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.