Your profile picture may reveal more about your personality than you realize
Whether it’s a selfie, an old baby picture or a professional snap, a new study has found that you can tell a lot about a person’s personality through their profile photo – but it may not be what you think.
“Social media gives users the opportunity to build an online persona through posting of content such as text, images, links or through interaction with others,” the study explains. “The way in which users present themselves is a type of behavior usually determined by differences in demographic or psychologic traits.”
In the past, studies were able to determine a number of traits from social media images, such as age, gender, occupation, political orientation, location and even some personality traits. But researchers from the University of Pennsylvania wanted to take things further. Analyzing 66,000 Twitter users, they wanted to see how the data they acquired from analyzing profile pictures compared to the actual personality represented through a person’s tweets. The results were surprisingly accurate.
“Our results show significant differences in profile picture choice between personality traits, and that these can be harnessed to predict personality traits with robust accuracy,” the study’s abstract explains. “Although social media allows a user to shape his or her own personality and idealized view (the ‘idealized virtual identity hypothesis’), evidence shows that social media behavior usually represents an extension of one’s self (the ‘extended real life hypothesis’), thus allow-ing others to observe the users’ true’ personality.”
They broke it down into five personality types: the conscientious, extroverts, open, neurotic and agreeable.
Conscientious
“Users high in conscientiousness tend to be more orderly and prefer planned behaviors,” the study found. These users had very traditional photos – typically from the front and looking into the camera.
Extrovert
The study found that most extroverts will post photos of themselves with others or photos where they’re having a good time. “Extroverts enjoy interacting with others, have high group visibility and are perceived as energetic.”
Open to experience
“Users high in openness to experience may be more inclined to choose unconventional images and poses, as a general inclination of this type of people for art and novelty.” These are your artsy shots or the ones that show the back of someone’s head. That, or it’s possible these people are just insecure about the way they look.
Neurotic
Basically, if your photo is lacking colour, positive emotions or anything interesting or complex, you’re probably giving off some seriously neurotic vibes.
Agreeable
Conversely, people who tend to get along with others and are easy going have colourful pictures with multiple people or lots of good vibes.
What do you think of this study? Are the findings in line with your own profile picture? Let us know your thoughts by tweeting to @YahooStyleCA.
