We are defined by our habits. What about internet habits? How different is our behavior online and in reality? In the early days of the Internet, the behavior of users had little to say about themselves. There were jokes like “On the Internet, no one knows that you really are a dog.”
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, psychologist, business coach, professor at University College London.
“As the Internet has become more and more important in our lives, we have begun to abandon online anonymity and stop hiding our real face. Today, online life is already inseparable from real life. For example, in the UK, the average adult spends 20 hours a week online, twice as much as 10 years ago. Approximately the same figures in the US. 30% of this time users spend on social networks.
Pass the tests
- What does your “inner child” look like?
- Are you a passive spectator or an active creator of your own life?
It is difficult to successfully pretend for a long time. It’s possible to play the role of another person on a first date or a job interview, but it’s not easy to maintain an imaginary façade for long, and much of your life is now constantly exposed on the internet.
Of course, our personality is not limited to our history in the browser, but it is logical to assume that the history of search queries, pages visited and activity on social networks reflect some personality traits. Before the advent of the digital age, our personality traits, style, and ideals demonstrated to those around us primarily our material values, which psychologists called the “extended self.”
“Information, communications, photographs, video recordings, music, calculations, messages, recordings, data – all this remains invisible and intangible until we specifically call them. It all consists of electronic streams of zeros and ones stored locally or in some kind of cloud that is hard to imagine,” says Russell W. Belk, a consumer psychology specialist at York University in Canada.
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- Likes lead to depression?
However, from a psychological point of view, there is no difference between these digital artifacts and physical values - both show important aspects of our personality to others. In the digital world, they form the basis of our reputation. Many studies have been devoted to how our analog self is transferred to the digital world. They all agree on one thing – although the Internet helps us escape from everyday life, it itself has almost ceased to be a virtual reality.
Remarkably, test scores can predict our behavior on social media. Traits such as extraversion, intelligence, and foresight determine how we like us on Facebook. The analysis of messages on Twitter allows you to find out how much users are prone to extraversion and how stable they are emotionally. In this case, it is possible to analyze not only the content of messages, but also their number, as well as the number of subscribers of the user. Twitter can also reveal the so-called “dark triad” of personality traits – sociopathy, narcissism and a tendency to manipulate people.
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- What is the meaning of a selfie for us?
Research shows that the websites we visit, our artistic and musical preferences, and online shopping can also reveal a lot about us. Perhaps the automatic algorithms of online stores and online cinemas that suggest which products or films you might be interested in will soon be able to explain why you have such preferences.
The father of American psychology, William James, once said that the number of our personalities is equal to the number of situations in which we find ourselves. Our digital identity seems fragmented, but in fact, its fragments almost formed into a single picture.
This data and algorithms for its analysis can be useful for many companies. If they manage to overcome ethical and legal barriers (perhaps by allowing consumers to voluntarily agree to the collection of data about them, while the whole procedure should be as transparent as possible), they will be able not only to predict user behavior, but also to analyze and explain its reasons. Opportunities like this could revolutionize how businesses interact with consumers.”
See more at published by The Gaurdian.