7–9 Apr 2011
Europe/Stockholm timezone

The Personality of Popular Facebook Users

7 Apr 2011, 11:40
40m
FD5

FD5

Speaker

Dr Renaud Lambiotte (FUNDP)

Description

Social science aims at understanding how large-scale behaviour emerges from the intrinsic properties of a large number of individuals and their pairwise interactions. Contrary to network connectivity, whose organization has been explored in email or mobile phone data, the psychological profile of large-scale populations has not been studied so far. In this work, we have analyzed data from a highly-popular Facebook application that is able to survey a very large number of Facebook users with peer-reviewed personality tests. Based on test results, we study the relationship between network importance (number of Facebook contacts) and personality traits, the first of its kind on a large number of subjects (400,000). We test to which extent two prevalent viewpoints hold. That is, sociometrically popular Facebook users (those with many social contacts) are the ones whose personality traits either predict many offline (real world) friends or predict propensity to maintain superficial relationships. We find that the strongest predictor for number of friends in the real world (Extraversion) is also the strongest predictor for number of Facebook contacts. We then verify a widely held conjecture that has been put forward by literary intellectuals and scientists alike but has not been tested: people who have many social contacts on Facebook are the ones who are able to adapt themselves to new forms of communication, present themselves in likable ways, and have propensity to maintain superficial relationships. We show that there is no statistical evidence to support such a conjecture.

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