A study of Facebook behavior: What does it tell about your Neuroticism and Extraversion?

Social Network Sites offer users the opportunity to portray themselves with much freedom. People get an impression about a user based on this user’s online profile, posted content and interactions with friends. In this paper, we examine how Neuroticism and Extraversion traits are expressed through such behaviors of a user on Facebook. While previous research relied on self-reported Facebook usage from small samples of college students, we developed a Facebook application to directly retrieve data from 1327 users. This enables us to study fine-grained signals embedded in users’ behaviors, such as writing styles or number of ‘‘likes’’, and correlate them with users’ personality. We present the features found to be significant and show that these features can be used to infer a user’s Neuroticism and Extraversion. 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.