You may have an opinion about what your friends’ Facebook posts reveal about them: this person’s a show-off, that person is the Queen of the Humblebrag.
But a new online tool will tell you exactly what kind of personality you have, and how closely it matches your friends, frenemies and even celebrities.
Five Labs analyzes your Facebook posts to determine how you rank on the so-called “Big Five” traits that, according to modern psychology, comprise the personality: agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, extroversion and openness.
The tool, developed by San Francisco-based consumer technology company Five, pulls key words from status updates to make what it calls “strikingly accurate assumptions about individual personalities.”
The company is quick to note that it does not store users’ personal information.
Five Labs’ methodology is based on the world’s largest language and personality study, conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. The lead researcher on that study, H. Andrew Schwartz, serves as an adviser to Five.
Five co-founder Nikita Bier says Five Labs is just the latest in a series of apps and tools that mine user-driven sites, such as Facebook, for social data.
“Think of this as a personality snapshot,” Bier said Tuesday in a statement. “It’s all for fun, but we’re also hoping to educate.
“People need to ask themselves a profound question: ‘How does my data portray me on public networks -- and how might that be used?’”
Five Labs was launched first as an online tool. But users can sign up for the mobile app ahead of its launch.
