Science

Your computer might know you even better than your friends do

Your computer might know you even better than your friends do
Based on nothing but Facebook "likes," a computer is able to judge a person's personality traits more accurately than their friends and family can (Photo: Shutterstock)
Based on nothing but Facebook "likes," a computer is able to judge a person's personality traits more accurately than their friends and family can (Photo: Shutterstock)
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Based on nothing but Facebook "likes," a computer is able to judge a person's personality traits more accurately than their friends and family can (Photo: Shutterstock)
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Based on nothing but Facebook "likes," a computer is able to judge a person's personality traits more accurately than their friends and family can (Photo: Shutterstock)

New research has found that computers can "judge" personality traits far more precisely than previously thought. The study found that it is possible for computers to draw inferences about a person as accurately as their spouse can. Even then, the judgements were based only on Facebook "likes."

Jointly run between Stanford University and the University of Cambridge, the study sought to find out how a computer's answers to questions about an individual would compare to those of their friends and family. A total of 86,220 volunteers provided answers to questions about themselves regarding the five basic personality dimensions of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. A standard, 100-item long personality questionnaire was used to gather the data.

Friends and family of each volunteer were then asked to provide their judgement of the individual's personality based on their existing knowledge of the person, via a 10-item questionnaire. The same questions were put to a computer model that answered them based on the analysis of what articles, videos, artists and other items the volunteers had "liked" on Facebook.

The relationship of human respondents to the volunteers was categorized under titles including colleague, friend, roommate, family-member or spouse. It was found that the computer model was able to more accurately predict answers of the volunteers than a colleague by analyzing 10 likes, than a friend or a roommate with 70 likes, than a family-member with 150 likes and than a spouse with 300 likes.

"This is an emphatic demonstration of the ability of a person's psychological traits to be discovered by an analysis of data, not requiring any person-to-person interaction," the researchers noted. "It shows that machines can get to know us better than we'd previously thought, a crucial step in interactions between people and computers."

Co-lead author and postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Department of Computer Science Michal Kosinski suggests that computers have a number of advantages over humans where personality analysis is concerned. In particular, he says, they are able to retain, access and analyze large quantities of data in ways that humans are not optimized to do.

A paper on the research was recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Source: Stanford University

1 comment
1 comment
PRice
There are many elements to this study. Let’s take one – impulsivity – which should be a multifaceted judgment relating to one’s own feeling brain and especially lower brain, whose signature is instinctual survival reactions.
The self-assessed correlation score was .52, which was better than the computer score of .28, which was better than the .26 social contacts score.
I interpret the impulsivity scores as people internally knowing who they really are better than they display externally. A finding of the “duh” variety, though not counter to the study’s headlines.
What do you think about this study’s statement? “Furthermore, in the future, people might abandon their own psychological judgments and rely on computers when making important life decisions, such as choosing activities, career paths, or even romantic partners. It is possible that such data-driven decisions will improve people’s lives.”
I think that’s generally possible. Whether that’s individually possible depends on who you really are.
If all your life you’ve accepted being constantly told what to do, and accepted being forced to do things “for your own good” then yes, you may accept a computer program as a substitute for your parents’ or some other external party’s authority over your life.
If this describes you, I ask: When do you get to live your own life?
http://surfaceyourrealself.com/2015/02/18/when-do-you-get-to-live-your-own-life-surfaceyourrealself/