Are You Addicted to Facebook? See What It Says About Your Personality

How often do you use Facebook...if you are on the social media / communicating site at all? Hitting the "LIKE" button or sharing your status now looks like it has a whole new meaning...

A PhD student from Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre has developed software to predict a person's personality traits based on their Facebook activity! By ‘mining’ for likes on the social network, the program created by Wu YouYou predicts for an individual user how open, conscientious, outgoing and neurotic they are. Other categories of data include Age, Psychological Gender, Sexual Preference, Relationship Status, Education, Political Orientation, Religious Orientation, Life Satisfaction, and Intelligence. I allowed the program to analyse my FB, and got mixed results:

• AGE:  52 (15 years higher than actual)
• PSYCHOLOGICAL GENDER:  100% Masculine
• SEXUAL PREFERENCE:  0% Same Sex
• RELATIONSHIP STATUS:  88% Single
• PERSONALITY: 100% Conscientious, 74% Extraversion, 51% Agreeableness, 0% Openness & Neuroticism (not so highly organized, but higher traditional score)
• EDUCATION: 25% Finance (leads the list of 11 subjects, journalism is only 4%)
• POLITICAL ORIENTATION: 94% Conservative (I'm actually a Centrist/Independent)
• RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION: 84% Christian
• LIFE SATISFACTION: 94% (to be honest, not quite that high)
• INTELLIGENCE: 28% (much lower than my standardized tests would say)

To collect the data, Youyou's team asked 86,220 Facebook users to complete a 100-item personality questionnaire, designed to provide personality scores for the traits listed above. The results of the questionnaire were then compared with judgments of friends and family members made using a shorter version of the personality test. During testing, only a spouse's judgement was better than the computer’s ability to predict these broad psychological traits.

What did you think about it's accuracy? Do you think this data analysis is a true representation of you? Can this info can help you make life decisions?