Your Facebook activity reveals your personality traits to strangers

A new research has revealed that the personality traits of strangers can be detected by looking at their Facebook activity.

The researcher from the University of Kansas found that extroversion was the easiest personality trait for strangers to interpret followed by agreeableness and openness, but there was just one cue that pointed to conscientiousness and none that helped detect neuroticism.

While strangers were able to correctly match certain Facebook activities with personality traits, the researchers believe new algorithms enacted by Facebook could make it harder to detect personality traits.

Lead author Jeffrey Hall said that studies gave them really good evidence that a complete view of people's actions on Facebook revealed about them a lot.

Hall added that since much of that research studied earlier versions of Facebook, it was conceivable that people's ability to accurately judge others would go down as a consequence of these changes.

According to the KU study, an agreeable person tends to post less often, an open person is less likely to respond to other people's posts but make more political status updates, and a conscientious person agrees more often with what other people post.

The study is published in the journal New Media and Society.