[LINK] "No Lie! Your Facebook Profile Is the Real You"

[rfmcdonald]

This news doesn't surprise me, although the sample size does place limits on the survey's reliability. I'm on the Internet, known under my own name, because I want to be known as myself, or at least as something pretty close to what I'm like in person. (I try.) Why wouldn't other people?

College-age users of Facebook in the United States and a similar social networking site in Germany typically present accurate versions of their personalities in online profiles, says psychologist Mitja Back of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. People use online social networking sites to express who they really are rather than idealized versions of themselves, Back and his colleagues conclude in an upcoming Psychological Science.

“Online social networks are so popular and so likely to reveal people’s actual personalities because they allow for social interactions that feel real in many ways,” Back says.


Back’s team administered personality inventories that evaluated 133 U.S. Facebook users and 103 Germans who used a comparable social-networking site. Inventories focused on the extent to which volunteers endorsed ratings of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional instability and openness to new experiences.

The subjects — who ranged in age from 17 to 22 — took the inventory twice, first with instructions to describe their actual personalities and then to portray idealized versions of themselves.

Then, undergraduate research assistants — nine in the United States and 10 in Germany — rated volunteers’ personalities after looking at their online profiles. Those ratings matched volunteers’ actual personality descriptions better than their idealized ones, especially for extraversion and openness.

Facebook is so true to life, Back claims, that encountering a person there for the first time generally results in a more accurate personality appraisal than meeting face to face, going by the results of previous studies.

Adriana Manago, a psychology graduate student at UCLA, calls the new findings “compelling” but incomplete. College students on Facebook and other online social networks often augment what they regard as their best personal qualities, Manago holds. In her view, these characteristics aren’t plumbed by broad personality measures like the ones measured in Back’s study. And students’ actual personality descriptions may have included enhancements of their real characteristics, thus inflating the correlation between observers’ ratings and students’ real personalities, Manago notes.