That allowed researchers to cross-reference the results of the quiz — numeric Ocean scores — with the users’ Facebook “likes,” and build a model from the correlations they found between the two. With that model, the researchers could often make precise guesses about subsequent users’ personalities using only a list of their likes, no 100-question quiz necessary. What Your Facebook ‘Likes’ Say About Your Personality Researchers at Stanford University and Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Center built a model that could assess a person’s personality using Facebook “likes” alone. Dr. Kogan developed a Facebook app called “thisisyourdigitallife,” a quiz similar to myPersonality, and used it to harvest data from more than 50 million Facebook profiles. Facebook in 2015 changed its policies, including altering rules about how third-party apps can gain access to information about users’ friends.

Source: New York Times March 20, 2018 17:27 UTC