Study shows how easy and effective it is for Facebook ads to target your personality

Examples of ads used in the study: (A) targeted at high and low extraversion users, (B) at high and low openness users. via Matz et al, 2017 / Getty Images By Christian Jarrett Last week, Facebook’s founding president Sean Parker admitted his concerns that by focusing on social validation, Facebook was designed to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology”. Added to this, and amidst the current furore around fake news, imagine if adverts on Facebook could be adapted to target your personality, significantly increasing the odds that people like you will click on the ads and then buy the associated products. A timely study in PNAS shows just how easy and effective it is to target web users according to their personality, a technique that the researchers call “psychological persuasion”. The research, led by Sandra Matz at Columbia Business School, used data previously gathered via the myPersonality.org app. Millions of people took personality tests and agreed for the app to access their history of Likes on Facebook (for instance, whether they had “liked” Lady Gaga or the film Battlestar Galactica). From a subsample of 65,000 users of the app, Matz and her team identified Likes which correlated strongly with scores on one of the main personality traits, but were neutral as regards the others. For example, they found that liking the US rapper Shwayze correlated with extraversion, but not with scores on the other main personality trait...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Facebook Personality Technology Source Type: blogs