Why computers know you better than your friends do

Facebook knows you well because ‘likes’ reveal so much about your character.

17:37 13 January 2015

Scientists have found that computer is more effective in assessing someone’s basic personality than even their own family or close friends.

In a study that was participated by more than 86,000 users of Facebook has demonstrated the ability of computers to predict the character of a person based on what they have listed as their Likes.

Ms Wu, the lead author of the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said: “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 interaction depicted in science fiction films such as Her seem to be within our reach.”

“People may choose to augment their own intuitions and judgments with this kind of data analysis when making important life decisions such as choosing activities, career paths or even romantic partners,” she said.

David Stillwell of Cambridge, who developed the personality test, said: “We used some machine learning technology to see how accurately we could predict personality and we compared this set of predictions made by the computer with the set of predictions made by friends and family, and by the person themselves in a self-assessment.”