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

• We retrieved data directly from 1327 participants’ Facebook accounts to investigate users’ personality.
• We calculated 154 features, covering demographics, profile descriptions, produced content, and interactions with friends.
• Neurotic users are inclined to share personally identifying information.
• Extroverts have significantly more Facebook friends than introverts.
• Neurotic and introverted persons are less likely to be “alone together” on Facebook.

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.