By now, almost everyone has understood: We pay for the free use of services like Facebook, Tiktok, Google and Co. with our personal data. But what can the big tech companies do with this data? In a groundbreaking study researchers at Stanford University were able to provide a (somewhat creepy) answer: it is easy to predict the most important personality traits (including the Big Five: openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion and neuroticism) using only Facebook likes (Youyou et al., 2015).

The results of this study show that Facebook Likes are a valuable source for predicting personality traits and that machine learning models are capable of predicting these traits with high accuracy (Kosinski, Stillwell, & Graepel, 2013). However, there are also ethical concerns about privacy and the possibility that this technology could be abused (keyword: Cambridge Analytica).

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Studies (small sample only):

Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., & Graepel, T. (2013). Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(15), 5802-5805.

Markovikj, D., Gievska, S., Kosinski, M., & Stillwell, D. (2013). Mining facebook data for predictive personality modeling. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 23-26).

Matz, S. C., Kosinski, M., Nave, G., & Stillwell, D. J. (2017). Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 114(48), 12714-12719.

Matz, S., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., & Nave, G. (2017). Psychological framing as an effective approach to real-life persuasive communication. ACR North American Advances.

Matz, S. C., Kosinski, M., Nave, G., & Stillwell, D. J. (2018). Reply to Eckles et al.: Facebook’s optimization algorithms are highly unlikely to explain the effects of psychological targeting. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(23), E5256-E5257.

Matz, S., & Kosinski, M. (2019). Using consumers’ digital footprints for more persuasive mass communication. NIM Marketing Intelligence Review, 11(2), 18-23.

Matz, S. C., Kosinski, M., Nave, G., & Stillwell, D. J. (2018). Reply to Sharp et al.: Psychological targeting produces robust effects. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(34), E7891-E7891.

Youyou, W., Kosinski, M., & Stillwell, D. (2015). Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(4), 1036-1040.