Mindbook? Psychologically naked in a social network
I thought it was a prank.
Inside Facebook ran an April 1 story titled “Facebook for Serious Psychological Research? With a Fun Quiz, You Bet” about the work of a UK psychology grad student. Complete with a picture of Jung I got ready for fun, expecting a psychological “Farmville Grows Crops: Cure Hunger With a Fun Game!”
I was wrong. It was serious. In fact, according to AppData the “MyPersonality” quiz has about 25,000 Daily Active Users. Real, off-the-shelf, public domain psychological tests were indeed being made available on FB to amuse friends and inform advertisers. And it was popular.
While psychological tests have been available online for years, I even dimly recall coming across things like the MyPersonality app quiz when I was still in graduate school in the late 80s, what’s new is the social networking piece. There is an option not to let your friends see your results, but sharing your results is kind of the point of the whole thing. With apps like this, Facebook flirts with becoming Mindbook. And while “MyPersonality” might just be a diversion (like Horoscopes), it also might be meaningful and with meaning comes risk.
Unfortunately, the app doesn’t include any of the statistical data (at least I couldn’t find any) I’d need to figure out what the “tests” actually measure and how well they do it (thereby saving me the embarrassment of statistically geeking-out in public). The only option left is what’s called “face validity,” a kind of smell test to see if something on it’s face does what it says it does. So, I took the tests and, well, it had a funny odor but it didn’t stink.
Some of the more amusing findings are that according to “MyPersonality” my three top choices for college major should be: #1 Culinary Arts, #2 Cosmetology, #3 Criminal Justice. And where to live? Well, my top 3 country choices would be: #1 Isle Of Man, #2 Syria, #3 Honduras.
At least the results include the disclaimer, “Few tests will even try to give such specific information, so cut us some slack if it is not perfect for you!” In other words, entertainment is the reason we’re doing this so stop complaining and have some fun. I did. I enjoyed imagining myself working in a little restaurant on the Isle of Man. I’d get a cable knit sweater and let my beard grow out. Owning a nail salon in Syria was more of a stretch (I’m not sure a male American psychoanalyst would succeed in such a venture) and when I got to the idea of possibly joining the Honduran criminal justice system I was frankly a little frightened.
But the results are also intended to be serious and meaningful; it is not just entertainment. In fact, the intro to the app states
this questionnaire gives you a structured and organised way to describe your personality. This offers you a framework to understand yourself, to understand other people, to make comparisons, to consider the advantages and disadvantages of your personality, and to consider how your personality will impact upon your work and social lives.
In other words, it’s all about meaningful self-knowledge: don’t mind the disclaimers we need to have, this is the real deal! For example, among the results shared with FB friends is your MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator). Based on Carl Jung’s work, the MBTI is a widely-used shorthand for talking about what kind of person you are. There are 4 dimensions each with two choices resulting in 16 different “types.”
Excerpted with permission from the MBTI® Manual: A Guide to the Development and Use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®
Favorite world: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world? This is called Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I).
Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning? This is called Sensing (S) or Intuition (N).
Decisions: When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances? This is called Thinking (T) or Feeling (F).
Structure: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options? This is called Judging (J) or Perceiving (P).
via My MBTI Personality Type – MBTI Basics.
So, as an example if you are an ISTP (introverted, sensing, thinking, perceiving) you are:
Tolerant and flexible, quiet observers until a problem appears, then act quickly to find workable solutions. Analyze what makes things work and readily get through large amounts of data to isolate the core of practical problems. Interested in cause and effect, organize facts using logical principles, value efficiency.
via My MBTI Personality Type – MBTI Basics – The 16 MBTI Types.
All interesting. But there are lots of places on the web where you can fill out questionnaires and learn which of the 16 types fits you best. Same with all of the other tests, nothing in “MyPersonality” is unique. What is unique about “MyPersonality” is putting widely available tests inside a social network.
A good metaphor for self-knoweldge is looking at yourself in a mirror: you get to see how you look in all the places typically hidden from view. To state the obvious, there is a huge difference between looking at yourself naked in a mirror and posting naked pictures of yourself on Flickr. Similar differences exist between traditionally private psychological tests and “MyPersonality.” Kashmir Hill, my colleague here at T/S who first told me about MyPersonality (thanks!), has repeatedly warned against posting nude pictures because they will just cause trouble for you. So too with publicly posting meaningful psychological test results, it will likely only hurt you later. Call me an old-fashioned anti-Web 2.0 luddite (of course, you’d be wrong if you did), but I believe as much as possible you should always be able to choose who gets to see what you see when you pose naked in front of a mirror, real or metaphorical.
