What Computers Know About You from Your Facebook Likes

What Computers Know About You from Your Facebook Likes
mediaX at Stanford University - Mackenzie Room, Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center
A growing proportion of human activities such as social interactions, entertainment, and gathering information, are now mediated by online social networks. Such activities can be easily recorded, offering an unprecedented opportunity to study and assess psychological traits using actual - rather than self-reported - behavior. Our research shows that digital records of behavior, such as Tweets or Facebook Likes can be used to accurately measure a wide range of psychological traits. Such Big Data assessment has a number of advantages: it does not require participants' active involvement; it can be easily and inexpensively applied to large populations; and it is relatively immune to cheating or misrepresentation. Essentially, if the ethical and methodological challenges could be overcome, Big Data has the potential to revolutionize psychological assessment, marketing, recruitment, insurance and many other industries.