• Gay? Conservative? High IQ? Your Facebook 'likes' can reveal traits

    New research analyzing the "likes" of nearly 60,000 Facebook users found that a person's race, gender, political views, religion and even sexual orientations could be identified with a high degree of accuracy. Among the findings: if you "like" curly fries, you're probably more intelligent than average, and if you "like" cuddling, you're probably a bit more politically liberal.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    When you click a "like" button on Facebook, you could be telling the world whether you're gay or straight, liberal or conservative, intelligent or not so much — even if you don't intend to. That's what researchers found when they ran tens of thousands of Facebook profiles and questionnaires through a computer algorithm to find the obvious as well as not-so-obvious connections.

    The results were published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and you can sample the method for yourself at a website called YouAreWhatYouLike.com.

    "The main message of the paper is that whether they like it or not, people do communicate their individual traits in their online behavior," said lead author Michal Kosinski, operations director at the University of Cambridge's Psychometrics Center.

    Some of the correlations are obvious: For example, If you're a fan of the "I'm Proud to Be a Christian" Facebook page, it's a pretty safe bet that you're a Christian. But others are hard to explain: Why is it that liking the "Curly Fries" page is associated with having a high IQ? Why does the computer model put "Sometimes I Just Lay in Bed and Think About Life" in the category for homosexual females, while "Thinking of Something and Laughing Alone" is linked to heterosexual females?

    "These little patterns are really not perceptible to humans," Kosinski said. Sometimes, it takes a computer.

    Kosinski and his colleagues conducted their experiment over the course of several years, through their MyPersonality website and Facebook app. More than 8 million people took the MyPersonality survey, which asked participants about their personal details and also had them answer questions about personality traits. About half of the test-takers gave their OK for the researchers to match up their survey results with Facebook likes, on an anonymous basis. More than 58,000 of the volunteered profiles from U.S. respondents were selected for matching.

    The results were analyzed to produce correlations in more than a dozen categories, including five widely accepted personality attributes (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability). Those are the attributes analyzed on the "You Are What You Like" website. The other categories included IQ, religion, politics, sexual orientation, age, gender, race, relationship status, alcohol and drug use, tobacco use, life satisfaction, number of friends — and even whether a Facebook user's parents had separated by the time the user was 21.

    This PDF file shows you which Facebook pages are the best fit for each of the categories.

    YouAreWhatYouLike.com

    Researchers set up a website that assesses your personality based on Facebook "likes."

    The researchers' computer model did the best at predicting black-vs.-white and male-vs.-female (95 and 93 percent accuracy, respectively). It could distinguish correctly between Republicans and Democrats 85 percent of the time, and between Christians and Muslims 82 percent of the time.

    The accuracy rates for predicting sexual orientation were 88 percent for males and 75 percent for females. But don't think reaching that result was as easy as seeing who clicked the "like" button for "Gay Marriage." Less than 5 percent of the gay users were fans of such obvious pages, Kosinski and his colleagues said. The predictions were based instead on inferences from likes for less obvious pages. For example, the computer model associated the fan pages for Kathy Griffin and "Wicked, The Musical" with homosexual males, while heterosexual males were associated with the pages for Bruce Lee and WWE wrestling.

    OK, maybe the pages weren't all that much less obvious.

    The model wasn't as accurate (60 percent) when it came to predicting whether a user's parents stayed together or separated before the user turned 21. But even that level of predictive power could be "worthwhile for advertisers," the researchers said. "For instance, digital systems and devices (such as online stores or cars) could be designed to adjust their behavior to best fit each user's preferred profile," they wrote.

    "I know the paper might sound like we're criticizing Facebook, but not at all," Kosinski told NBC News. "I'm a fan of Facebook."

    Kosinski pointed out that an analysis of your credit card purchases, online music preferences, video rentals and Web browsing habits could come up with personal profiles at least as detailed as the ones that he and his colleagues produced. It just so happens that the Facebook likes were accessible enough to yield a vivid illustration of how such analyses work.

