Your Selfie Might Be Revealing More About You Than You Think

Photo: Getty Images

Whether it’s a selfie, an old baby picture, or a professional snap, a profile photo can reveal a lot about a person’s personality, a new study has found – but perhaps not what you may think.

“Social media gives users the opportunity to build an online persona through posting of content such as text, images, links or through interaction with others,” the study explains. “The way in which users present themselves is a type of behavior usually determined by differences in demographic or psychologic traits.”

In the past, studies were able to determine a number of traits from social media images, such as age, gender, occupation, political orientation, location, and even some personality traits. But researchers from the University of Pennsylvania wanted to take things further. Analyzing 66,000 Twitter users, they wanted to see how the data they acquired from analyzing profile pictures compared to the actual personality represented through a person’s tweets. The results were surprisingly accurate.

“Our results show significant differences in profile picture choice between personality traits, and that these can be harnessed to predict personality traits with robust accuracy,” the study’s abstract explains. “Although social media allows a user to shape his or her own personality and idealized view (the ‘idealized virtual identity hypothesis’), evidence shows that social media behavior usually represents an extension of one’s self (the ‘extended real life hypothesis’), thus allowing others to observe the users’ true personality.”

They broke it down into five personality types: the conscientious, extroverted, open, neurotic, and agreeable.

Conscientious

“Users high in conscientiousness tend to be more orderly and prefer planned behaviors,” the study found. These users had very traditional photos — typically from the front and looking into the camera.

Extroverted

The study found that most extroverts will post photos of themselves with others or photos where they’re having a good time. “Extroverts enjoy interacting with others, have high group visibility and are perceived as energetic.”

Open to experience

“Users high in openness to experience may be more inclined to choose unconventional images and poses, as a general inclination of this type of people for art and novelty.” These are your artsy shots or the ones that show the back of someone’s head. That, or it’s possible these people are just insecure about the way they look.

Neurotic

Basically, if your photo is lacking color, positive emotions, or anything interesting or complex, you’re probably giving off some seriously neurotic vibes.

Agreeable

Conversely, people who tend to get along with others and are easygoing have colorful pictures with multiple people or lots of good vibes.

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