Science has spoken: If you’re a fan of The Smiths, you're probably neurotic. If you're a Björk or Tom Waits fan, you're more likely to be an open to new experiences. And if you're a Marilyn Manson fan, you're probably not very agreeable. This is all according to a 2015 study of Facebook "likes" conducted by Stanford University and Cambridge University's Psychometrics Center, recently highlighted by The New York Times in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. According to the Times, Cambridge Analytica, the now-disgraced consulting firm, "adapted its approach to personality modeling" from the Stanford/Cambridge research. The firm would go on to harvest "data from more than 50 million Facebook users, without their consent, to build its own behavioral models to target potential voters in various political campaigns."
The 2015 study used a Facebook app called myPersonality, "a 100-question quiz developed by the Psychometrics Center that assessed a person’s openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism," according to the Times. The 70,000 respondents to the quiz gave the app access to their Facebook profiles (and their friends' Facebook profiles), so researchers were able to study how various personality traits related to what the respondents "liked" on Facebook. They then used the data to build a model that could predict behavior based solely on Facebook "likes."
As the Times reports, "When Cambridge Analytica approached the Psychometrics Center about using its models, the center declined." So the firm ended up building their own, with the help of Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge professor. And thus, the same methods used to determine that Smiths fans are neurotic were used to determine who would be more likely to vote for Donald Trump.
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