    "It's possible this will lead some people to say, 'Maybe I shouldn't be using Facebook, or I shouldn't be using Google.' And that could be bad," he said. That kind of technophobia could hamper technological and economic progress, he said. Instead, the research should lead people to think twice about what they share online.

    "We hope this information will help users start a discussion with organizations like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or even policymakers about the rules of the game online," Kosinski said.

    Update for 3:55 p.m. ET March 11: Kosinski's two co-authors, David Stillwell of Cambridge and Thore Graepel of Microsoft Research, passed along their comments in a news release from Cambridge. 

    "Consumers rightly expect strong privacy protection to be built into the products and services they use, and this research may well serve as a reminder for consumers to take a careful approach to sharing information online, utilizing privacy controls and never sharing content with unfamiliar parties," Graepel said.

    "I have used Facebook since 2005, and I will continue to do so," Stillwell said. "But I might be more careful to use the privacy settings that Facebook provides."

    More about Facebook research:

    The PNAS paper, titled "Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable From Digital Records of Human Behavior," includes a conflict-of-interest statement: Stillwell received revenue as owner of the MyPersonality Facebook app. Kosinski received funding from the Boeing Co. and Microsoft Research.

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

    This story was originally published on Mon Mar 11, 2013 3:02 PM EDT

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  • Facebook posts are more memorable than faces

    Getty Images stock

    By Megan Gannon, LiveScience

    The fleeting status updates you post on Facebook might leave a more lasting impression than you think. New research shows that people are much more likely to remember the text from Facebook posts than human faces and text from books.

    "Facebook is updated roughly 30 million times an hour so it's easy to dismiss it as full of mundane, trivial bits of information that we will instantly forget as soon as we read them," researcher Laura Mickes, a visiting scholar at UC San Diego and a senior research fellow at the University of Warwick in England, said in a statement. "But our study turns that view on its head, and by doing so gives us a really useful glimpse into the kinds of information we're hardwired to remember."

    For the study, Mickes and her colleagues set up a memory test in which participants were shown 200 sentences for three seconds each on a computer screen. Half of the lines were taken from anonymized Facebook updates (for example, "The library is a place to study, not to talk on your phone" and "My math professor told me that I was one of his brightest students"), and the other sentences were pulled from recently published books, such as, "My throat was burning from screaming so loudly" and "Underneath the mass of facial hair beamed a large smile." All the selections were similar in length, and the Facebook posts were taken out of the context of the social media site — stripped of accompanying links, images and irregularities like emoticons or multiple exclamation points.

    The participants were then shown 200 sentences (100 of which they had seen before) and instructed to indentify which ones they recognized. The researchers found that the participants' memory was about one-and-a-half times stronger for Facebook posts than for book sentences.

    The experiment was then tweaked, with sentences from books replaced with pictures of faces. Participants' memory for Facebook posts was nearly two-and-a-half times as strong as for faces, the researchers said. [ 5 Interesting Facts About Your Memory ]

    "We were really surprised when we saw just how much stronger memory for Facebook posts was compared to other types of stimuli," Mickes said. "These kinds of gaps in performance are on a scale similar to the differences between amnesiacs and people with healthy memory."

    The researchers speculate that Facebook status updates are so memorable because they are written in "mind ready" formats — they're spontaneous and closer to natural speech than the polished, edited text of books. That could explain why the researchers also found similar levels of memorability for comments posted under online news articles, compared with headlines and text from the articles.

    "One could view the past five thousand years of painstaking, careful writing as the anomaly," UC San Diego psychology professor Nicholas Christenfeld, who was involved in the study, said in a statement. "Modern technologies allow written language to return more closely to the casual, personal style of pre-literate communication. And this is the style that resonates, and is remembered."

