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Forget Myers-Briggs: all you need is Facebook

25th April 2012

FacebookPersonality tests are an everyday part of the recruitment world. Companies across the globe use complex tests to spot the right personalities for their business. Indeed, massive consultancy firms exist crammed with psychologists to analyse the data and help companies ensure that they employ the best possible mix of personalities. But you have to wonder if such companies have a future, if the results of some recent research can be converted into some kind of “app”.

It turns out that just checking someone’s Facebook stream of activity is a reliable indicator of their personality type, as assessed by a theory known as “the Big Five”. The Big Five personality indicators are: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism and openness. There are other methods of assessing personality, such as the popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, based on the work of Jung, but the “Big Five” indicators are nowadays generally accepted as the basis of personality.

New research has shown that a Facebook stream is a reliable method of indicating personality based on the Big Five theory. If someone’s Facebook timeline includes lots of “smilies” for instance, it shows that they have high levels of extroversion and people who post frequent status updates have high levels of openness. Conscientiousness is reflected in lots of questions and neuroticism is shown by the rate of negative comments an individual posts. The researchers discovered that simple checks of Facebook profiles are accurate indications of personality types as assessed by sophisticated questionnaires.

It all suggests that those personality tests use by human resources specialists may well be a thing of the past for many companies. If you want to know what kind of person you are employing, all you need to do is check out their Facebook profile. Many companies already do that when recruiting new staff, but largely as a “back-up” to the expensive psychological tests that they have used. Now, there is evidence which suggests that checking Facebook alone is as good as those expensive occupational psychology profiles.

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Categories: Internet Psychology Tags: , , , ,

Attractive friends make you more popular online

24th April 2012

Attractive faces win friendsFancy extending your online influence using social networks? It’s possible, of course, but you are more likely to succeed if you choose the right friends in the first place..! When people decide whether or not add you as a friend on Facebook, or to connect with you on LinkedIn, one of the frequent checks made is a look through your existing contacts. When asked why they do this, people often reply with statements like “just seeing who else they know” or “finding out if I know any of their contacts”. Whilst those may well be true, there is another, hidden reason why people flick through your contact list.

They want to see how many of your friends are attractive. Darwinian theory suggests that in order for the “survival of the fittest” we have in-built mechanisms to ensure that the best genes survive. Hence we are always on the lookout for people who appear to have good genes and one marker of that is people we judge to be attractive. And, so the theory goes, if you are surrounded by attractive people, then you too must be attractive genetically as otherwise you wouldn’t have so many gorgeous friends.

This theory was recently tested by researchers from The Netherlands who asked people to rate the attractiveness of several individuals simply by looking at their photographs. Then, when they had graded the photographs according to attractiveness they created some Facebook profiles and added the highly attractive photos to one profile as friends and the less attractive individuals to a second profile. A group of participants were then invited to rate the appeal of the profiles. Unsurprisingly, the profiles with the highly attractive people as friends were rated as much more appealing than the profiles with the less attractive individuals in them. However, there were no other differences in the profiles – the participants in the study appeared to be basing their judgement of the profile owners solely on the attractiveness of the “friends”.

At first sight this may seem to imply you need only to seek out attractive people as friends. However, you are already, unknowingly, doing that because of your in-built drive for “survival of the fittest”. Remember, the researchers manipulated the profiles so that one was full of unattractive photos. Your friend are friends because they are attracted to you – and hence other people with your kind of desires for attractiveness will also find them appealing.

The real issue is about those unattractive photos in your social networking profiles. What this research suggests is that unattractive photos can lead to people deciding not to connect with you. So instead of trying to only find attractive people, you will probably gain more benefit if you rid your social networking profiles of bad pictures and those daft images people have for their own profiles, such as of a rubber duck, or their pet dog. Having those kinds of images on your Facebook profile, because that’s what some of your friends have, could actually decrease your chances of gaining more friends and contacts. It is yet more evidence that pictures matter – especially profile pictures.

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Categories: Internet Psychology, Social Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Talk to Google to get better search results

20th April 2012

Talking to yourself is not crazyWe all do it – we talk to ourselves. When someone catches us talking to no-one but ourself, we apologise and say something like “I must be going crazy”. But far from it. Talking to yourself actually improves cognitive performance.

If you’re not sure about that, ask a primary school teacher. They will know children who are given a task and talk themselves through it. “Now I’m going to get the blue paint,” they will say. “That’s good,” they add, “Now I want something bright.” Meanwhile, some children in a junior school will just do their work in silence. Ask the school teacher if they know which ones perform better in tests and appear to “get” things more quickly. Yes, they’ll tell you it is the children who talk themselves through things, rather than the silent ones. Primary school teachers often do not realise they are encouraging the silent ones to become self-talkers. They sit with them and ask questions like “What are you doing now?” so the child can vocalise their activities. Teachers encourage youngsters to be self-talkers because it is clear it helps learning.

As we grow up, social pressures suggest that we shouldn’t talk to ourselves as it is a “sign of madness”. It isn’t, of course, but we see it as such child-like behaviour that we think it would be “madness” for an adult to do it. Hence there is strong pressure for us not to talk to ourselves. Yet we all lapse into it from time to time – largely because it helps.

Now, new research shows that talking to yourself improves performance. Researchers in the USA tested the ability of people to find objects in pictures when they were asked to either be silent or to talk to themselves about the object. When people talked, they were able to find the objects more quickly. In addition, they were more accurate. It appears that the self-directed speech enables the better formation of visual images and thereby the more rapid and accurate location of objects.

