We’ve been discussing how Google forms an identity of you through your click signals, and how Facebook forms an identity of you through connections and sharing. What about what you like on Facebook? Two British men have made a website and algorithm called YouAreWhatYouLike. They claim that they can map your personality according to the things you’ve liked on Facebook, whether its musicians, politicians, movies, etc. To do this, they divide the human personality into five areas; Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Stability, and Agreeableness. Then using your likes on Facebook, they generate your specific personality in each of the five areas.
As we’ve seen in other places, my identity created through my Facebook Likes is inaccurate. The one area of personality they got right for me is Extraversion. I thought I would be the perfect candidate for this test because I Like hundreds of pages on Facebook. I Like every musician that has ever had even one song I’ve liked, every place I’ve visited on vacation, and even my favorite hot sauce. Maybe this mass of information made it harder for the test to get a solid image of my personality. Is the test accurate for you?
One of the issues of this web site is the manner in which it is presented. Pariser writes about how people are fluid, we change our personalities based on our mood and situation. So, when YouAreWhatYouLike tells me that my Stability is “Calm and Relaxed,” the only answer is sometimes. True, I am generally calm, yet there are plenty of times I get stressed. This method of mapping a personality is like a horoscope, it is full of truisms, or statements that everyone wants to believe are true.
That’s a cool site and it’s time like these where I wish I had a Facebook to try it out. I think your post touched on Mark Zuckerberg’s comment on the idea of “one-identity.” Even though you may have liked everything you have come into contact with, we are still much more complicated and multidimensional than just our interests. This may get a little too philosophical but I believe there are no absolutes outside of |math|(though many may argue otherwise). We’re all in a constant state of change and are relative to our surroundings. We are gradually changing every moment that passes by. You are never the same person as you once were. It’s probably why the question of who we are is always relevant and why the appeal of understanding and categorizing oneself through the use of methods such as the five factor model is so popular.
I actually took a survey very similar to this awhile back. It’s very long with over 300 questions I think, but it gave me a pretty accurate description of myself that I didn’t actually want to believe. If you are interested and have time to kill here’s the link http://www.personal.psu.edu/j5j/IPIP/
If you do take it, answer the questions as honestly as you can to get an accurate result. The information is confidential as far as I know and you can take it under a false name.
Usually I ignore these kinds of websites, but my curiosity got the best of me and I attempted to give this a shot. Initially I am very skeptical about any kind of quizzes and surveys’ regarding “our personalities, character, political views, etc” is because we are all dissimilar personalities. How can 5 or 50 questions declare who we are, we are much more than that.
But since I attempt this test, I can say that the accuracy of this test for me was 60%. I was reading my results, and most of the answers had truthfulness to my personality, and I thought that this wasn’t as impractical as I thought but then I stumbled upon the last result “AGREEABLENESS: Assertive and competitive, rather than warm, trusting and cooperative.” Laughably I can express the insult, but I am trying to figure out what information “likes” did they base this upon. So now I can legitimately say that I give up on these quizzes, surveys, etc.
I tried the site and I have to admit it is a pretty cool site. Usually, I am very, very skeptical about giving my information out especially for someone to make a profit off of under the guile that they can tell me more about my ownself. But, it did take some brilliance to create the site.
In any case, I’m still not sold on the You Are What You Like idea. For one, I only liked a mere 20 people, places, etc. I don’t think that’s enough to tell me who I am. Secondly, I like a lot more things on Facebook but i don’t always click the button. According to the site, I am liberal and artistic versus conservative and traditional which is not true. I mean, the self I want to be is liberal and artistic but the self I am right now is definetly traditional. The site says a lot more about me, but it is only half true. Sometimes I am calm, other times I’m stressed. Sometimes I’m really outgoing and other times I keep to myself. It all depends on the situation. So basically, those two British guys are pretty smart. They created an algorithm that really doesn’t tell us more about our self, rather it plays on our curiosity and gets us thinking.