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.
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
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?
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
I know what you mean: I'm naked while typing this.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I think she wants to have sex with me.
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.
"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.