What Does Your Facebook Profile Really Say About You?

What do your status updates really say about you?

In a study published last week at PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania examined the language used in 75,000 Facebook profiles. They found differences across ages, genders and certain personality traits. This allowed the group, led by computer and information scientist H. Andrew Schwartz, to make predictions about the profile of each user.

The researchers found that they could predict a user’s gender with 92% accuracy. They could also guess a user’s age within three years more than half of the time.

To date, this is the largest study of its kind. Its magnitude allowed the researchers to use an “open-vocabulary approach”—that is, they let the data drive which words or phrases were considered most important. Most studies rely on a closed-vocabulary approach, using previously established lists of related words. That technique forces researchers to look at trait markers they already know, rather than discover new ones. Read more...