Your Online Profile Actually Tells a Lot About You 272
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."
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.
Re:Employers look! (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, let them find it on their own and let them make assumptions on their own. If questioned about it, just blow it off as a personal thing that they should not take seriously.
Re:Of course this assumes that when you filled it (Score:1, Informative)
yes.. details certainly can be fake, but not everybody is as paranoid as your average slashdotter. The majority of people I know who use Facebook have a disgusting quantity of true details, without so much as a second thought as to why they should or should not be there.
Re:lightweight article (Score:5, Informative)
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:Gold star for you (Score:2, Informative)
It, along with sociopathy is an obsolete term for what the DSM-IV classifies as antisocial personality disorder.
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!"
Maybe not (Score:2, Informative)
I think most people would give out information like this, even or especially when they use fake names and birthdays.
Re:Of course this assumes that when you filled it (Score:2, Informative)
Will you go out with me?
Re:Duh (Score:3, Informative)
I got my tech-writer job based not only on the quality of my experience on my resume (put little lines above the e's for me), but also because I used En-dashes in my date ranges ;-)
Please tell me where you got your job because I might want to send my résumé there, that is, if I resume looking for tech-writing jobs. As you can see, I'm sure to get a job.
Those "little lines above the e's" are accent marks— in this case, acute accents. The character entity is, naturally enough, é.
The emdash is an acceptable a substitute for semi-colons, but also for commas— yet I have never heard of, nor can I imagine, using an emdash as a substitute for a colon. That would be wierd. An emdash rule of thumb: if you are building a complex sentence with lots of phrases set off with commas and/or semicolons, and if some of those phrases are subordinate to another subordinate, then consider strategic use of the emdash to help the reader disambiguate your intended meaning from other possible meanings.
Second rule of thumb for emdashes: If you are writing to a bunch of semiliterates— and want to fit in— use lots of emdashes.
Third rule is simil.... OMG!! PONIES!!! Like— Wow! In ValleySpeak it is —like— posilutely and absitively necessary— Hey! You just can't do VS without emdashes? You_know_what_I_mean???
Ndashes are easy. In dates, in SSNs and similar dash-separated numeric codes, and in phone numbers (except the european style dot separator is becoming more common). Might also want to use the ndash in place of a hyphen when working with systems that do not have a good "non-breaking hyphen".