Monday, September 15, 2008

Personality on Social Network Sites: An Application of the Five Factor Model

Stefan Wehrli, September 2008, Paper available here

...We use data from an online survey with 1560 respondents from a major Swiss technical university and their corresponding online profiles and friendship networks on a popular Social Network Site (SNS)... we collected survey data on personality traits with a short question inventory of the Five Factor Personality Model. We show how these.. influence participation, adoption time, nodal degree and ego-network growth over a period of 4 months on the networking platform... extraversion (is) a major driving force in the tie formation process. We find a counter-intuitive positive effect for neuroticism, a negative influence for conscientiousness and no effects for openness and agreeableness.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Samiel Golsing has a recent paper on personality and online social networking. He and his co-authors comment how
"for many people, these websites have changed the dynamics of how individuals become acquainted.
But how accurate are the
impressions based on (these)profiles?" They examine impressions based
on 133 Facebook profiles, comparing them with how the targets
see themselves and are seen by close acquaintances.

The findings presented show: (a) that Facebook-based
personality impressions show some consensus for all Big Five
dimensions, with particularly strong consensus for Extraversion;
(b) the impressions show some accuracy, with the exception of
Emotional Stability; (c) that observers are aware only of how they
are seen in terms of Extraversion; and (d) profile authors did
engage in some self-enhancement for the Big Five domains of
Emotional Stability and Openness to Experience.

http://www.icwsm.org/papers/3--Gosling-Gaddis-Vazire.pdf

Anonymous said...

Vazire.pdf