Website Reveals What Your Facebook Posts Say About Your Personality

Have you ever stopped to really think about you're throwing out there in the social stratosphere? On the surface, they may appear to be a bunch of silly posts and status updates about your weekend or where you went for lunch, but on a deeper level, perhaps posting to Facebook reveals more about yourself than you thought. That's the general premise behind Five Labs, a new service that analyzes your Facebook activity to determine your personality.

More than just a fun exercise, the method of predicting your personality is actually based on real-world research -- specifically, a study published by H. Andrew Schwartz and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania's World Well-Being Project. By looking at your linguistic content on Facebook and zeroing in on key words, Five Labs claims it can make "strikingly accurate estimates" about your personality.

Five Labs

"The application’s predictions are based around the Big Five personality traits: the leading personality theory in modern psychology. According to the theory, personality is based on the following five characteristics: extraversion, openness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and agreeableness," Five Labs explains.

Based on an examination of my Facebook feed, Five Labs determined that I'm inventive, sensitive, efficient, analytical, and reserved. I was hoping for "badass," "witty," and "fun," but whatever. It also recommended Facebook friends with similar personalities, though interestingly I found that the ones it presented tended to be the ones I least interact with.

In any event, if you want to give it a whirl, click here.