Tag Archives: personality

Yesterday, as I was standing in line in my campus bookstore, I heard someone on the radio talk about a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showing that a computer algorithm, relying only on the things you “Like” on Facebook, makes more accurate judgments of your personality than your friends. If you also heard about this study, you probably did not react the way I did yesterday. Having been a reviewer on this study, I had already read the paper. So my reaction was, “Yeah, the study did show that, but it isn’t as simple as this report makes it sound.” So what does the study show? I personally was intrigued by three things. 1) Clearly there is a sexy news story in saying that computers make better judgments than humans. And that is precisely how this study has been discussed so far.[1] However, the data show that self-other agreement with human judges was about r = .49 (across all Big 5 traits) while self-other agreement with computer-based judgments was about r = .56. Yes, these differences are statistically significant and NO we shouldn’t care that they are statistically significant. What these effectively mean is that if you judge yourself to be above average (median) on a trait, your friends are likely to guess that you are above average 74. Continue reading →