How Well Does Facebook

This social site interface judges your personality traits using data fed by you.

- Mala Ashok

It is quite possible that in the future your computer may know you better than your friends or even your parents and/or spouses do. Now wait! This might not be the future, this may be now.

Researchers from Stanford and Cambridge University have disclosed the results of a study which shows that Facebook may know your personality better than your closest friends, spouses and even yourself! How is this possible?

Well, the study looked at people’s “Likes” on Facebook and compared it to their own answers to personality questions. They then looked at the answers about the same people provided by their close friends and family. The results came in and showed that Facebook was a better judge of people’s personalities than their near and dear ones.

So, how important is this? First of all the result is a surprise. Humans are supposed to be the better judge of personality. This is what protects us from getting into bad relationships. Now, if computers can do the judging it gives the compute, rather Facebook, a lot of power over us.

“We’re walking personality prediction machines,” says Michael Kosinski, a computer science professor at Stanford, “but computers beat us at our own game.”