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A Lot About You from Your Facebook Profile

by Savitha C Muppala on May 28 2009 4:49 PM

Your facebook profile reveals a lot about how you are in real life , a new study has revealed.

The study found that university students considered likeable by people, who met them in real life, appeared to make a similar impression on people who view their Facebook profiles.

"People who were expressive in tone of voice and facial expression were also socially expressive on Facebook. They posted a lot of pictures, they posted photo albums, they seemed to have a lot of conversations with people," New Scientist magazine quoted lead researcher Max Weisbuch, a psychologist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, as saying.

Facebook's 200-million-plus members maintain their personal pages where they reveal their interests and photos, as well as comments from friends.

For the study, the researchers recruited 37 university students, 18 of them women, to come to his lab for a one-on-one chat with another study participant, and were told to get to know each another by asking questions for several minutes.

However, one of each pair was actually a researcher masquerading as a student.

Later, the role-playing researchers rated each participant's likeability, based on their tone of voice, how much they smiled, how much they revealed about themselves, and other verbal and nonverbal factors.

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Soon after, the researchers downloaded the Facebook profile of the volunteer and a panel of 10 students from another university was asked to rate the likeability of its owner.

It was found that the Facebook pages that earned the highest likeability rating were the most expressive, loaded with pictures and wall posts.

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Also, the people tended to be rated as the most affable volunteers in person.

In fact, the undercover researcher assessed them as being very animated and with expressive body language.

People who talked a lot about themselves in the conversation also tended to share a lot of information on Facebook.

However, they also tended to score lower on likeability in person, compared to people who shared less.

Source-ANI
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