Facebook likes predict personality and life outcomes as accurately as human judges

Evidence

A paper published in 2015 broke fresh ground again by announcing that the accuracy of the team’s computer predictions had equaled or outpaced that of human judges, both in the use of Facebook “likes” to assess personality traits based on the five-factor model and to predict “life outcomes” such as “life satisfaction,” “substance use,” or “depression.” The study made clear that the real breakthrough of the Facebook prediction research was the achievement of economies in the exploitation of these most-intimate behavioral depths with “automated, accurate, and cheap personality assessment tools” that effectively target a new class of “objects” once known as your “personality.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 858

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to ongoing discussion of behavioral surplus and prediction as the core of surveillance capitalism; also relates to the ‘data is the new oil’ framing elsewhere in the book. — connects to: Facebook likes accurately reveal private attributes including sexual orientation and drug use. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 855; Facebook users’ personality traits can be predicted from public data without consent. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 854; Facebook’s data advantage enabled unprecedented advertiser nanotargeting — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1006