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Facebook and Your True Self
Psychology researchers find that certain aspects of the real you show up on your social networking site, whether you want them to or not
By Taylor McNeil
Is your Facebook page a reflection of the real you? A new study suggests that it is—for better or worse.
Psychology researchers at Tufts devised an experiment in which college students were rated based on how they interacted in person and how they appeared on their Facebook pages. What they found was that even though users can easily manipulate their online presence, “elements of who you are—and how you might behave with other people—leak through on your Facebook page,” says Max Weisbuch, a postdoctoral researcher in the psychology department in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, who led the study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Profiles on social media sites like Facebook “don’t completely reveal who you are, but they probably leak something that is true about you,” says Max Weisbuch.
Weisbuch, along with study co-authors Zorana Ivcevic, a postdoctoral researcher, and psychology professor Nalini Ambady, are interested in what people infer about each other from brief impressions. “People treat Facebook, Friendster or MySpace in some ways as if there is something real about a person there,” Weisbuch says. “But little is known about if people’s impressions of others from Facebook correlate with any actual behavior.”
As the experiment was set up, 37 undergraduate volunteers were recruited at a local university to chat about themselves briefly with another student. Those other students were in fact research assistants at Tufts, who rated the volunteers on various factors, including likeability, warmth and agreeableness. Later, videotapes of the sessions were separately viewed by three other undergraduate research assistants, who rated the volunteers on social expressivity and personal disclosure.
Each of the volunteers also gave permission to the researchers to download their Facebook page at the sessions, which were rated by yet another set of undergraduate research assistants. They judged the subjects’ likeability, attractiveness, trustworthiness and the extent to which they would want to be friends with the subject.
Fun in Person, Fun on Facebook
When people talk in person, we can consciously control what we say, but psychologists think we all have a little bit less conscious control over our nonverbal behavior, such as facial expressions and tone of voice. “Nonverbal behavior can leak information about you that you may not want to get out there,” says Weisbuch.
That stands in contrast to Facebook pages. “After all, when you’re deciding what to put on your Facebook, MySpace or Match.com page—you can really put a lot of thought into it,” he says.
Even so, the researchers found that people “who had this sort of nonverbal expressivity—their vocal tones varied a lot, they exhibited a lot of expressivity in their faces, they smiled a lot—were the people who posted a lot of pictures on Facebook, made a lot of photo albums, and had a lot of conversations on their Facebook walls.”
It probably reveals something about their personality, Weisbuch says. “These people are socially expressive and socially engaged, and that comes out in their nonverbal behavior online.”
While no doubt there is some faking of personality on Facebook—not to mention online dating sites—there are also “some real elements of personality, of a person’s social self, that shine through,” Weisbuch says. “They don’t completely reveal who you are, but they probably leak something that is true about you.”
Taylor McNeil can be reached at taylor.mcneil@tuft.edu.
