Facebook Profiles 'Real'; So Are Risks
In the grand carnival that is the Internet, Facebook and MySpace profiles are commonly understood to be fun-house mirrors -- exaggerating and distorting a person's features for effect. But the results of a new study suggest that social networks may actually provide a much more accurate reflection of people's personalities than previously thought.
Surveying some 236 students ages 17 to 22, psychologists in the United States and Germany discovered that, contrary to the "widely held assumption" that people use virtual identities to paint a rosier picture of themselves, more tended to use them as "an efficient medium for expressing and communicating real personality, which may help explain their popularity."
The researchers performed their study by comparing social network profiles to personality tests and published the results in the journal Psychological Science. "I was surprised by the findings," admitted one of the researchers, Sam Gosling, in a statement to HealthDay. He's not the only one: Other researchers who have looked into virtual identities say the new results indicate a marked change from previous surveys.
