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The personality of popular facebook users

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Published:11 February 2012Publication History

ABSTRACT

We study the relationship between Facebook popularity (number of contacts) and personality traits on a large number of subjects. We test to which extent two prevalent viewpoints hold. That is, popular users (those with many social contacts) are the ones whose personality traits either predict many offline (real world) friends or predict propensity to maintain superficial relationships. We find that the predictor for number of friends in the real world (Extraversion) is also a predictor for number of Facebook contacts. We then test whether people who have many social contacts on Facebook are the ones who are able to adapt themselves to new forms of communication, present themselves in likable ways, and have propensity to maintain superficial relationships. We show that there is no statistical evidence to support such a conjecture.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CSCW '12: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
      February 2012
      1460 pages
      ISBN:9781450310864
      DOI:10.1145/2145204

      Copyright © 2012 ACM

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      Publication History

      • Published: 11 February 2012

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