So, as you sit in front of Google (or your favourite search engine) today simply say out loud what your are really looking for. The chances are the links you really want will then jump out of the page at you, saving you time by not clicking on search results which prove fruitless.

Talking to yourself while you search online could actually save you hours each week by increasing the speed and accuracy of your results. Of course, you will have to put up with your colleagues thinking you have gone crazy..!

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Categories: Internet Psychology, Search Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

You must laser target your website visitors

19th April 2012

Multiple Targets mean Multiple WebsitesWebsite visitors know what they want. They come to any of your web pages for one specific thing – often a highly specific thing. If they can’t see it immediately, they are off to another web page, in an instant. But how do your website visitors focus in on exactly what they want, when your web pages are full of so many interesting diversions and distractions? How do people see the “wood for the trees” and determine whether your web page offers exactly what they are after, in such a short space of time?

A clue is found in some remarkable new research involving probing the brains of people with epilepsy using neurosurgical techniques during which the patients were conscious. The scientists found that even in noisy environments people were able to focus in on specific sounds they wanted to hear. That’s long been known in psychology and is called the “cocktail party effect”, where you can hear someone from the other side of the room mention your name above the sound of the people closer to you. But, this amazing piece of new research found that the brain appears to actually only be aware of the sounds it wanted to hear. Indeed, further than this, the researchers were able to use the recordings they made of their patients’ brain activity and work out the actual words they were really listing to.

It appears that the individuals in this study had already decided what they wanted to listen to amongst the various conversations they could have heard. But – and this is the crucial bit – their brains only focused their hearing on the bit they wanted and only processed that. In other words, they ignored everything else going on around them not only at their conscious level, but also deep within their brain. The stuff they were not interested in was not being heard.

The research highlights one of the issues which have puzzled psychologists for decades – the way we can selectively pay attention to things. As you sit reading this, there are several other things around you to which you could pay attention, but you are focusing solely on these words. So, are you ignoring everything else around you, or are you aware of it but using your ability to focus  to carry on reading this, in spite of something else going on?

This new study suggests our brains concentrate only on the material we want, to the detriment of everything else.  There is clearly much more neurological research to be done, but the study implies that when we consciously choose to pay attention to something our brain helps us achieve this by ignoring everything else. And that simple process has important implications for web design.

It means, for instance, that if prior to visiting your site your visitors have thought that all they want to do is read your latest blog post, their brains will focus on exactly that – ignoring your adverts, not being aware of your sign-up forms for your newsletter, nor even considering travelling to other parts of your site perhaps.

Our brains appear to have the ability to have laser sharp attention – and that means web design must be similarly laser sharp. Looking good is not enough; focusing specifically on exactly what your website visitors have decided, in advance, what they want to do is vital for success in the instant-decision online world. It is just more evidence that one website aimed at a rather generalised target audience is simply not good enough. We need highly targeted, highly specific web pages which focus exactly on what our visitors want to pay attention to.

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Website analytics could waste your time

18th April 2012

Analytics could waste your timeIf you run a physical, real world, “bricks and mortar” shop you have a significant advantage over online businesses. You can engage directly with your customers at a subconscious, emotional level. When store owners talk to customers they know instantly whether they are happy or sad, or whether they are really interested in buying what they are looking at. Good sales people in the bricks and mortar world of retailing will tap into the emotions of their potential customers to serve them better – ultimately gaining more sales.

But online you have no real idea of your website visitor’s emotional state. Is each visitor really motivated to buy? Are they really, deep-down, interested? Do they actually like what they see on your website?

The answer to such questions appears to be provided by website analytics software, such as Google Analytics, which is the market leader in this sector. There is no denying that analytics programs provide us with more data about our customers than ever before. You know exactly where they come from, where they live or work, what pathways they take through your site and how long they look at things. Gosh, how wonderful it would be if a bricks and mortar store had so much information about their customers. Frankly, they have no idea.

With something like Google Analytics you can find out which keywords people actually typed into a search engine and which page that led them to. You can discover which parts of the page get most clicks. And you can understand the way in which people arrive at your site in the first place. This is all valuable data and you can certainly use it to build a better site.

However, it tells you almost nothing about your customers. Unlike the sales person in a bricks and mortar store, you have no idea as to the motivation of people and you have no insight into their emotional state. Yet that is the most important piece of information you need to connect with customers and make a sale. This is reflected in sales conversions. Typically, a retail store in the real world has conversion rates of between 15% and 20% of customers – up to one in five people who walk into a store buy something. Online, average conversion rates hover just above the 1% mark. In other words, bricks and mortar retailers are much, much better at selling than most online stores. The difference is that online stores get many, many more visitors so the low conversion rate is outweighed by the traffic.

If, though, website owners could tap into the emotions of their website visitors, they would doubtless increase their sales in the same way this happens in physical stores. And that possibility is on the way – meaning very soon you’ll be able to ditch the time-wasting effort of delving deep into web analytics. Instead, using emotional sensors which will be present in all kinds of computing technology you will know the emotional state of each of your online customers, enabling you to connect with them at a much deeper level than all that data in Google Analytics can provide.

That technology will be with us in a year or two. In the meantime, rather than spending hours looking at your analytics data, you’ll gain more sales by actually talking to your customers and getting inside their minds. Remember analytics software really only gives you historical information – it does not let you know intentions and motivations.

 

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