What's Her Face(book)? How many of their Facebook “friends” can college students actually identify?

An online game, titled What's Her Face(book), was created and students from an Ivy League campus (as well as adults from the general population) were invited to play as many times as they wished. Each game lasted around 90 s during which individual friends were randomly selected from the participant's Facebook page and their profile photo displayed alongside up to four additional tagged photos. The participant was prompted to either type in the friend's first name, last name or both names with single names allowing a Levenshtein distance of one letter and both names allowing a distance of up to three letters for accuracy (Levenshtein, 1966). Following a game, participants were shown the photos and names for those they correctly and incorrectly identified. More than 4000 participants played the game, with an aggregate 174,615 opportunities to name their Facebook friends. Playing the game an average (median) of 4 times, participants were able to name only 72.7% of their friends, with male participants naming male friends more accurately than their female friends and female participants naming their female friends more accurately than their male friends. Although playing the game more times resulted in higher accuracy, perhaps from correcting previous mistakes, the benefit was minimal with those in the top quartile of games played garnering only an additional 2% in accuracy on average. Results were discussed in terms of social capital theory alongside issues of privacy and security on social media sites.