Five Labs characterized my personality¹Personalities are analyzed according to the Big Five personality traits. by analyzing the words in my Facebook posts:²Five Labs examined the linguistic content using a method “based on a study published by H. Andrew Schwartz and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania’s World Well-Being Project.

Brent is restless, inventive, and reserved.³I’m tempted to disagree, but maybe that would just prove its validity. I do question its validity for everyone, though. One person I analyzed showed very different traits than in real life. Maybe all that proves is that we can be very different people on social media than in person.

If that’s all it did, Five Lab’s analysis would be interesting.⁴Some may question why I’d post personal results on a public blog. I have a couple of responses: (1) if the results are accurate, those who know me aren’t surprised; those who don’t, don’t know whether they are or not. (2) I have a ton of public postings here on my blog. Not posting the results doesn’t prevent anyone from doing a similar analysis with an even larger data source. However, what makes it cool is Five Labs showing me which of my friends’ and selected public figures’ personalities are closest to mine. Turns out, Bill Gates and I could be twins.⁵I wonder if he’d agree. ;-) All the same, notice the similarity in poses for our profile pictures. Also, Bill’s personality traits matched closer than any of my friends’ traits did. ;-)

Five Labs also lets me analyze my friends’ personalities, even those who apparently haven’t yet specifically authorized Five Labs to see their walls as I did. I bet they didn’t know they were authorizing that when they friended me. I didn’t either.⁶It’s amazing how much information we leak on the Internet, even on Facebook. Or maybe, this is just what it means when we authorize apps our friends use to see our data. Makes sense?

Maybe you’d like to let Five Labs analyze your personality. Or maybe you already have. Did you agree with the results?

Update. It appears that the last assertion is no longer true. As more of my friends have done this analysis, it turns out that one of my friends is an 88% match. Sorry, Bill… ;-)

• 1
  Personalities are analyzed according to the Big Five personality traits.
• 2
  Five Labs examined the linguistic content using a method “based on a study published by H. Andrew Schwartz and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania’s World Well-Being Project.
• 3
  I’m tempted to disagree, but maybe that would just prove its validity. I do question its validity for everyone, though. One person I analyzed showed very different traits than in real life. Maybe all that proves is that we can be very different people on social media than in person.
• 4
  Some may question why I’d post personal results on a public blog. I have a couple of responses: (1) if the results are accurate, those who know me aren’t surprised; those who don’t, don’t know whether they are or not. (2) I have a ton of public postings here on my blog. Not posting the results doesn’t prevent anyone from doing a similar analysis with an even larger data source.
• 5
  I wonder if he’d agree. ;-) All the same, notice the similarity in poses for our profile pictures. Also, Bill’s personality traits matched closer than any of my friends’ traits did.
• 6
  It’s amazing how much information we leak on the Internet, even on Facebook. Or maybe, this is just what it means when we authorize apps our friends use to see our data. Makes sense?