Soooooo you’re an extravert! What your Facebook status update says about you.

I’m fascinated by the psychology of social media: does it make us feel happier and more connected? Or could it make us feel more depressed, like there’s a great big party going on out there and we’re not invited? Do our social updates reflect our true selves? Can social media make us feel anxious? The science of social media is still emerging and we’re only just beginning to learn about the impact it has.

A recent, large-scale study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has found that the stuff you say on Facebook reveals lots about your personality. The study shows that what we say on Facebook is actually an accurate portrayal of our personality. So for example introverts typically talk about exactly the kind of stuff you’d expect them to talk about such as computers, books, reading, and use the word “I” a lot… Whereas extraverts use lots of exclamation marks and the word “soooo”, talk about parties and other people. You can take a look at the study here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25365036

You might be thinking that this is a very obvious finding, and actually so what? Essentially this research demonstrates that language-based assessments can constitute valid personality measures… I’m already wondering what the implications of this could be for enterprise social networks i.e. social media used within the firewall of organisations…

In the future could we see companies using such technology to make assessments about employees? Who to promote? Who to move into certain roles? Who to make redundant? And what are the implications for using such technology to make these assessments? How does this sit with data protection rules? Understanding the psychology of social media is still in its infancy but I’m sure there are some significant and far-reaching implications as we begin to understand more about this fascinating area.