If you've ever toyed with the idea of determining your personality with the use of an application, a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge now says: "It is possible." They say this is feasible through your Facebook Likes.
Experts at the University of Cambridge's Psychometrics Centre, has lately unveiled an application which has the power to generate a picture of an individual's personality through the use of just one dataset - Facebook Likes.
The tool dubbed Apply Special Sauce can estimate the user's intelligence, gender, sexual preference, life satisfaction, political and religious preferences, relationship status, as well as education.
What the tool does is it compares the user's Likes against those of other individuals. Prior to using the app, the user needs to grant access to his or her Facebook account.
"Please login with Facebook to submit your Facebook Likes to our prediction engine and view the output of the API. You are asked to log in so we can collect your LikeIDs but we will not post to your wall, store your Facebook profile information or any results of this predictions," reads the instruction on the Apply Special Sauce website.
This will then collect the records of the pages the user liked and will run the so-called "digital footprint" against the vast internal model that Cambridge has created from thousands of personality examinations as well as around six million social media profiles.
Based on reports, the research was particularly conducted by an organizational behavior assistant professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business - Michal Kosinski. He created the tool while was at the University of Cambridge, reports say.
A report pointed out, however, that the Apply Magic Sauce's existence is aimed to advertise the technology of the University of Cambridge to private organizations. This app, according to the report, could help the companies in customer service, ad targeting as well as market research.
To date, there exist other tools offering similar functionality as that of the Apply Magic Sauce. Specifically, other services include: Crystal, a Gmail plug-in which users call "creepy" and "psychic," as it analyzes the personalities of people who are sending emails to Gmail users as well as recommends techniques to communicate better; and the Personality Insights tool of IBM which reportedly infers social and cognitive characteristics as well as psychological needs.
