A study from the University of Kansas finds that people can accurately detect the personality traits of strangers through Facebook activity; however, changes to the social media site in the past three years could be making it harder to do so. Researchers sampled 100 Facebook users, paralleling the demographics of the social networking site, and asked them to fill out a personality survey. A group of coders looked at each person's Facebook activity, 53 cues in all, to see whether certain personality types were more likely to do specific activities. The researchers then had 35 strangers spend 10 to 15 minutes on each of the Facebook users' profile pages to see if they could correctly gauge a person's personality.
The crux of the study looked at which cues correlated to personality types and whether the 35 strangers were able to correctly detect personality traits based on those cues. The research found that extroversion was the easiest personality trait for strangers to interpret followed by agreeableness and openness. There was just one cue that pointed to conscientiousness and none that helped detect neuroticism.
The study, "Impression Management and Formation on Facebook: A Lens Model Approach," will be published this month in the journal New Media & Society. The research was conducted by Jeffrey Hall, an associate professor of communication studies, doctoral candidate Natalie Pennington and Allyn Lueders, who received her doctorate at KU and is now an assistant professor of communication studies at East Texas Baptist University.
While strangers were able to correctly match certain Facebook activities with personality traits, the researchers believe new algorithms enacted by Facebook could make it harder to detect personality traits.