Our social media followers form quite inaccurate impressions of the type of people we are from our posts. It is the main conclusion of the first research that analyzes the perceptions of our personality based on the messages we publish on our profiles.
Researchers at Cornell University have studied the Facebook status updates of 160 students at their own school, finding substantial discrepancies between the image they projected to their followers through their messages and the perception that the authors have of themselves. Readers rated these users on average as people with lower self-esteem and a higher degree of sociability compared to their perception of themselves.
The study concludes that status updates that include images, videos or links to external content lead to more accurate assessments of the personality of those who share them than those that only contain text. Overall, the research attempts to shed light on the dynamic process by which our online audience interprets our identity and character from the isolated fragments of information we share on our networks.
“The impression that people form about us on social media based on what we post differs from the way we see ourselves,” explains Qi Wang, professor of psychology and director of the Laboratory of Culture and Cognition at the Cornell University (Ithaca, New York). “This mismatch between who we are and how others perceive us could influence our ability to establish connections in our online relationships and the benefits we perceive when interacting on social networks,” adds the researcher.
Previous studies have looked at the personality traits that we project through personal websites such as blogs or newsletters, extracting evaluations more in line with the self-perception of their authors. The Cornell researchers consider their work to be the first to deconstruct the publications that participants share in their networks to determine what idea our contacts get about our way of being and thinking. And they come to different conclusions.
The authors attribute these divergences to the unique nature of this type of social platforms, where users often do not share “coherent personal narratives”, but instead interact with profiles that are often not friends or even acquaintances outside the digital ecosystem, but people who may be known tangentially or, on occasions, may be completely unknown.
Curiously, the impressions that the participants in this research generated in their viewers are consistent with the results of sociological studies on the character of the demographic group to which they belong, despite the fact that the followers did not have access to the name or photograph of the profiles they they consulted. For example, female Facebook users were rated as more extroverted than male users, something that is also observed in general surveys of the United States population. Likewise, white users (almost half of the sample, 75 out of 158 people) are seen as more extroverted and have higher self-esteem than Asian users (the next largest ethnic group in the sample, 41 out of 158 participants), whose culture of origin places more emphasis on modesty and modesty.
“We present ourselves according to our cultural frameworks,” notes Wang, “and others can discern our ‘cultured persona’ through the meaning of our posts.” In his opinion, the differences between how we believe we are and how we are perceived on social networks could cause relative damage to our self-esteem, although it could interfere with our communication habits and relationships through the Internet. “The fact that people’s vision of us is very different from who we really are, or how we would like to be perceived, could undermine our social life and well-being,” the expert believes.
The academics note that the results of their study could help developers design interfaces that allow people to express themselves more authentically. But to do this it is necessary, they admit, to complement this research with other studies in larger and more diverse samples of publications and participants on other popular social platforms such as Instagram and X, formerly known as Twitter.
