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Your Online Profile Actually Tells a Lot About You
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Jun 29, 2008 08:43 PM
from the explains-my-dating-life dept.
from the explains-my-dating-life dept.
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."
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Submission: Your online profile actually tells a lot about you by Anonymous Coward
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Of course this assumes that when you filled it out (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Of course this assumes that when you filled it (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Of course this assumes that when you filled it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Of course this assumes that when you filled it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Of course this assumes that when you filled it (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Of course this assumes that when you filled it (Score:5, Funny)
That is why on the NYT registration page I am a 16 year old female attorney from Afghanistan named Osama Bin Laden. Honest!
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Re:Of course this assumes that when you filled it (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:Of course this assumes that when you filled it (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Of course this assumes that when you filled it (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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Just another case of... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just another case of... (Score:4, Interesting)
Right and the peacock unfurls its huge tail without realizing the full ramifications either.
A lot of animals do silly or risky stuff to try to show off to potential mates.
The people using facebook, myspace etc are no different.
If some grey suit doesn't hire some girl just because she or someone posted a pic of her half naked and drunk on facebook, despite her proven skills in the line of work, she's probably better off working elsewhere.
Other bosses might just hire people who'd make their company a more fun place to be in.
Now if you see that person has a big problem with alcohol (there might be other clues or signs) then sure don't hire.
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I agree (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I agree (Score:5, Insightful)
and thereby, most surely, are a target market.
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The In-security Blanket (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The In-security Blanket (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:The In-security Blanket (Score:4, Funny)
I shudder to think where you work.
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Re:The In-security Blanket (Score:4, Funny)
I shudder to think where you work, at 10PM, on a Sunday.
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Re:The In-security Blanket (Score:4, Interesting)
Our intuitions about safety don't work because there may be nothing to trigger our alarms.
My advice to minors about posting personal information is to ask themselves whether they'd be OK with having the creepiest person in the neighborhood see it. The creepiest person online is obviously a lot worse, but the creepiest person in the neighborhood is a concrete concept that their brain's safety module has already sized up.
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Gold star for you (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gold star for you (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Gold star for you (Score:5, Funny)
So you've figured out from my facebook page that I'm an antisocial loser with no social skills.
It was only a hunch until you posted on Slashdot as well.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
HOLY CRAP; are you some sort of detective?
DUH... That's what my profile says, isn't it?
I'm sorry; I can't go out with you. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Rand(om) but somewhat applicable (Score:3, Insightful)
Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.
Re:Rand(om) but somewhat applicable (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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Summary incorrect. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Summary incorrect. --Caveats (Score:5, Informative)
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!"
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Yuhhuh (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Of Chickens and Men (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Duh (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Duh (Score:4, Insightful)
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... [slashdot.org] 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.
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Generalize much? :P (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
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Re:Generalize much? :P (Score:5, Funny)
"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.
Everyone knows it's "typod". It's 5 letters, not 6. Dumbass.
Ah, this is going to be one to tell my grandkids in The Sims. How they will laugh and admire me :)
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Re:Talking without communicating?? (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
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To be entirely fair, though (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Duh (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems to be a few new studies that simply find that women want to talk, not communicate.
It's more subtle than that. Men tend to communicate mainly ideationally, in other words what they communicate is straightforward facts contained directly in the words. Women are much more inclined to communicate phatically, which is to say that the direct meaning of the words is less important, but the nature of the utterance is communicating a lot about relationships. So when women talk they are communicating, but when men look at the simple meaning of the words they are sometimes looking in the wrong place to find the communication.
Key words in this posting are, of course, "tend", "inclined" and "sometimes".
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Re:Duh (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Duh (Score:4, Funny)
That's a design flaw in your parser-it should know to recognize "-" as the preface to a new dependent clause.
My sig is ADD+sparkles, so I'd be surprised if it didn't make people go cross eyed.
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Re:Duh (Score:4, Funny)
Well, perhaps it's because you're a woman, and you *did* say 'string-drop'. Which gets me all flustered and confused.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:lightweight article (Score:5, Interesting)
As you said, though, it does come down to whom you befriend on Facebook - your real life friends, your online friends or a combination.
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Re:lightweight article (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Employers look! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I suggest to everyone looking for a job to do the same.
Or better yet, make a fake facebook profile that totally fluffs all the stuff an employer would be looking for -- photoshop yourself in to pictures with important people in your field, talk about your work on important projects, talk about your social connections with management at potential customers, venture capitalists, etc. The kind of stuff you might not put on a formal resume, but the kind of stuff that would make you appear as a very valuable asset.
Just make sure NOT to mention it to them at all, le
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And a select subset of my profile is available for all to see. If a potential employer looks me up they will see a perfectly normal socially adjusted person who likes watching soccer.
I consider my public profile as an additional resume.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a security flaw, sure.
But somehow I don't think many competent small businesses and HR departments going to ThePirateBay to find out what pictures you and I might be taking. In fact, I don't imagine them spending more than a couple minutes trying to find possible MySpace or Facebook profiles.
Re:Employers look! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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