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

Facebook knows a person's personality by analyzing some of the data.

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 relatives... based on the analysis of some of the data we have left on 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. This demonstrates that machines, despite lacking the social skills to interpret human language and intentions, can be able to make valid judgments about us by accessing our digital footprint on the Internet.

Facebook knows you better than your own friends

For this research, 86,220 people were given a personality test based on the Big Five model. Each of them had to fill in these 100-item forms designed to record information about the different traits that define the way we act, perceive and feel about 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 "likes 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 associated with pages about movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, etc.

Later, software found trends and relationships between personality traits and certain preferences. for one or another page located in this social network. For example, it was found that people with a high score in the trait "Openness to Change" tend to show a liking for Salvador Dalí or TED Talks, while extraverts show a liking for dancing. This may be a stereotypical conclusion, but there is empirical data to support these ideas.

While the software was playing a game to learn how human behavior works, a group was formed with the other other raters who were to predict the personality scores of the volunteers. of the volunteers. This group consisted of friends, family members and acquaintances of the participants who had filled out the test. Each of these flesh-and-blood judges had to describe the personality of the test subject by filling out a questionnaire. The (somewhat humiliating for our species) results at the top of the article were obtained by compare the degree of accuracy accuracy with which humans and machines predict personality scores. Only a husband or wife can rival computer-generated personality models from a few pieces of data obtained from 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 personal information personal information and their ability to relate data to each other and find patterns of behavior in fractions of and find patterns of behavior in fractions of a second. Thanks to this, computer-generated personality models can predict certain behavioral patterns automatically, without the need for social skills and more accurately than humans.

As a result, today we are closer to 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 goes through a kitchen of algorithms. Considering that the average number of "likes" that each of us has accumulated on Facebook is around 227, we can imagine what this innovation in psychometrics means for statistics centers, recruitment agencies or even groups dedicated to espionage and social control. All of this makes the website created by Mark Zuckerberg look more like a tool of market segmentation than a social network.

Moreover, the consequences this may have for the world of advertising and marketing for the world of advertising and marketing are obvious. If today it is already possible to roughly estimate a person's tastes and hobbies based on their Google searches, perhaps in the future a car brand will be able to know which model we are most attracted to based on the fact that one day we made twenty clicks on a social network.

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

Big Data: Facebook and its database

Ultimately, it is now possible that computers are increasingly capable of infer information about us that we have never directly stated, and that this information will be directly, and that this information is of higher quality than that inferred by anyone else. All of this can be made possible, to a large extent, by Big Data analysis on Facebook: the massive processing of data (personal or otherwise) 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 depict robots that outperform humans in making psychological inferences. In the movie Her, for example, the protagonist falls in love with his operating system. Through the management and analysis of your digital footprint, your computer may understand and react to your thoughts and needs much better than other humans, including your girlfriend and closest friends. Our research, along with advances in robotics, provides empirical evidence that this hypothetical situation is becoming increasingly possible as digital assessment tools mature.

What will computer science be capable of when a computer is able to read not only Facebook pages, but also photographs and texts with the same level of accuracy?Will we be beings without mystery under the gaze of mass-produced processors? Whether this form of understanding of the human being that machines may in the future achieve reflects our essence as sentient and unique persons is something worth reflecting on.

Bibliographical references:

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