How authentic are personality traits inferred from Facebook Likes?
It’s actually now pretty well understood that we are retrieving the actual personality of the person from the Facebook likes. It is relatively easy to misrepresent yourself, or try to sell a kind of idealised image when you are filling in a personality questionnaire, writing it, to focus for a few minutes, questions are very often quite obvious, which means that in some contexts, really, a personality questionnaire becomes and IQ test.
Well, if you think about the occupational market, the one that is able to adjust the responses in the most appropriate way to the needs or perceived needs of the employer, will have the perfect score, which actually results in a bit of a cheating contest, where people who are the least honest and the most intelligent have a great advantage. Being able to run this assessment based on your digital footprint to a large extent solves this problem. If you can appear to be extroverted consistently for the last seven years, you just as well probably are an extrovert.