Featured paper: Personality and Patterns of Facebook Usage.

"Personality and Patterns of Facebook Usage"

ABSTRACT
We show how users' activity on Facebook relates to their personality, as measured by the standard Five Factor Model.
Our dataset consists of the personality profiles and Facebook profile data of 180,000 users (using myPersonality, a Facebook application deployed in 2007.). We examine correlations between users' personality and the properties of their Facebook profiles such as the size and density of their friendship network, number uploaded photos, number of events attended, number of group memberships, and number of times user has been tagged in photos. Our results show significant relationships between personality traits and various features of Facebook profiles. We then show how multivariate regression allows prediction of the personality traits of an individual user given their Facebook profile. The best accuracy of such predictions is achieved for Extraversion and Neuroticism, the lowest accuracy is obtained for Agreeableness, with Openness and Conscientiousness lying in the middle.

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The Big Five Personality Model to assess personality is good for guidance purposes and not good enough for predictive purposes.
"Because the Big Five groups the more specific primary-level factors, feedback organized around the five Global Factor scales is more easily understood. For detailed feedback or predictive purposes, one should assess the more specific primary factors. Research has shown that more specific factors like the primary scales of the 16PF Questionnaire predict actual behavior better than the Big 5 Global Factors. For example, one extravert (a bold, fearless, high-energy type) may differ considerably from another (a sweet, warm, sensitive type), depending on the extraversion-related primary scale score patterns, so deeper analysis is typically warranted." Extracted from the 16PF5 Manual


Other papers like
- "Personality Impressions Based on Facebook Profiles"
- "What lies beneath: The linguistic traces of deception in online dating profiles."
- "Perceptions of trustworthiness online: the role of visual and textual information"
- "Reading between the lines: linguistic cues to deception in online dating profiles"
- "Making Sense of Strangers' Expertise from Signals in Digital Artifacts"
- "The Truth about Lying in Online Dating Profiles"
had shown that browsing profiles at social networking sites or online dating sites, any person will assess quite well the level of Extraversion of the other persons and not well the other personality traits.
and
- "Can you resist the temptation of Facebook: Asymmetrical Facebook-study association predicts academic performance"
- "The Effect of Personality Factors in Predicting Information Disclosure Online"
- "Frequent Facebook Use: Maladaptive Addiction or Healthy Social Strategy?"
- "People or Profiles?: Seeking Out or Warding Off the Perspectives of Others on Facebook"
- "ePersonality: Differential perceptions of personality during online and real-world social interactions"
- "Who are you on Facebook? The role of personality and gender in online social networking sites"
- "Using MySpace increases the endorsement of narcissistic personality traits"
- "Facebook Norms: How People use Facebook to Share and Connect with Others"
- "Personnel Selection, Facebook, and the Dilution Effect: Is More Information Really Better?"
had only discovered people who make an intensive use of social nets, had some personality disorders.



The only way you could have any type of accurate personality analysis is using a normative personality test, like the 16PF5.