Simulating Virtual Behaviour A Facebook “Like” Questionnaire Christine L. Cook, Mphil (PhD Candidate) Supervised by Dr. Aleksandr Kogan (Spectre)

Facebook Research – A Brief History Social networking research was spearheaded by Dr. Jen Golbeck. Predicting Personality by analysing “tweets” (Twitter; ) Facebook “likes” were further explored by Kosinski, Stillwell, & Graepel (2012). “Likes” are binomial (yes or no/indifferent), public information. Reduced via principal component analysis (PCA) to 100 dimensions. Correlations with actual data range from 0.17 (satisfaction with life) to 0.85 (age). This technique was refined by Kogan & Chancellor. Likes are entered into a co-occurrence matrix, eliminating the sparseness of data. Instead of 50,000+ participants, models can be trained on samples as small as 1000. http://www.psychometrics.cam.ac.uk/about-us/directory/michal-kosinski/image_normal http://www.cs.umd.edu/~golbeck/jen-small.jpg http://www.psychol.cam.ac.uk/directory/ak823@cam.ac.uk/image_normal

Limits of the Research People need Facebook accounts! People need to be willing to authorize access to their accounts. Recent unethical research (The Guardian, 2014) General unease with “big brother” (i.e. NSA, CCTV …) Fear of additional information being downloaded. Testing requires an internet connection.

The Current Study GOAL: Create a paper-pencil alternative to Facebook account access. Kogan & Chancellor’s models were trained on an American population, therefore all participants in this study must also be American. Participants were recruited via Tellwut, a Toronto-based survey panel.

Making the Facebook Like Simulator (FLS) Walmart Amazon.com Ebay.com T-Pain 1.000 0.874 0.863 0.412 0.973 0.381 0.566 The top 500 Facebook “likes” were found in 2014 by Kogan & Chancellor. These were entered into a correlation matrix. Any item-pairs that correlated at 0.90 or higher were flagged; the highest-ranked item was kept, the other discarded.

Methodology Participants Procedure Participants Procedure Study 1 Study 2 Participants 1247 completed the survey 1000 authorized the app Procedure Consent Form/Information Sheet Authorization of Facebook Harvester App Completion of FLS Redirect to Tellwut for reward Participants 1019 completed the survey 842 authorized the app Procedure Same as Study 1, + BFI -60 participants (no response variance) -Items 2, 12, 21, 23, 24, 26-29, 31, 32, 34-41, and 44 (sub-scale reliability)

Machine Learning Algorithms Based on FLS 10-150 Likes used Self Report Data Demographic Q’s Big Five Inventory (BFI) Based on FB All possible likes used Testing Sample: 8364 participants from Kogan & Chancellor’s original research.

Study 1 Results Age Gender

Study 2 Results Openness Conscientiousness

Study 2 Results Extraversion Agreeableness

Study 2 Results Neuroticism

Final Results One scale of 60 items. Ability to predict personality, age, and gender retroactively. More accuracy than using harvested FB likes.

The Next Steps Validate completed FLS on multiple existing scales Use the FLS in other United States-based studies as a personality measure Laboratory studies with small n’s Large-scale surveys without a Facebook component Perform Kogan & Chancellor’s initial work in other countries Hong Kong Russia UK Create FLS versions appropriate to these other cultures

Thank you for your attention.

Detailed Training Sample Information Study 1 Study 2 Age range: 19-86 (M = 47.33, SD = 17.83) 79.48% Female, 20.52% Male Age range: 17-85 (M = 48.70, SD = 17.55) 79.01% Female, 20.99% Male

Detailed Test Sample Information Age range: 14-96 (M = 29.99, SD = 12.31) 53.20% Female, 46.80% Male Racial data was not available for this test set. 32 participants claimed to be over 100 years old and were thus eliminated as “missing data”. With the exception of the FLS, this sample had completed all the same questionnaires as the training sample. The same test sample was used in both study 1 and study 2.

Data Processing (FLS and Facebook) Raw Data Sparse 1’s and 0’s Co-occurrence Matrix Person to Group Dense to Rich Comparable Scores 100 dimensions

Study 1 Results – FLS to Facebook Age Gender

Study 2 Results Neuroticism FLS to Facebook? Openness -> 40 Likes Conscientiousness -> 120 Likes Extraversion -> 90 Likes Agreeableness -> 100 Likes Neuroticism -> 80 Likes