Although the test intro proudly states “There are no foreseeable risks to you from taking this questionnaire” that just isn’t so. Whenever you make the private public, whether it’s the contours of your skin or of your personality, you no longer own it. You give it away and people will use if for their own purposes, not always in your best interest. Do you really want to make yourself even more vulnerable to potential bullies? How about that crush of yours? Won’t it be more fun letting him or her get to know you by, oh I don’t know, taking a walk?
And if you ever need a job, well, the data provided by this supposedly risk-free entertainment is one of the parameters many recruiters use in determining whether a new hire would fit with a team and whether an applicant fits with the intended job. Inc. Magazine cites the popularity of the MBTI, it’s value, and the danger of the MTBI becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy:
MBTI is a popular evaluative tool. Many colleges and universities use it in career counseling to help guide students into appropriate fields for their personality types. In the business world, companies use it to make hiring decisions, identify leadership potential among employees, design training for specific employee needs, facilitate team building, and help resolve conflicts between employees. By giving people an increased understanding of their behavior and preferences, MBTI is said to help them increase their productivity, build relationships, and make life choices.
Proponents of MBTI see the testing system as a valuable aid to personal development and growth. But critics of MBTI argue that its personality profiles are so broad and ambiguous that they can be interpreted to fit almost anyone. Some also worry that, once a university career counselor or employer knows a person’s “type,” that person might tend to be pigeonholed or pushed in a certain direction regardless of his or her desires.
via Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) – Encyclopedia – Business Terms.
I would never complain about any path to self-knowledge. If you’re interested, by all means play around with the kinds of self-knowledge online psychological tests can provide, even share the results with your real friends. Talk. Discuss. Share. But please, like naked pictures, don’t just give your self-knowledge away for a momentary amusement where it can then be used by anyone for any purpose; the dangers of dumping this kind of personal information into an online social network is just not worth the risk.
[for those following the "A Clinical Portrait of Excessive Online Porn-Use" series, the third installment will be posted Saturday]
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Hi Todd, thanks for your interesting article! I run the My Personality application, and hopefully I can provide some of the info that you did not have.
We use the IPIP version of the Big Five test, for which you can see some reliability stats on this page: http://ipip.ori.org/newNEO_DomainsTable.htm
As you can see, the reliability alpha coefficients are high (mean: .89) and although the table is poorly labelled, at the end there are the correlations between the IPIP 5 domains test and the NEO-PI-R test used in employee selection, which show that the tests are very close (.81 correlation, .90 corrected for unreliability). We have checked to make sure that our Facebook data is also reliable, and find that it has similar or higher alpha coefficients as the IPIP data.
This test has been used in published papers, and we are also in the process of adding to this literature with My Personality data. So, the big 5 test we use does seem to be a reliable measure of personality. Concerning its validity, we’ve done various analyses on the data, and every time we’ve found that the results we get are the same as those in already published papers, so there’s good reason to think its validity is high also.
Regarding your concerns about making one’s personality profile available, this is something that has been at the forefront of our thoughts too. You already mentioned that it’s possible to set your results as “hidden” so that only you can see them. But what’s also worth mentioning is that by default your personality profile is only viewable by your friends. So, whereas by default a Facebook profile can be seen by anyone on the networks you join, your personality profile is only viewable by people who you have specifically chosen to friend. This means that unless you decided to add your boss or a recruiter as a friend, he/she wouldn’t be able to see your results.
Regarding the amusing aspects – you’re right that the Personality Matches feature, which matches one’s personality results with potential college majors and countries, is more speculative and meant to be more fun. The Big Five results, however, are meant to be more serious. We have attempted to clearly delineate the two different features by specifically marking it as a separate section, and giving warnings about the more speculative results.
As far as we know, the personality matches feature is also unique. Although lots of personality tests attempt to match personality results with careers, the ones I’ve seen have done it theoretically. In other words, they assume that extroverted people will also be good at e.g. sales, for various theoretical reasons.
This might be accurate, but on the other hand it might not. My Personality, however, has been lucky enough to have lots of users take our tests and give us access to their data. This has allowed us to empirically test whether people studying certain college majors (or living in certain countries) are more likely to be a certain personality. So, our matches are based on hard data.
I’d love to chat with you if you have any questions. Feel free to send me a message.
I’m delighted to see you here David, thanks so much for stopping by and taking the time to comment!
