“On the Internet," one dog tells another in a classic New Yorker cartoon, “nobody knows you're a dog." The internet is notorious for its digital dens of deception. But on Facebook, what you see tends to be what you get -- at least in one study of tailless, two- legged young adults.
College-age users of Facebook in the United States and a similar social networking site in Germany typically present accurate versions of their personalities in online profiles, says psychologist Mitja Back of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. People use online social networking sites to express who they really are rather than idealized versions of themselves, Back and his colleagues conclude in an upcoming Psychological Science.
“Online social networks are so popular and so likely to reveal people's actual personalities because they allow for social interactions that feel real in many ways," Back says.
Back's team administered personality inventories that evaluated 133 U.S. Facebook users and 103 Germans who used a comparable social-networking site. Inventories focused on the extent to which volunteers endorsed ratings of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional instability and openness to new experiences.
The subjects -- who ranged in age from 17 to 22 -- took the inventory twice, first with instructions to describe their actual personalities and then to portray idealized versions of themselves.
Then, undergraduate research assistants -- nine in the United States and 10 in Germany -- rated volunteers' personalities after looking at their online profiles. Those ratings matched volunteers' actual personality descriptions better than their idealized ones, especially for extraversion and openness.
Facebook is so true to life, Back claims, that encountering a person there for the first time generally results in a more accurate personality appraisal than meeting face to face, going by the results of previous studies.
College-age users of Facebook in the United States and a similar social networking site in Germany typically present accurate versions of their personalities in online profiles, says psychologist Mitja Back of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. People use online social networking sites to express who they really are rather than idealized versions of themselves, Back and his colleagues conclude in an upcoming Psychological Science.
“Online social networks are so popular and so likely to reveal people's actual personalities because they allow for social interactions that feel real in many ways," Back says.
Back's team administered personality inventories that evaluated 133 U.S. Facebook users and 103 Germans who used a comparable social-networking site. Inventories focused on the extent to which volunteers endorsed ratings of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional instability and openness to new experiences.
The subjects -- who ranged in age from 17 to 22 -- took the inventory twice, first with instructions to describe their actual personalities and then to portray idealized versions of themselves.
Then, undergraduate research assistants -- nine in the United States and 10 in Germany -- rated volunteers' personalities after looking at their online profiles. Those ratings matched volunteers' actual personality descriptions better than their idealized ones, especially for extraversion and openness.
Facebook is so true to life, Back claims, that encountering a person there for the first time generally results in a more accurate personality appraisal than meeting face to face, going by the results of previous studies.
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