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On Facebook, smart people like The Colbert Report and curly fries

Liking these is a predictor of higher intelligence on Facebook.
Moira Cluney

Facebook's tendency to leak private information and photos has gotten the company in hot water, but the controversies may be missing a larger point. The service is all about sharing personal tastes and interests in a public forum, and the collective public musings can tell you a lot about the service's users.

How much? A new study has paired a personality profile with a datamining of people's "likes" on Facebook and has found that the likes collectively tell us some remarkably specific things about political views, personality traits, happiness, drug use, and so on. On its own, the study doesn't tell us anything shocking, but it provides some amusement value when the authors dive into their numbers and find out what items were specifically correlated with what traits. Which is how we find out that fans of curly fries probably outscored Sephora users on their SATs.

The work comes out of the myPersonality project, which has created a Facebook app that gives users a basic test of their psychological traits. If the users permit it, the researchers also get access to their Facebook profile and history of using the service to formally "like" something. At the time that the analysis in this study was done, the authors had data on nearly 60,000 users.

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Study recruits 61 million participants via Facebook, gets some to vote

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Despite the importance of Congressional representation, barely a third of eligible US voters cast a ballot in the most recent midterm elections. Various get-out-the-vote campaigns have been tried, and many of these have been shown to have a positive effect on voting, but most of them are too focused to reach a large portion of the population. Now, some researchers have tested a method with a good deal more reach: an appeal to potential voters via Facebook. Thanks to the heavy use of that social networking service, the study had the largest experimental population I've ever seen, at 61 million.

On the day of the midterm election, every potential voter who logged in got an ad that encouraged them to vote. And, to a small extent, it worked—voting among those users edged up ever so slightly, and was enhanced when their close friends voted. Given the size of the appeal, this small boost translated to hundreds of thousands of additional voters.

The procedure for the experiment was remarkably simple. Anyone in the US who was over 18 and logged in to Facebook the day of the 2010 election was enrolled in the study. The authors note that this probably makes the numbers they obtained an underestimate of the procedure's effects, since some of these people will have logged in after polls closed.

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Facebook reveals music, film make friendships; books, not so much

Studying the factors that bring people together creates a serious challenge for researchers. Do friendships form because of shared interests, or do those interests develop due to the friendship? A research team has now tracked a set of college students across all four years, using Facebook to identify social ties. The study reveals that people are fundamentally a bit lazy, as proximity provided the strongest predictor of social ties. Once that was accounted for, however, shared tastes in music and film did promote friendships, while books had a minimal effect.

When it comes to being influenced by their friends, the students generally weren't. The exceptions were two genres of music: people liked classical and jazz pieces found via their friends, and those with interests in alternative music acted just like stereotypical hipsters, shying away from things that were popular with their friends.

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