{"id":81996,"date":"2015-01-13T15:00:10","date_gmt":"2015-01-13T15:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/4cd.e16.myftpupload.com\/?p=81996"},"modified":"2015-01-13T14:35:52","modified_gmt":"2015-01-13T14:35:52","slug":"computers-good-judge-character","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=81996","title":{"rendered":"Computers &#8216;good judge of character&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"story_continues_1\" class=\"introduction\">Computers can be better at predicting our personality than our friends and family, an experiment with tens of thousands of volunteers has indicated.<\/p>\n<p>By analysing &#8220;likes&#8221; on Facebook, a computer model deduced a person&#8217;s character on five key traits better than brothers, mothers and even some partners.<\/p>\n<p>The Cambridge team acknowledge that personality is more complex than this.<\/p>\n<p>But they say the results show computers can outpace humans.<\/p>\n<p>And the findings, in the journal PNAS, suggest some interesting associations &#8211; Facebook fans of Dr Who tend to be shy, while fans of Big Brother are conservative or conventional.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"cross-head\">Digital footprint<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"caption full-width\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/news.bbcimg.co.uk\/media\/images\/80216000\/jpg\/_80216027_c0221635-thermogram_of_footprint-spl-1.jpg\" alt=\"footprint\" width=\"624\" height=\"351\" \/><\/div>\n<p>The University of Cambridge and Stanford University researchers had already said that Facebook &#8220;likes&#8221; could be used to predict a raft of personal information including sexual orientation and political leaning.<\/p>\n<p>In this study, they wanted to go a step further and pit man against machine to see which would perform better at making judgements about human character and personality.<\/p>\n<p>Dr Youyou Wu and her colleagues ran the data of 70,520 willing Facebook users through their computer system, which linked &#8220;likes&#8221; to five core personality traits:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>agreeableness<\/li>\n<li>conscientiousness<\/li>\n<li>extraversion<\/li>\n<li>neuroticism<\/li>\n<li>openness<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p id=\"story_continues_2\">The Facebook users completed a personality questionnaire and were asked to get their colleagues, friends and family to act as character witnesses by filling out a survey.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers then compared all the results to see how the computer model fared in summing up a person&#8217;s self-reported character.<\/p>\n<p>Given enough &#8220;likes&#8221;, the computers came closer to a person&#8217;s self-reported personality than even their closest allies.<\/p>\n<p>By looking at just 10 Facebook &#8220;likes&#8221;, the computer was able to outperform a work colleague.<\/p>\n<p>Analysing 70 &#8220;likes&#8221; let the machine rival a friend or flatmate.<\/p>\n<p>Using 150 &#8220;likes&#8221;, it trumped a family member, but not a partner &#8211; it took 300 likes to match or outdo their deductive power.<\/p>\n<p>Given that the average Facebook user had about 227 &#8220;likes&#8221; on their profile, this was ample for a computer to go on, said Dr Wu &#8211; a visiting intern at Facebook and a PhD student at the University of Cambridge.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It may seem surprising because people are generally good at judging personality.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s intuitive to think that people close to us know us very well, so it&#8217;s even more impressive that computers are able to beat us at our game.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>She said that people now spent a lot of time online, which gave computers the edge.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Friends and colleagues might only see us in a limited number of situations, so they have less information to go on.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Computers can access a lot of relevant information about us and have a huge memory capacity.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;And they can make judgements in a consistent, systematic way, whereas humans may be biased.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Alan Redman, a chartered psychologist with a specialist interest in personality and psychometrics, said advertising companies already used our digital footprints to build a picture of who we were.<\/p>\n<p>And potential employers might want to check social media sites before seeing a candidate.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We do need to be careful,&#8221; he added.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We have little control over the data that is being collected about us.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<p>Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Computers can be better at predicting our personality than our friends and family, an experiment with tens of thousands of volunteers has indicated. By analysing &#8220;likes&#8221; on Facebook, a computer model deduced a person&#8217;s character on five key traits better than brothers, mothers and even some partners. The Cambridge team acknowledge that personality is more [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":81997,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-81996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-dr-akwasi-osei"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/81997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}