Study Finds That Your Facebook Profile Is Truer To Life Than People Think

A study has found that your Facebook behaviour closely mirrors your real-life personality, ReadWriteWeb reports. The study from the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, entitled “Manifestations of Personality in Online Social Networks: Self-Reported Facebook-Related Behaviors and Observable Profile Information” is published in the journal ‘Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking’ and its findings are largely in contrast to much of the popular opinion that’s been expressed in recent years that people use Facebook to create an edited, shinier, more interesting version of themselves.

Utilising the five big personality types of popular psychology, the report finds that extroverted and introverted people behave in manners that are perhaps to be expected of their personality type, with extroverted types engaging more on Facebook than introverted people.

This seems an obvious enough correlation to make, but that the results of this study found it to be the case makes the argument for this view stronger, and brings up some interesting questions about your online personality. Is your Facebook profile an absolutely accurate representation of your real voice because you control what the little-photograph-with-your-name-beside-it says, or is it no more than a written and visual record, an enhanced version of a diary, letters and photographs? A photograph merely captures the image of the physical you, and a letter only words that you have written. So just as you might look at a photo of yourself and say ‘that’s me’, and while it is indeed you, it’s just one aspect of you, so can the same be said of Facebook?

Things get even more complicated when we think of personality, identity and the ‘real’ you, what is what this study seems to be looking at, not viewing Facebook as a depository or an online record but as an active place where your behaviour fits in with how you are in the ‘real’ world. The ‘real’ you is a subjective term at any rate, as defining one’s identity is a pretty difficult thing to do as was covered yesterday. Unless you view yourself as a brand with a certain image to maintain, or at the opposite end of the spectrum enjoy anonymous trolling, it’s likely that you behave naturally enough on a social networking site, interacting with friends, looking at things that interest you, and that you’re not an offline Jekyll and an online Hyde.

So this would seem to be a result of being the ‘real’ you while you’re online. The study’s participants were university students, young people who most likely would have grown up with social networks forming a natural part of their teenage years, so perhaps the correlation between online and offline personality is so close in this study because young people themselves are comfortable enough with the idea of online identity and see it as a natural way of expressing themselves in their daily lives.

The study also looked at what you can glean from a person’s offline personality by the information displayed on their Facebook page, which is essentially what many of us do when we look at a new friend’s profile for the first time, to see what they’re like in photos, if you’ve any interests in common, what kind of sense of humour they have, and to judge whether this person could be a future ‘real-life’ friend. Do you think that a person’s Facebook profile is an accurate representation of their personality, allowing you to judge whether or not a new Facebook friend could become a real-life friend? And is it fair to do so?