The day has come: Facebook knows you more than your friends

A study recently published in PNAS concludes that a computer is capable of more accurately predict a person's personality than their own friends and family… From the analysis of some of the data that we have left in Facebook.

The researchers conclude that, by analyzing 10 "likes", a computer can describe our personality better than our co-workers; with 70, better than our friends or roommates; with 150, better than a family member; and with 300, better than a spouse. It is thus shown that machines, despite not having the social skills to interpret the language and human intentions, may be able to make valid judgments about us by accessing our fingerprint on the internet.

Facebook knows you more than your own friends

For this research, a personality test based on the model was provided Big five 86,220 people. Each of them had to fill out these 100-item forms designed to record information about the different traits that define our way of acting, perceiving and feeling things.

In addition to having the information obtained through the personality tests, some volunteers also gave their permission for the research team to analyze the

"I like" that they had given from their Facebook accounts. These "likes" were not those that can be given by clicking on Facebook statuses, photos or videos, but those that are associated with pages about movies, books, television shows, celebrities, etc.

Later, software found trends and relationships between personality traits and certain preferences by one or another page located in this social network. For example, it was found that people with high scores on the “Openness to Change” trait tend to show fondness for Salvador Dalí or TED Talks, while extroverted they show a taste for dancing. It can be a conclusion that stereotypes, and yet there is empirical data to support these ideas.

While the software was playing to learn how human behavior works, a group was formed with the others raters who were to predict personality scores of the volunteers. This group was made up of friends, relatives and acquaintances of the participants who had completed the test. Each one of these flesh and blood judges had to describe the personality of the subject evaluated by filling in a questionnaire. The results (somewhat humiliating for our species) that head the article emerged at the compare the degree of accuracy with which humans and machines predict personality scores. Only a husband or wife can rival computer-generated personality models from a few data obtained by Facebook.

Electronic brains

How can software speak so accurately about aspects that define us and make us unique? The biggest advantage they have over us is their access to massive amounts of information staff and their ability to relate some data to others and find patterns of behavior in fractions of a second. Thanks to this, computer-generated personality models can predict certain patterns of behavior automatically, without the need for social skills and with more precision than human beings humans.

As a consequence, today we are closer to know the traits of certain aspects of people's psychology without the need to interact with them face to face, after information about the movies, books and celebrities we like, go through a kitchen of algorithms. Taking into account that the average number of "likes" that each of us has accumulated on Facebook is around 227, we can imagine what this innovation of psychometrics means for statistical centers, recruitment agencies or even groups dedicated to espionage and control Social. All this makes the website created by Mark Zuckerberg more profiled as a tool for market segmentation than a social network.

Furthermore, the consequences this may have for the world of advertising and marketing are obvious. If today it is already possible to roughly estimate a person's tastes and hobbies from their Google searches, perhaps in a future a car brand may know which model can attract us the most due to the fact that one day we made about twenty clicks on a network Social.

One of the paradoxes of this psychological evaluation methodology is that qualities that make us social and unique beings without the need for social interaction and applying generic rules on behavior human. This perspective can be so appealing to organizations that the University of Cambridge already have an application which allows you to see what your Facebook profile, tweets and other forms of fingerprint say about your psychological profile. One of the supposed advantages that can be read on its website is: “it avoids having to ask unnecessary questions”. How this methodology will affect privacy protection remains to be seen.

Big Data: Facebook and its database

In short, today it is possible that computers are increasingly capable of infer information about us that we have not disclosed at any time directly, and that this information is of a higher quality than that inferred by anyone. All this can be made possible, to a large extent, by the analysis of Big data on Facebook: the massive processing of data (personal or other) that we provide of our own free will. The team of researchers talks about this qualitative leap in the conclusions of their article:

Popular culture has come to represent robots that outperform humans when it comes to making psychological inferences. In the movie Her, for example, the protagonist falls in love with his operating system. Through the management and analysis of his fingerprint, his computer can understand and react to his thoughts and needs much better than other humans, including his girlfriend and his closest friends. Our research, together with advances in robotics, provides empirical evidence that this situation hypothetical is becoming increasingly possible as assessment tools mature digital.

What will computing be capable of when a computer is capable of reading not only Facebook pages, but also photographs and texts with the same level of accuracy? Will we be beings without any mystery in the eyes of mass-produced processors? If this form of understanding of the human being that machines can reach in the future reflects our essence as sentient and unique people, it is something worth reflecting on.

Bibliographic references:

• Youyou W., Kosinski, M. and Stillwell, D. (2015). Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans. PNAS 112 (4), pp. 1036 – 1040.