How do you feel if computers know your personality better than your best friends and even your parents? Feeling awful and scared?
A recent study (“Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans”) shows that computers are able to predicate a person’s personality more accurately than one’s friends and family members.
Picture Credit:http://pakseoexpert.com/
By analyzing digital footprint (“likes” on Facebook), a research group at The University of Cambridge suggests that people’s personalities can be predicated automatically and without involving human social-cognitive skills.
In the computer personality judgments study, researchers used a sample of 86,220 volunteers, who filled in the 100-item personality questionnaire through an application called myPersonality project on Facebook and also tracked their Facebook Likes.
The results of analyzing the collected data, researchers realized that the result of the study highly aligned the Big Five theory. (The five factors are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.) For example, volunteers with high openness tend to like meditation or TED talks, and participants with high extroversion tend to enjoy partying or dancing.
In order to study the human personality judgments, researchers obtained from participants’ friends on Facebook and asked their friends to give a 10-item version of a personality measure about a given participant.
By comparing with participants’ self reports, the results show that those computer-based models are more accurate than humans in personality judgment.
At the end of the article, researchers concluded that computers gave more accurate personality report than a person’s friends, partners and even parents.
“In the future, computers could be able to infer our psychological traits and react accordingly, leading to the emergence of emotionally-intelligent and socially skilled machines.”
“In this context, the human-computer interactions depicted in science fiction films such as ‘Her’ (“Her” is a movie which is released in 2013. The film follows Theodore Twombly, a man falls in love with a computer system that speaks with a female voice.) seem to be within our reach.”
—–Wu Youyou
Picture Credits:http://www.gsmnation.com
However, researchers couldn’t deny that privacy concerns came out because computers can collect amount of information about an individual.
“Big Data and machine learning provide accuracy that the human mind has a hard time achieving, as humans tend to give too much weight to one or two examples, or lapse into irrational ways of thinking.”
“We hope that consumers, technology developers, and policy-makers will tackle those challenges by supporting privacy-protecting laws and technologies, and giving the users full control over their digital footprints.”
——Dr. Michal Kosinski
Picture Credits: National Magazine(Canada)
In the age of Big Data, online data mining and tracking activities of users cause a big concern of personal privacy. By tracking a person’s activities online, computers are able to give a suggestion for one’s life decisions, such as choosing activities, career paths and even choosing a romantic partner. However, related laws or policies should be set up to protect users’ privacy.
By Xindi Wang
