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Scientists Used Facebook For The Largest Ever Study Of Language And Personality — And The Results Are Groundbreaking

Scientists Used Facebook For The Largest Ever Study Of Language And Personality  — And The Results Are Groundbreaking

Read more:  http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-study-on-language-and-personality-2013-10#ixzz2gz3pDVr0

“A group of  University of Pennsylvania researchers who analyzed Facebook  status updates of 75,000 volunteers have found an entirely  different way to analyze human personality, according to a new study published in PLOS One.

The  volunteers completed  a common personality questionnaire through a Facebook application and made their  Facebook status updates available so that researchers could find linguistic  patterns in their posts.

Drawing  from more than 700 million words, phrases, and topics, the  researchers built computer models that predicted the individuals’  age, gender, and their responses on the personality questionnaires with  surprising accuracy.

The  “open-vocabulary approach” of analyzing all words was shown to be  equally predictive (and in some cases moreso) than traditional methods used by psychologists, such as self-reported surveys and  questionnaires, that use a predetermined set of words to  analyze.

Basically,  it’s big data meets psychology.

The Penn  researchers also created word clouds that “provide  an  unprecedented window into the psychological world of people with a given trait,”  graduate student Johannes Eichstaedt, who worked on the project, said in a press release. “Many things seem obvious  after the fact and each item makes sense, but would you have thought of them  all, or even most of them?”

Here are some  personality traits (key at bottom):

The word clouds allowed the researchers to generate new insights into relationships  between traits and language used.

For example, participants  with the most  emotional stability refer to sports much more.

Researcher Lyle Ungar said this suggests “we should explore the possibility that neurotic  individuals would become more emotionally stable if they played more  sports.”

In this way the results provide new ways of  researching connections between traits, behaviors, and the effectiveness of  psychological interventions.

Here’s the breakdown  by age:

Martin  Seligman, director of the Positive Psychology Center,  explained why the new approach trumps previous methods:  “When I ask myself, ‘What’s it like to be an  extrovert?’ ‘What’s it like to be a teenage girl?’ ‘What’s it like to be  schizophrenic or neurotic?’ or ‘What’s it like to be 70 years old?’ these word  clouds come much closer to the heart of the matter than do all the  questionnaires in existence.”

Here is gender:

The biggest boon of the study may be that instead of asking millions of  people to fill out surveys, future studies could involve volunteers  submitting their Facebook or Twitter feeds for anonymized study.

“Researchers have studied these personality traits for many decades  theoretically,” Eichstaedt said, “but now they have a simple window into how  they shape modern lives in the age of Facebook.”

The study is part of the World Well-Being Project, which has  found several  ways to “analyze the big data available through online social media in  light of psychological theory.””

Read more:  http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-study-on-language-and-personality-2013-10#ixzz2gz468wGt

 

Stephen

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Posted on: October 15, 2013, 6:31 am Category: Uncategorized

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