Your (Facebook) Personality

Pop-quiz hotshot: a friend wants to set you up with her friend and all you have is some vague information and access to her/his Facebook profile, what do you do? (There are no hostages to shoot) The greater questions I would like to address is what can one learn about another individual based on his/her FB profile and whether this information is of any significance.

This is not a simple topic. I am truly fascinated by what Facebook has become and how it has revolutionized the way we interact with one another. Never before could one have access to a wealth of detailed information about thousands of individuals at the click of a button.

It’s a scary thought. Some are more sensitive to this than others. There are those whose profile will contain little information aside from a single picture (if that) and will only allow access to their FB friends. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are those who have 2 pages worth of information on their page, hundreds of pictures (in the most private of circumstances), personal conversations on their walls, and links to their blog. This individual may very well grant access to their “personal” life to the entire New York City network

So this question cannot be given a simple answer as people treat their Facebook identity differently. But even this itself is telling. The latter individual is most probably more of an exhibitionist person, while the former is likely more private. But it is clear that the more information there is to work with the more insight one can have into someone’s personality.

In order to determine the value of information on Facebook profiles as clues to a person’s personality, we first must analyze how we learn about others’ personality in general. In a Personality class we learned of 4 types of information that one can utilize in order to gain an understanding of an individual: Self report data, informant data, behavioral data, and laboratory data. (Laboratory data is not relevant to this discussion, as no one is conducting experiments to learn information about a person in his/her social strata.)

Informant data is when we learn about a person from a third party. As I am sure we have all experienced this can be grossly inaccurate. I was once warned against rooming with a particular individual for a list of reasons. As it turned out, this person became one of my favorite roommates of all time (not referring to capital punisher. He is awful.) So informant data is largely subject to biases of the informant.

Self-report data is a person describing himself. Once again this is also subject to the person’s biases to view himself in the most positive light. Most of us consider ourselves to be honest people, but amongst us there will certainly be a bell curve of honesty. So the information can also be vague. As Dungeon Dweller pointed out, “everyone is a nice person.”

Behavioral Data, I believe is the most accurate way to understand a person. A person is not what someone else says he is, not even what he himself says he is, but rather he is what he does. Actions speak louder than words. A person you observe consistently being nice and honest is, in all probability, worthy of the descriptions “nice” and “honest”. And these terms in your mind won’t be vague, but will be qualified with the examples witnessed.

But behavioral data is not only a person’s deeds but also anything she does. A sample of an individual’s writing is behavioral data. The food he eats, the clothing she wears, people he befriends, even her scent is all behavioral data that may or may not be valuable information for “judging” another individual. (Please don’t take this out of context – I do not mean judging in the pejorative sense. Judging is the method through which we understand the world we live in.)

A Facebook profile contains some self data (primarily the ‘about me’ section), but most importantly a mother load of behavioral data. This can be found almost everywhere on the page. Here are the top 3 sources

#1 Pictures. A person who has 600 pictures, 90% of which are of him smashed at a bar making out with a different girl in each series is most probably quite different than the guy who has 100 pictures of himself at mock trial. Pictures and albums are like a pictorial history of the person’s last couple of years. (For those of you who have used Facebook for years and have accumulated a bunch of pictures, see if you can notice any aging from the first to the last. wild.)

#2 Info. Each of the personal information items is a great resource of information about an individual. I truly believe you can really get a good understanding of a person based on their favorite movies, music, books, and quotations.

Try looking at this backwards. Look at the profile of a friend you know well, look at how they responded to these fields, and you will most often find it making perfect sense given the personality of the person. (You may argue that this is hindsight bias, i.e. you are morphing these items into your understanding of the individual to confirm to yourself that you in fact know him. But my experience has convinced me otherwise.)

To a great extent we are what we love (actually a quote on my FB page.) So these items that express the things we love are a large part of who we are. Personally, I know my identity is inseparable to my music.

#3 Wall posts. Reading what people write on another’s wall is very telling. Some profile walls are speckled with posts of great adoration. “I miss you so much, when are we gonna hang out.” Wall-to-wall, when available, allows you to see how the person interacts with his friends, how he writes. What type of comments he makes on his friends’ photos, are they nice? Are they enlightening? These, I believe reveal much about a person.

Just a few caveats before I conclude:

I once told someone about this thought and she seemed pretty disgusted. “Uch,” she said, “you analyze people’s FB profiles!?” She made me feel like some stalker or pervert. Another, more rational friend told me, “sure, everyone stalks on FB.” I was uncomfortable with the word “stalk”, but she was at least honest with herself to understand that it is not repugnant to view another’s profile. Facebook, as described by some sociologist, caters to man’s desire to be exhibitionist and voyeuristic. This may explain why it is one of the most visited websites on the internet.

Also, it is impossible to truly know someone. All information about a person is only clues. Some of these clues are more superficial than others. But the human being is an infinitely complex entity that no one can truly grasp, regardless of the quantity or quality of information available to you.