?
My facebook profile is hidden from all searches, you can't find it unless I add you first.
Just go to Privacy > Search
There choose:
Search visibiliy > Friends
Uncheck all boxes and Save changes.
I suggest to everyone looking for a job to do the same.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
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
Ah, but you don't actually need to use your real name - just a given name and a surname. As an example, I used to call myself "Devoc Winter" before I deleted my account. Nothing whatsoever like my real name, so some of my real life friends did call BS at first, but quite a few of them don't use their real names either.
As you said, though, it does come down to whom you befriend on Facebook - your real life friends, your online friends or a combination.
I can tell you as an employer, we scan all the popular "social networking" sites before looking at someone as a possible employee.
Hell, that's what I'm counting on - my own personal website has a far more diversified list of my projects (as well as source code, schematics, and other bits and pieces) than you'll ever get from a resume. Of course then again it's not on some trendy "social network" site - it's my name, as a domain, that I've owned for years. I figure, if they're going to look, why not show off? (And not in the suggestive 18-25 girl sense - though being single again, I wish our recruiters would look for that sort of thing.)
I think she wants to have sex with me.
They don't. You can lie. There are a quite a few Facebook profiles for fictional characters. I know a few people who only list their first name and last initial. But that's not the point. If you have a Facebook profile it is because you want people to be able to find it and contact you. Lying about your name would just be pointless, especially if you are signed up on a college network which will list your .edu e-mail address which could be easily looked up in a directory anyway. I have no problem with pesudo-anonymous social networking, but that is not what Facebook is for.
Centralization breaks the internet.
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.
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!"
I tend to think their vocal chords are connected neurally to the parts of their brain that think whereas men can think without their vocal chords moving.
I tend to think that men use their vocal chords as a secondary tactic after "Hulk Smash!" Women are physically smaller, so they can't generally get their way through force. Women have to manage with what they have: negotiation. If women simply point out mens' failings, men start pounding their chests to demonstrate their dominance. Who needs a brain or tact when might makes right? Case in point... Behold: pedantic dweebs berating what is probably the only woman on /. for failing to use the — code to produce a — symbol. Thanks to their quick actions, the female is quieted and they can resume wanking it and flaming each other to assert their dominance on the internet's biggest sausage party.
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.
I'll bite: You are a pasty teenage boy with an unconscious sexual desire for your mother.
You desire a lower slashdot id because you believe that will give you more status, but you haven't one because you spend your time posting to male dominated, english language forums and surfing porn.
;)
Your philosophy on life is a cross between an advertisement for a breakfast cereal and a science fiction space opera.
You believe trolls are a higher form of evolution.
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
"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.
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.
... he wrote on Slashdot.