Why you should try online dating
(you can jump to the short answer here, if you're feeling impatient)
Onto the psychology of social media. Kristin Stecher of the University of Washington and Dave Evans of Psychster LLC both gave interesting talks about profile pages.
Psychster is a consulting company dedicated to "the social science of social networking". Recently they've been looking at interpersonal perception (how does person A perceive person B? How close is that to B's self perception?). Most research into this uses 'fake' people - i.e. A is given a detailed written description of B and works off of that, rather than meeting anybody face to face.
To try and get a large 'real people' dataset Psychster created a Facebook application (and later a website) where users could fill out a questionnaire that rated their personality on a variant of the big five personality inventory (the big five being openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). They then had the option of rating the personalities of other people (not just their friends), the idea being to collect how users saw themselves, how others saw them and the correlation between the two.
On the standalone website users created profiles to reflect their personalities. Profiles could contain any number of elements (name, location, gender, favourite movie, most embarrassing moment...) chosen from a large list.
The results in general:
Psychster looked at different profile elements on the standalone website to see if the presence or any in particular were correlated with higher rates of accuracy.
Profile elements that make somebody easier to get:
Profile elements that make you harder to get:
That last one (naming a great book making it harder to guess your personality) is pretty interesting. Dave did say that he hadn't yet done any proper analysis of why it might be. I wonder if there's any research into how much (or little) reading habits have to do with your personality? Here's a tangent (why do some people get interested in science fiction?) if you're interested. Here's another (people who read lots of fiction aren't socially awkward, in fact the tendency to get absorbed in a story correlates with empathy scores).
OK, anyway...
Why were women easier to read? Because they tended to fill out the profile elements that were good predictors ("my most embarrassing moment").
At this point you might be wondering (well, I wondered) who cares how well an online profile reflects your true personality. One answer is the online dating industry who have a vested interest in not setting you up with anybody plainly unsuitable. If profiles were set up the right way then maybe you could tell in advance if the guy or girl messaging you is worth seeing in the real world.
Sticking with the online dating theme, it turns out that the levels of agreement (between actual and guessed personalities) you get by looking at Facebook profiles approach those you see in long term acquaintances. They're certainly better than what you get after a short face to face meeting (like a date). In fact, short f2f meetings are particularly bad at helping you gauge levels of agreeableness and neuroticism - not good. I think this means that stalking potential partners online actually makes good, practical sense and should be encouraged.
In case you needed any reassurance.
Onto the psychology of social media. Kristin Stecher of the University of Washington and Dave Evans of Psychster LLC both gave interesting talks about profile pages.
Psychster is a consulting company dedicated to "the social science of social networking". Recently they've been looking at interpersonal perception (how does person A perceive person B? How close is that to B's self perception?). Most research into this uses 'fake' people - i.e. A is given a detailed written description of B and works off of that, rather than meeting anybody face to face.
To try and get a large 'real people' dataset Psychster created a Facebook application (and later a website) where users could fill out a questionnaire that rated their personality on a variant of the big five personality inventory (the big five being openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). They then had the option of rating the personalities of other people (not just their friends), the idea being to collect how users saw themselves, how others saw them and the correlation between the two.
On the standalone website users created profiles to reflect their personalities. Profiles could contain any number of elements (name, location, gender, favourite movie, most embarrassing moment...) chosen from a large list.
The results in general:
- people do 'get' each other (where to 'get' a person means to guess a personality close to their actual, self-rated personality).
- people on Facebook get each other better (this kind of figures - you'd want to go rate your real life friends).
- women are better guessers than men - but only when guessing random strangers.
- women are easier to get.
Psychster looked at different profile elements on the standalone website to see if the presence or any in particular were correlated with higher rates of accuracy.
Profile elements that make somebody easier to get:
- A link to a funny video (the number one predictor of personality)
- What makes me glad to be alive?
- Most embarassing thing I ever did:
- Proudest thing I ever did:
- My spirituality:
- A great person:
- I believe this:
Profile elements that make you harder to get:
- Profile picture (but only if it is of a non-person)
- An awful website:
- An awful person:
- A great book:
That last one (naming a great book making it harder to guess your personality) is pretty interesting. Dave did say that he hadn't yet done any proper analysis of why it might be. I wonder if there's any research into how much (or little) reading habits have to do with your personality? Here's a tangent (why do some people get interested in science fiction?) if you're interested. Here's another (people who read lots of fiction aren't socially awkward, in fact the tendency to get absorbed in a story correlates with empathy scores).
OK, anyway...
Why were women easier to read? Because they tended to fill out the profile elements that were good predictors ("my most embarrassing moment").
At this point you might be wondering (well, I wondered) who cares how well an online profile reflects your true personality. One answer is the online dating industry who have a vested interest in not setting you up with anybody plainly unsuitable. If profiles were set up the right way then maybe you could tell in advance if the guy or girl messaging you is worth seeing in the real world.
Sticking with the online dating theme, it turns out that the levels of agreement (between actual and guessed personalities) you get by looking at Facebook profiles approach those you see in long term acquaintances. They're certainly better than what you get after a short face to face meeting (like a date). In fact, short f2f meetings are particularly bad at helping you gauge levels of agreeableness and neuroticism - not good. I think this means that stalking potential partners online actually makes good, practical sense and should be encouraged.
In case you needed any reassurance.
posted by Stew @ 12:22 AM
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