    But the casual nature of Facebook status updating naturally lends itself to some ill-advised posts. The results suggest that Facebook users should be more careful about what they publish on the site, as a social faux pas or offensive rant might not be so easily forgotten. [ 6 Personal Secrets Your Facebook Profile Isn't Keeping ]

    The ubiquitous Facebook status update has become a focal point for researchers trying to uncover the real-life social motivations that drive people's activity on the social media site. A study published last month found that college students who posted more status updates than they normally did over the course of a week felt less lonely, even if no one "Liked" or commented on their posts. That research, detailed in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, might help explain what compels people to constantly update their status. However, research out last year suggested Facebooking can hurt one's self-esteem.

    The new study appears this month in the journal Memory & Cognition.

    More from LiveScience:

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  • Your weirdest anxiety dreams

    By Melissa Dahl, NBC News

    Earlier today, we wrote about anxiety dreams, and whether they serve a purpose, or if they exist just to torment us. You shared so many hilarious examples of your own recurring dreams -- so we decided we had to round up the best ones up for an additional post. Here are 10 of our favorites.

    From comments on the blog:

    mwc1108:
    "I dreamed last night that my gender had been mis-assigned at birth (i'm almost 50!) and I was actually a man.

    It was extremely awkward not just because I've always been a woman, with a very curvy figure, but I also had just gotten a date with a really cute boy for a fraternity formal or the prom.  I told him that I was actually a boy but that I would still go to the party with him if he wanted me to and he said "sure." Then I asked him if he wanted me to got as a boy or a girl and he told me to choose!

    WTH could a dream like that mean?  I have always had wild dreams but that one was a REAL doozy!"

    Saraki:
    "My recurring anxiety dream is when my teeth fall out. Usually I'll be talking to someone in the dream, and I'll feel my teeth start to loosen. I touch them with my tongue and they wiggle and then begin to fall out. I frantically try to catch them all and push them back in, and just when I really start to panic, I wake up (and immediately feel to be sure my teeth are still there!)"

    Virginia-3572375:
    "I have a dream repeatedly that I need to shower . The shower is always located in a room that is not a bathroom. I cannot find my shampoo., there are people in the room. the water will not continue running and I am left half finished. Another is while traveling, I will begin in a car. The car changes to a bicycle then the bicycle to a tricycle. I come to a river that has alligators in it and have to cross. These have been going on for years."

    BubaloosIzzy:
    "I keep having this dream that I have a couple of fish tanks full of scary fish and I forget to feed them and they are VERY angry! They are in their tanks glowering at me and I become very afraid of them! They are usually in a darkened room. What the heck is that about?"

    Minnie-517207:
    "My recurring and annoying dream involves moving back into the home we lived in for 21 years- despite it being owned and lived in by someone else. I keep thinking it will all be ok and that they won't mind if we just come "home" again. Obviously, I just long to "go home" again- which will never happen. It makes me very sad, tho. Not a good dream, at all."

    And over on our Facebook page:

    Donna Rawlins:
    "I used to dream about having a piece of string/dental floss hanging out of my mouth. the more I pulled the more came out. It was like a clown pulling out scarves. I never was able to get it out."

    Lesa Atherton Pinker:
    "My reoccuring anxiety dream harkens back to my days of working in retail. For some reason, the store is dark (as though the power has gone out) but we still have to help the customers, and it is always really busy and stessful. I never had the power go out when I worked retail, so I don't really know what that's about. Maybe feeling like you don't really know how to do your job and being 'in the dark'?"

    Jannette Thoennes:
    "Recurring theme...random dreams will find me with a "gimpy" right leg, can barely walk and it feels numb up to my hip...dreams are always different, but that bad leg turned up frequently in my late teens and twenties, eased up for a few years, but its back again and I am now 41"

    Jackie Peterson Tadeo:
    "I keep dreaming that I have a baby and lose it. I forget who had it last, where I left and its always different scenetios but dame theme: I have no idea where my baby is."

    Melissa Gwyther:
    "I had this nightmare for years that I could not find my HS sweethearts phone number and I was panicked that I would never get to speak to him ever again. A lost love. After my divorce I ran into him again, and now we've been together 2 years. I always felt since have this horrible dream, it must have meant, 'once you see him, never let him go again!'"

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