What could your Facebook “likes” say about you?! Source: Shutterstock

I’m already pretty convinced that the Internet knows me too well and it makes me a little nervous. Well, now there’s a website to see how well your Facebook could know you based on what pages you “like” on the site. Scary? Cool? Both?

Here’s what I gather from this tech news. It all stems from a recently published study about Facebook likes and users’ personalities. Researchers gathered survey data through MyPersonality, and from there, a number of those participants told the researchers they could use their survey info to make correlations with Facebook likes.

The researchers input Facebook likes into a computer algorithm and the computer set to work figuring out details about the person, from sexual orientation to relationship status to political affiliation, and more.

The degrees of accuracy varied, but a lot of them are still pretty impressive considering it’s just coming from Facebook likes. For example, the user’s gender was accurately determined 93 percent of the time. Some of the likes associated with a certain affiliation seemed obvious or stereotypical, but there also were odd connections, like curly fries was singled out as a “like” associated with increased intelligence. Well, okay then!

Now YOU at home can at least get a snippet of how it works at YouAreWhatYouLike.com, which was put together by those same researchers. This only focuses on five personality areas (which were included in the full study, as well), but I was curious if my Facebook likes would show anything “unknown” about me. Obviously, I had to try it.

To be honest, I don’t have a ton of “likes” on Facebook, nor do I think at first glance that they are particularly revealing about how I act. It’s mostly books, movies and TV shows. Obviously, I also like Gurl (as should you), and there’s some randoms like pensieves (I feel like I am the only person who has that).

You just allow the site to access your Facebook, and BOOM you get your results. Here is what the site determined about me from my Facebook likes: I’m “liberal and artistic,” “well-organized,” “shy/reserved,” “warm/trusting/cooperative” and “emotional.” Each of these has a little blurb about why you got that result, however it just speaks generally about the categories (as opposed to breaking down your individual likes).

Well, I actually think that sums me up pretty well, but I’m still not totally sure how they got all that based on the things I like. For example, I just don’t know what about my particular television show preferences could possibly clue people into the fact that I’m the least calm person going.

YouAreWhatYouLike selected a few likes that are “most indicative” of my Facebook profile. These were A Separate Peace, Hunger Games and Little Women. I guess maybe they were able to draw a lot of data about people who liked those sorts of things? I guess though if learning that something super specific like a type of French fry can say something seemingly unrelated about a person, I shouldn’t make myself crazy trying to rationalize how the site’s analysis seemed to work for me.

I only had 33 likes that were analyzed, so I have to think that the more you like things, the more the program has to work with in figuring out your personality. Whether you have more or less likes than I do, feel free to try it out yourself and see if it seems accurate to you!

What do you think about this study? Do you often “like” things on Facebook? Did you try out YouAreWhatYouLike.com? Do your results seem accurate? Tell me in the comments!

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