11 surprising things Facebook 'likes' may reveal about you


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SALT LAKE CITY — People who liked "Morgan Freemans' Voice" and "Curly fries" on Facebook were more likely to be intelligent, and those who like "I Love Being A Mom" and "Sephora" were likely to have a lower IQ.

Liking "The Book Of Mormon" or "Logan Utah" showed people were more likely to be cooperative rather than competitive.

At least, that's what the results of a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests. They looked at over 50,000 people's "likes," and were able to correctly predict some very interesting things about people based on nothing more than what they decided to like on the social media platform.

Below is a list of some of the more interesting predictors. After that is more detail on the study and its findings.

  • Liking "Stewie Griffin" or "Science" strongly predicted dissatisfaction with life, while liking "Sarah Palin" or "Glenn Beck" predicted satisfaction.
  • Liking "So So Happy" indicated a person was neurotic, while liking "Getting Money" indicated a calm and reserved emotional stability.
  • Liking "Fly The American Flag" predicted someone was older, while liking "Walt Disney Records" or "Body By Milk" showed a person was young.
  • Liking "Just Because You Can Reproduce Doesn't Mean You Should" predicted being a white American, while liking "I Support My President" indicated being black.
  • Liking "I'm Sorry I Love You" showed your parents divorced before you were 21, while liking "Watching Peoples Lives Fall Apart Via Status Updates And News Feeds" showed they did not divorce.


Liking "I'm Sorry I Love You" showed your parents divorced before you were 21, while liking "Watching Peoples Lives Fall Apart Via Status Updates And News Feeds" showed they did not divorce.

  1. Liking the band "Cradle of Filth" predicted being a smoker, while liking "When Little Kids Are Chasing Me I Run Slow So They Think They're Fast" predicted being a non-smoker.
  2. Liking "Causes.com" predicted drug use, while those who didn't use drugs often liked "Milkshakes" or "Sour Candy."
  3. Liking "Scrapbooking" indicated being in a relationship, while liking "Hunger Games" indicated being single.
  4. Liking "Sometimes I Just Lay In Bed And Think About Life" predicted being a lesbian, while liking "Thinking Of Something And Laughing Alone" predicted being a straight woman.
  5. Those who liked "Kathy Griffin" were likely to be gay men, while liking "Being Confused After Waking Up From Naps" was more common among straight men.
  6. Those with few friends were likely to like "In'n'out Burger", while liking "Dollar General" indicated having many friends. Details on the study

Facebook launched its like button in 2009, and the small thumbs-up symbol has since become ubiquitous on the social network and common across the rest of the Web as well. Facebook said last year that roughly 2.7 billion new likes pour out onto the Internet every day - endorsing everything from pop stars to soda pop. That means an ever-expanding pool of data available to marketers, managers, and just about anyone else interested in users' inner lives, especially those who aren't careful about their privacy settings.

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Cambridge University researcher David Stillwell and his colleagues scooped up a bucketful of that data in the way that many advertisers do - through apps. Millions of Facebook users have surveyed their own personal traits using applications including a program called myPersonality. Stillwell, as owner of the app, has received revenue from it, but declined to say how much.

The study zeroed in on the 58,466 U.S. test takers who had also volunteered access to their likes.

When researchers crunched the "like" data and compared their results to answers given in the personality test, patterns emerged in nearly every direction.

The study found that Facebook likes were linked to sexual orientation, gender, age, ethnicity, IQ, religion, politics and cigarette, drug, or alcohol use. The likes also mapped to relationship status, number of Facebook friends, as well as half a dozen different personality traits.

Some likes were more revealing than others. Researchers could guess whether users identified themselves as black or white 95 percent of the time. That success rate dropped to a still impressive 88 percent when trying to guess whether a male user was homosexual, and to 85 percent when telling Democrats from Republicans. Identifying drug users was far trickier - researchers got that right only 65 percent of the time, a result scientists generally describe as poor. Predicting whether a user was respectively a child of divorce was even dicier. With a 60 percent success rate, researchers were doing just slightly better than random guesses.

The linkages ranged from the self-evident to the surreal.

Men who liked TV song-and-dance sensation "Glee" were more likely to be gay. Men who liked professional wrestling were more likely to be straight. Drinking game aficionados were generally more outgoing than, say, fans of fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett. People who preferred pop diva Jennifer Lopez usually gathered more Facebook friends than those who favored the heavy metal sound of Iron Maiden.

Among the more poignant insights was the apparent preoccupation of children of divorce with relationship issues. For example, those who expressed support for statements such as "Never Apologize For What You Feel It's Like Saying Sorry For Being Real" or "I'm The Type Of Girl Who Can Be So Hurt But Still Look At You & Smile" were slightly more likely to have seen their parents split before their 21st birthday.

Some of the patterns were difficult to understand: The link between curly fries and high IQ scores was particularly baffling.

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David Self Newlin

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