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Study Claims Your Facebook Profile Shows the True You

by Caleb Johnson on March 2, 2010 at 05:45 PM

When you're trolling Facebook, how much of what you read do you actually believe? It's an important question, particularly if you're looking to develop a meaningful relationship beyond the realm of social networking.

According to Wired, a new study claims that college-age people tend to tell the truth rather than lie on their social networking profiles. German psychologist Mitja Back, along with nine U.S. and ten German undergraduate research assistants, studied 133 U.S. and 103 German Facebook members by giving the subjects personality tests. The subjects were asked to describe their actual personalities, and then their idealized personalities. The research assistants then viewed the subjects' online profiles and rated their characteristics.

The assistants' ratings more closely matched the actual personalities of the participants (all aged 17 to 21) than they did the idealized ones. In other words, Back and his team assert that people don't really fudge their Facebook profiles much at all. "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 told Wired.

These results are interesting, but, as UCLA psychology graduate student Adriana Manago told Wired, they might not tell the whole story. First, the participants could've lied (even if it wasn't conscious) when describing their actual personalities. Second, we often highlight our best qualities in online profiles. Manago told Wired that a broad personality test, such as the one used in this study, couldn't account for that factor. [From: Wired]

Tags: facebook, lying, personality, personality test, PersonalityTest, socialnetworking, study, top, web, wired

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