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New research from data collected on Facebook is summarized here.
The gist:
- Every day, millions of people click on Facebook "Like" buttons, boldly declaring their preferences for a variety of things, such as books, movies, and cat videos.
- But those "likes" may reveal more than they intend...according to a study that analyzed the online behavior of thousands of volunteers.
- Facebook likes are an amazingly good predictor of personal attributes, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The most accurate predictions were for gender (93%) and race (95%), as limited to Caucasian versus African American.
- But people's likes also predicted far more sensitive personal attributes such as homosexuality (88% for men, 75% for women), religion (82%), political party membership (85%), and even use of cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs (73%, 70%, and 65%, respectively).
- Many of the likes that had the strongest prediction power make intuitive sense, such as "Jesus" for Christians and "Glee" for gay men. But others were harder to explain, such as the strong association between liking "curly fries" and having high IQ.
- "What was traditionally laboriously assessed on an individual basis can be automatically inferred for millions of people without them even noticing," Kosinski [the lead author] says, "which is both amazing and a bit scary."
My prediction: The number of average-IQ folks ordering curly fries is about to go through the roof.
