Facebook profile photos reveal people’s personalities, study finds

The research could be used by people looking to predict personality traits “with robust accuracy”, the scientists behind it note

Facebook data row: What is Cambridge Analytica? (iStock)

People’s social media profile pictures are giving away huge amounts about their personal lives and characters, according to a new study.

Using just a profile picture, people can understand a huge degree of information about people’s lives, according to the new research. And those same findings could be used to predict people’s personality traits on a mass scale, the scientists behind it note.

The research took the Twitter profile pictures of tens of thousands of users, and estimated their personality based on their tweets. It found that the differences in pictures could be used to easily show the differences in their personality and then succesfully guess what they might be like.

Most of the observations make sense, and can show the ways that profile photos could be expressing parts of your personality that you didn’t realise. But it also found that people’s profile photos can give away parts of their personality even if they don’t include them.

Outgoing people are more likely to have pictures that have other people in them, for instance. And people who are more open tend to take pictures that include themselves in more clear and colourful ways.

But perhaps the least obvious finding is that neurotic people tend not to include their own faces in their pictures. And if they do include their own face then they are more likely to have glasses in front of it – and, if it’s there, they will make it far bigger than usual.

The researchers tested the work by seeing how well they could predict a person’s personality based only on their picture, and found that it works accurately. They showed how those same tools could be used by people instead of doing “costly questionnaires” to make sure that things match their online persona.