Personality and patterns of Facebook usage

TLDR

The study investigates how Facebook activity correlates with users’ Five‑Factor personality traits. Using a dataset of 180,000 users, the authors correlated personality traits with profile features such as network size, photo count, events, groups, and tags, and applied multivariate regression to predict traits from these features. Significant correlations were found, with the strongest predictive accuracy for Extraversion and Neuroticism, weakest for Agreeableness, and intermediate for Openness and Conscientiousness.

Abstract

We show how users' activity on Facebook relates to their personality, as measured by the standard Five Factor Model. Our dataset consists of the personality profiles and Facebook profile data of 180,000 users. We examine correlations between users' personality and the properties of their Facebook profiles such as the size and density of their friendship network, number uploaded photos, number of events attended, number of group memberships, and number of times user has been tagged in photos. Our results show significant relationships between personality traits and various features of Facebook profiles. We then show how multivariate regression allows prediction of the personality traits of an individual user given their Facebook profile. The best accuracy of such predictions is achieved for Extraversion and Neuroticism, the lowest accuracy is obtained for Agreeableness, with Openness and Conscientiousness lying in the middle.