I’m not sure you were “lucky enough to have lots of users take our tests,” the fact is it’s not luck, you did a nice job with the app. Taking it was fun and, truth be told, thanks to “MyPersonality” and http://www.isleofmanrestaurants.com I will soon be leaving the States for that restaurant job on the Isle of Man for which I am ideally suited!!
My questions mix stat-geek eye on details with a clinician’s eye for the individual taking the test. Here goes:
– You said you “checked to make sure that our Facebook data is also reliable”? I’m fascinated. What do you do? What did you find? Test-taking conditions would vary so widely that this might actually be interesting to people who would otherwise find such questions mind-numbing.
– You said you’re getting ready to publish some of your results. Did you need to get IRB approval for the project? Did the FB agreement page count as indicating sufficient informed consent?
– In the agreement section you say there “no foreseeable risks to you from taking this questionnaire.” I assume you’re not being nit-picky about taking vs. taking AND getting results. So I’m really curious about the process you went through to arrive at this conclusion. How was risk assessed?
– I’m really interested in the fate of the data collected, who owns it and what happens to it. Are stored data severed from other profile info? Or can someone mine connections? Can the results used to serve targeted ads (things like tequila ads for the extroverted while the more introverted are sold a good, thoughtful scotch)?
– Finally, I don’t have the same confidence you seem to have in the FB platform. You’re playing by today’s rules really well by limiting views to “friends” rather than networks, but I think as a rule of thumb to be safe people should always assume whatever is posted in FB is at least potentially public. Also, someone might think they have a pretty clean FB persona, including believing there are not foreseeable risks to online personality tests, and might friend people far more liberally than is in their interest.
I hope you don’t mind so many questions. I’ve already learned from your comment, thank you. It even led me to read a fascinating study about the use of the IPIP with a Chinese sample. I look forward to whatever responses you care to share.
In response to another comment. See in context »I took the test and was not surprised to see it says I am a teacher type, but that ENFJ is the trait shared with Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Barrack Obama, Abe Lincoln and Oprah has me laughing with a smile, those people seem quite different to me! It is fun I must say! How can they know King David was one, that type of a judgment is a bit of a stretch, no?
Haha Todd
I wish you a wonderful new life! If you need to contact me, I will be doing something mathematical in Chile…
To check reliability we first made sure that the tests are statistically reliable. So, we looked at the responses to make sure that the items loaded on the five factors correctly, and that the traits have a high enough internal consistency. Then, as I say, we looked at our data to see whether they replicated previous findings, which they do.
Concerning risks and IRB. My Personality started out purely as a business, so we didn’t have plans to use the data for anything but giving people a personality test. As a researcher, I followed the guidelines available for running an ethical experiment online, but it was only as it took off that the app’s potential for research was considered. So, My Personality did not go through an ethics board to begin with. However, as we’ve partnered with various academics to add new tests and features, some of these academics have put their feature through an IRB without any problems (e.g. the sensational interests questionnaire).
The particular line on “no forseeable risks to you” is actually taken the consent form from another academic personality project available online: http://www.outofservice.com/bigfive/consent/ This project has had various articles published from it in respected academic journals.
Profile data has to be connected to personality data in order that once a user decides to delete their information, we delete all data about them. Obviously, part of our research is also connecting things like what someone’s interests are to what their personality is, so it’s necessary for us to connect the two. Personality data is not available to Facebook, and we certainly don’t provide it to ad companies, so no companies will be targeting a user based on their personality. When we do research, it is anonymised – we’re interested about extroverted people rather than any particular extroverted person.
My view is that a personality test is just a way to help people describe themselves. In this respect, it’s just like someone saying “I enjoy parties”. A personality test formalises this, so that everyone is describing themselves in the same way, but in the end it’s just someone describing what they’re like. I don’t think that this is much different from, say, writing that your favourite music is, or what activities you enjoy – both of these would tell us something about someone’s personality. So although it is personal information, and people should be able to choose how widely they disseminate it, I don’t think that we should get too protective about users sharing it.
Thanks for the info about the “no forseeable risks to you” claim. But I’m not sure the consent form you quote actually applies to your project. Specifically, the original at http://www.outofservice.com/bigfive/consent/ also states:
“•To avoid any confidentiality risks associated with participating, no personally-identifiable data about you is gathered or stored.
• Because your participation is anonymous, we have no ability to link the data to an individual person.”
In contrast, your project stores and links the gathered data to an individual person.
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