Predicting Psychology from Social Data

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Big Data Methods for Social Science and Policy - Interdisciplinary Workshop Programme

David Stillwell, Psychometrics Centre

The myPersonality Facebook app collected data from 6 million users by enabling them to take psychological questionnaires and get feedback on their results. We predict personality using digital records of behaviour and machine learning methods, and show that the machine is as accurate at predicting your psychology as your spouse. Could digital records one day replace self-report measures of personality, and what would that mean for digital privacy?

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